The best overlap is the one you never pay off

A full back who sprints outside and gets nothing looks wasteful on the tracking data and is often the reason a goal exists.

Ask a full back how many of his overlaps end with the ball at his feet and the honest answer is somewhere near one in six. The other five are the point.

Here is the mechanism. A winger receives with a defender square to him. He can go outside or cut in, and the defender is holding a compromise position that covers both a little and neither well. Now a full back comes past on the outside at speed. The defender has to make a decision, and every decision he makes is worse than the compromise he was holding. Show the winger inside and the winger goes inside, which was what he wanted. Follow the runner and he opens the lane he was standing in. Freeze, and both happen.

None of that requires the pass to be made. The run has already spent the defender's attention, which was the only thing he had.

Tracking data handles this badly, and I would go further and say it handles it wrongly rather than incompletely. A run that ends in a reception gets logged as a successful progression. A run that ends with the ball going the other way gets logged as distance covered, filed with jogging back after a throw-in. The full back who makes eleven decoy runs and gets a hamstring twinge in March has a season report that says he under-contributed.

There is a real cost and I am not pretending otherwise. Every overlap commits a defender to a sixty metre round trip, and if possession turns while he is high the winger he abandoned is running at a back three. That is why the best sides ration these runs by phase, not by appetite: overlap freely when the ball is already secure on the far side and the rest defence is set, almost never off a first-time pass into a crowded area.

What I would like is a simple counting change. Log the runner, log the defender who reacted, and log where the ball actually went. Do that for a season and you would find a handful of full backs whose value sits almost entirely in decisions other people made because of them.

Instead we count crosses. Crosses are easy to count. That is the whole reason we count them.