After he got dropped for the upcoming game I figured it might be a bit of fun to look at how much of an impact Sterling has had on England's results during the Euro 2020 qualifiers so far. I've also chucked in what would happen if we removed his contribution from the results. Needless to say I don't think England will be in trouble without Sterling for the next 2 fixtures, but the below does show his unrivaled contributions to the attack.
I ended up creating a slightly more general player view that was focused on attacking contribution. You can play with the fields on the right to change players and add or remove their contribution. I also created another view looking at the rating the player was awarded over the minutes they were given by Southgate.
By default the view below shows the attacking threat that Sterling gives England, removing Sterling has us losing the Kosovo game and only winning the other matches with the kind of 1 or 2 goal margins that we saw in previous qualifying campaigns under Hodgson and Goran Eriksson.
Goals + Assists: Sterling is untouchable in his consistency when it comes to being involved in goals, Kane is the next closest, but still has many games where he’s only involved in 1 goal. Try changing the “Discount Pen Goals” option to True to see that a lot of Kane’s goals were penalties and that his open play involvement in goals is less consistent than Sterling.
Dribbles: Successful dribbles is not a metric I’m going to claim I completely understand, but Sterling has a bunch of them, I’d hazard a guess that it means he's beaten at least 1 player and played a successful pass or made a shot. The next closest player is Barkley when it comes to successful dribbles.
Rating: This is pretty awesome, excluding the Czech Republic match where everyone had a nightmare Sterling has achieved a minimum rating of 8.3, great consistency!
The final chart below is showing the amount of game time that players have been given (size of the block) and the average rating the player has achieved over that game time (colour of the block). Sterling scores 8.6 despite having his mean dragged down by the Czech Republic loss rating of 6.4.
All data from api-football
Anyway, have a play and get in contact with me from the gamescreener homepage if you have any questions.
Thanks for reading
GameScreener