The Corner Question

Was everyone right? Is Kimmich as bad as he’s made out to be? While I thought he was maybe being a little hard done by because of outsized expectations, I also couldn’t be sure of that especially given the overwhelming number of disgruntled fans.

So I decided to give it a go myself. I will start by saying this is not a perfect statistical analysis. I sourced my data from Football Reference which seemed to have reliable data going back to the 2017/18 season. I initially wanted to go back to around the turn of the millennium to get an even bigger picture, but that just wasn’t possible.

Additionally, they don’t have the exact data I was looking for. Ideally I would get just the corner kick data alone but instead I was forced to settle for data related to dead ball’s in general. All of this I think ultimately works to give a general picture but it certainly affected how I went about things and should be noted before continuing.

Methodolgoy

The first thing I needed to do was get a population. Initially as I stated above I started out trying to get data going back to 2000. However, as that was impossible I shifted my scope a bit. At first I was thinking of primarily focusing on the corner kick history at Bayern, comparing Kimmich to prior corner kick takers at the club.

With the 2017/18 time limitation, I instead decided to broaden things to include 14 of the top teams across Europe. Upon reflection, I actually think this makes more sense anyways as it gives a better overview of contemporary comparisons and is less influenced by changes in the game over time.

While this again wasn’t an exact science, I tried to pick the teams that were consistently around the top 4 in their respective leagues. This led me to picking Bayern, Borussia Dortmund (BVB) and RB Leipzig from the Bundesliga, Real Madrid (Real), Barcelona (Barca) and Atletico Madrid (Atletico) from La Liga, Paris Saint Germain (PSG) from Ligue 1, Juventus (Juve), AC Milan (Milan)and Internazionale (Inter) from Serie A and Manchester City (Man City), Manchester United (Man U), Chelsea and Liverpool from the Premier League.

I’m sure some might argue that other teams should be considered/included but even excluding a few I feel like this population should give a general overview of performance on corners and dead ball situations over the six seasons selected and in general it includes those who I feel most would consider Bayern’s “peers” in world football.

I then filtered down to every player that took a corner for each team in every season mentioned. The pertinent data compiled were: Corner Kicks (CK) and Free Kicks (FK) which combined give you Dead Ball Situations (DB), Shots Created from Dead Ball Situations (SDB) and Goals created from Dead Ball Situations (GDB). It is important to note that the last two categories, SDB and GDB only take into account passes from dead ball situations and not direct attempts on goal, which given we are trying to focus on corners and passing makes sense to me.

I then sliced the resulting data up based on certain critera as the total number of players who had taken at least one corner over those six seasons on those 14 teams was 323. As you can imagine, there were quite a few of them that had taken a very limited number of corner kicks in that time.

I also compiled data on a team level and not just individually as I think showing just what happened on a broad team by team basis made sense.

Results

Team by Team

I also think that is the best place to start our journey. I suspect that the results of this study may surprise many of you. I admit that I was surprised as well even though I suspected that things were maybe not as bad as people were making out.

For the six years in question, Bayern scored the second most goals from dead balls coming in at 59. Liverpool was first with 65 and Inter (56), Man City (50) and PSG/Chelsea (46) filled out the top five.

The total shots created⁽¹⁾ was very similar except that Inter led that category with 677 followed by Liverpool (622), Bayern (612), Juventus (600) and Real (583). Manchester City took the most corners over that period, coming in at 2,096, while Liverpool (1,918), Bayern (1,823), Real (1,756) and Chelsea (1,754) came in two through five, and total dead ball situations⁽²⁾ was led by Real (3,700), Bayern (3,512), Man City (3,458), Liverpool (3,394) and PSG (3,367).
<sub>1. Total Shots created only includes shots created from free kicks and corners taken by players who had taken at least one corner in the seasons covered.
2. Total dead ball situations includes only free kicks and corners taken by players who had taken at least one corner in the seasons covered.</sub>

From these I created a couple of simple calculations: Percentage of Dead Ball Passes that lead to Shots (%SDB) and Percentage of Dead Ball Passes that lead to Goals (%GDB). For %SDB, Bayern are very much middle of the pack coming in at eighth with 17.4% of their dead ball passes resulting in shots. Inter (20.8%), Leipzig (20.2%), Juventus (19.6%), Chelsea(19.1%) and Atletico (18.5%) make up the top five.

Somewhat surprisingly, only two of that top five %SDB made it into the list for %GDB. Liverpool comes in on top with 1.92%, while Inter (1.72%), Bayern (1.68%), Chelsea (1.52%) and Man City (1.45%) round out the top five.

Team	CK	FK	DB	SDB	GDB	%SDB	%GDB
Liverpool	1,918	1,476	3,394	622	65	18.3%	1.92%
Bayern	1,823	1,689	3,512	612	59	17.4%	1.68%
Inter	1,726	1,525	3,251	677	56	20.8%	1.72%
Man City	2,096	1,362	3,458	548	50	15.9%	1.45%
Chelsea	1,754	1,281	3,035	580	46	19.1%	1.52%
PSG	1,544	1,823	3,367	433	46	12.9%	1.37%
Juventus	1,544	1,514	3,058	600	43	19.6%	1.41%
Real	1,756	1,944	3,700	583	42	15.8%	1.14%
Leipzig	1,332	1,297	2,629	530	38	20.2%	1.45%
Atletico	1,449	1,576	3,025	558	38	18.5%	1.26%
Milan	1,459	1,695	3,154	522	37	16.6%	1.17%
Man U	1,532	1,277	2,809	472	36	16.8%	1.28%
BVB	1,347	1,096	2,443	444	33	18.2%	1.35%
Barca	1,609	1,674	3,283	381	31	11.6%	0.94%

As you can see, Bayern as a club has done quite well compared to the other top sides in Europe during that six year run. Finishing outside the top 5 only in %SDB.

Even a year by year breakdown is relatively flattering to Bayern. Last season was a struggle no question with only 4 goals from dead ball situations. However, while that looks bad on the surface, it is hardly out of the norm for the 14 teams sampled.

Over the periods in question and the 84 combinations of team and season, 22 of them scored five goals or less from dead balls. Moreover only Liverpool and Inter did not have at least one season that fell in this category while three teams managed that feat three times. The 2022/23 season is the only time that Bayern did.

In fact, for every other season Bayern is in the top two in GDBs with the exception of the 2017/18 season. More on this later.

Player Results

So we’ve seen that Bayern has actually been quite productive from dead ball situations compared to the rest of Europe, but the question remains how Kimmich stacks up individually.

Using the entire population of 323 players, Kimmich (2.24%) comes in at 36^th for %GDB or in other words Kimmich was in the top 11% of %GDB. However, this population includes a lot of anomalies due to so many players with far too small a sample size. I therefore narrowed down the population in two different ways just to see where things landed.

First I eliminated any players who did not have at least 50 corner kicks taken in any single season which narrowed the field to 72 players. Using this method would put Kimmich at 15^th in %GDB over these six seasons. While I think this data is relevant, I also wanted to compare his performance against players who had more consistently taken corners over the six seasons since the gross number of corner kicks varied drastically within this population from as few as 53 to as many as 1,076.

So I instead filtered the entire population by total number of corners taken eliminating anyone who had taken less than 250 over the six years. This narrowed down the field to 24 players which felt like a better sample of those who had really been the primary corner takers for each team over that period. As you can see in the table below, Kimmich finished 5^th in %GDB and 12^th in %SDB using this population.

Player	CK	FK	DB	SDB	GDB	%SDB	%GDB
J. Kimmich	1,076	710	1,786	338	40	18.9%	2.24%
H. Çalhanoğlu	793	374	1,167	257	25	22.0%	2.14%
T. Alexander-Arnold	721	475	1,196	248	22	20.7%	1.84%
T. Kroos	932	861	1,793	304	21	16.9%	1.17%
A. Di María	530	207	737	151	20	20.5%	2.71%
K. De Bruyne	780	363	1,143	222	15	19.4%	1.31%
M. Mount	368	137	505	122	14	24.2%	2.77%
A. Robertson	395	368	763	117	14	15.3%	1.83%
L. Messi	490	493	983	116	13	11.8%	1.32%
M. Pjanic	348	509	857	123	11	14.4%	1.28%
M. Brozović	336	573	909	104	11	11.4%	1.21%
R. Mahrez	358	103	461	77	11	16.7%	2.39%
J. Milner	269	199	468	85	10	18.2%	2.14%
P. Dybala	346	154	500	106	9	21.2%	1.80%
Willian	378	106	484	116	8	24.0%	1.65%
C. Nkunku	264	135	399	103	8	25.8%	2.01%
Neymar	437	280	717	100	8	14.0%	1.12%
J. Brandt	272	66	338	71	8	21.0%	2.37%
O. Dembélé	302	55	357	68	7	19.1%	1.96%
Koke	377	476	853	118	6	13.8%	0.70%
B. Fernandes	343	211	554	103	5	18.6%	0.90%
J. Sancho	264	65	329	64	5	19.5%	1.52%
İ. Gündoğan	256	225	481	67	4	13.9%	0.83%
P. Coutinho	315	90	405	49	4	12.1%	0.99%

I do feel it’s worth noting that in all scenario’s most of the players that had a higher number of corners taken fared worse in both %SDB and %GDB. From my perspective this makes sense as one shot or goal has a much larger effect on the numbers the fewer dead ball situations they took.

In terms of gross numbers, Kimmich has by far the most number of CKs taken over that time at 1,076. He comes in second however to Toni Kroos in terms of total dead ball situations with seven less than his fellow countryman.

While he does have by far the most CK taken in that time Kimmich also leads GDB by a significant margin with the next closest player 15 goals behind while Kroos is 21 behind. Kimmich also leads the SDB by 34 shots over Kroos with the next closest after 81 shots behind.

In fact for the top 10 players in total dead ball situations over the six year period, Kimmich is by far the most successful in terms of %GDB. Hakan Çalhanoglu (2.14%) is the only other player to reach 2% %GDB and only Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andrew Robertson are even close at 1.84% and 1.83%, respectively, with the rest well below 1.50%. That top ten list includes some big names too: Kevin De Bruyne, Lionel Messi, Koke, Miralem Pjanic…etc.

Takeaways

There is a lot of information/stats there and I’m sure that this will leave many people still unconvinced. Which is fine honestly. In most respects, this study proved exactly what I expected it to: Scoring goals from free kicks and corners is nowhere near as common as people seem to think it is. Of the 44,044 dead balls taken in this sample, exactly 579 of them ended up as goals or 1.31%. Only 6,994, or 15.9%, of them even ended in a shot attempt.

For the most part, the big teams in Europe are not scoring directly off of dead ball situations all that often. Moreover, people seem to forget that there is a lot more that goes into successful dead ball plays than just the player making the kick as well.

Kimmich for instance had his worst season last year by a significant margin outside of the 2017/18 season in which he was not the primary corner taker. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that he had his worst statistical year in the season which Bayern sold off Lewandowski and completely failed to replace him.

That’s a significant presence in the box and one that requires the defense to focus on. Most likely the change in central defenders had an impact as well. Despite Süle maybe not being the greatest header of the ball, he was a massive physical presence in the box that could disrupt the defense and that presence wasn’t totally replaced in de Ligt.

Year	CK	FK	DB	SDB	GDB	%SDB	%GDB
2022/23	232	150	382	64	4	16.8%	1.05%
2021/22	190	152	342	73	13	21.4%	3.80%
2020/21	179	129	308	52	9	16.9%	2.92%
2019/20	221	125	346	60	6	17.3%	1.73%
2018/19	157	91	248	59	7	23.8%	2.82%
2017/18	97	63	160	30	1	18.8%	0.63%
Total	1,076	710	1,786	338	40	18.9%	2.24%

As you can see in the chart above, Kimmich’s %SDB for the 2022/23 season is very similar to that of 2020/21 and yet the %GDB is less than half of what it was that season. Realistically, his %SDB in the 2022/23 season is not that far off of his historical numbers which implies that finishing was the biggest problem, something I think we can all agree was a massive issue last season.

It is also interesting that the 2017/18 season is the only other in which Bayern were not in the top 2 in GDB for a season as that is the only season on the list in which Kimmich did not take the vast majority of corners. He and James Rodriguez both took 97 that season but Arjen Robben (46), Sebastian Rudy (29), Franck Ribery (24) and Thiago (14) all took a significant amount of corners themselves.

That said, Robben and Rudy were by far the most productive both contributing 3 GDB for the season while Kimmich and James were fairly unremarkable contributing just 1 GDB each.

Ultimately, it’s up to you whether you find any of this compelling or useful. I know a large segment of the fan base is going to continue using the “eye test” and complain about how bad Kimmich is at corners. However, maybe this will at least make you think twice before posting that next comment on the subject as it’s extremely likely that any alternative will be just as bad, or statistically speaking, worse.