Off-ball positional advantage quantifies when a player without the ball is in a location of high field value — available to receive the ball in good conditions, potentially with space ahead of them or behind the defensive line. Most player evaluation focuses on what players do with the ball. This metric captures what they do without it: their movement, positioning, and timing that creates receiving opportunities. Players who consistently occupy high-value positions without the ball are contributing even when they never touch it.
Compute by: (1) at every moment of a possession, identify all players without the ball; (2) look up the field value at each player's location from the pixel-level value map; (3) flag players above a value threshold as being in "positional advantage"; (4) aggregate per player over a match or season. Key distinction: a player can be in a high-value location without the ball being played there — the metric captures potential, not actualized value. Report separately: (a) time spent in positional advantage zones, and (b) how often the ball was actually played to them when they were in those zones.
A typical outfield player has the ball for 60-90 seconds per match out of 90+ minutes. Their off-ball movement — creating space, drawing defenders, maintaining positional structure — constitutes the vast majority of their contribution but is almost entirely invisible to event-data metrics. 360 data and tracking data enable measuring off-ball advantage (how much space a player creates for teammates by their movement and positioning), but most analysis still defaults to on-ball actions because the data is easier to work with.