Iniesta Messi & Fabregas Celebrate Player Influence Shot Chart Passing Chart

Last night FC Barcelona moved passed AC Milan and into their 5th consecutive Champions League semifinals.

Barcelona was awarded 2 penalties, which were cooly dispatched by Lionel Messi, with a third goal being added by Andres Iniesta.

Despite the insistance of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Milan wasn’t cheated by the refs.  As the graphical analysis above shows, they were thoroughly outplayed.  

Milan’s Clarence Seedorf said the ref got the second penalty decision wrong, but acknowledged that Barcelona was the best side on the night.  Classy comments from a classy player; probably why he got a classy ovation from the away fans when he was substituted in the second half.

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Messi Shot Chart Messi Passing Graphic Lionel Messi Messi Player Dashboard (All stats) Barcelona Player Influence Chart Team Passing Comparison

At this time last year, Lionel Messi did not have a Facebook page.  He started one in April, and after seven hours he had 7 million Likes.  As of this writing he has 32,796,799.

Athletes and musicians have some of the largest social media following, whether it be on Facebook or Twitter or any other social site.  This makes them huge targets for advertisers who want to take advantage of the reach that Messi, or Cristiano Ronaldo (41 million+ Likes) or Eminem (54 million Likes) has.

By the way, the pictures above come from a great app called Stats Zone that you can find at fourfourtwo.com.  It basically provides infographics for every game played, and are a very good tool for analyzing the game.

Messi scored 5 goals as Barcelona demolished Bayer Leverkusen 7-1.  The 5 goals is a Champions League record for goals in a game.

||BONUS||  Footballers are big into Twitter, and many of them shared their thoughts on Messi’s performance last night.  Check out this link to see what the pros had to say about it.

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It’s one thing to say one soccer team passed the ball 860 times during a 90 minute game.  It’s quite another to see those successful passes and the failed attempts all together on a field. Without knowing anything about soccer you can tell immediately that one team passed the ball a whole lot more than the other team.  Usually if you have the ball, you have a better chance of scoring, and if you score you win.   As you could probably guess from the picture, Barcelona won the game (3-1).  Images like these give us a great snapshot of a whole lot of information at once.  It looks good, and it makes an impression.  *Thanks to fourfourtwo.com and their Statzone app for this.

It’s one thing to say one soccer team passed the ball 860 times during a 90 minute game.  It’s quite another to see those successful passes and the failed attempts all together on a field.

Without knowing anything about soccer you can tell immediately that one team passed the ball a whole lot more than the other team.  Usually if you have the ball, you have a better chance of scoring, and if you score you win.  

As you could probably guess from the picture, Barcelona won the game (3-1).  Images like these give us a great snapshot of a whole lot of information at once.  It looks good, and it makes an impression. 

*Thanks to fourfourtwo.com and their Statzone app for this.

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