Definitions, explanations?

It is a source of constant frustration to me that Fantasy Football games - and the companies collating football statistics in general - never seem to offer any attempt at defining the terms they use to designate various aspects of performance. 

And, heck, even carefully framed definitions would not be enough. There is always scope for some ambiguity, for some borderline cases which defy convenient classification within one description rather than another. Ideally - as with exam marking schemes and tax regulations - you need not just the basic rule, but amplified interpretation guidelines, and detailed discussion of some illustrative example cases. I fear there's no chance of ever getting anything like that from FPL or Opta.  [And while we're dreaming of a better world, fuller 'implementation guidelines' for our referees from the FA and PGMOL would be helpful too!]

This omission is particularly galling in the current Fantasy Club World Cup game, where, instead of awarding general 'bonus points' based on a range of indicators of overall player performance, we are supposed to be getting extra points for certain individual game actions. But it is very unclear how or even if this is actually working, as the game site doesn't provide any tabulated player statistics [one of the most galling of its many, many shortcomings], and it's a bit of a rigmarole even to root out MatchDay figures for players in your current squad; and when you do find them, there's no justification given for them.

Far fewer points seem to be being awarded under these additional categories than we would have reasonably expected before the tournament. Often, it's been a struggle to find any such points being awarded in a MatchDay.

Are goalkeepers somehow making hardly any saves in this tournament? Are forwards not having any shots on target? Are midfielders not completing any tackles, or creating any chances??

That doesn't accord with the viewer's subjective experience - that it has been a high-quality tournament, with lots of excellent attacking play, and, in most games, quite a large number of scoring chances for both sides.

We must conclude that either the game is sometimes omitting to apply the appropriate points for these game actions, or the stats provider is somehow egregiously miscounting/misrecording them, or.... they're using extremely narrow definitions which exclude the majority of game actions that most people would expect to be eligible for counting under a commonsense view.

Chances created - does that mean only 'missed chances' and exclude actual goals?! If it encompasses 'missed chances', does that include instances where the attacker was put in a good position for an attempt on goal, but shanked his shot, or miscontrolled the ball initially, or hesitated for a moment before shooting and so allowed defenders to recover and get a block in, or was dispossessed just as he was pulling the trigger by a heroic last-ditch challenge? Or does it include only actual goals? (But if so, how is that different from the more familiar term 'assists'? Why not just use that instead??) I imagine there's a lot of definitional overlap here with what constitutes a 'shot on target' (see next point, below), so probably also includes at least efforts that required saves to be made by the keeper. Does it include players who 'make a chance' for themselves by - carrying the ball forward a long distance, or jinking past a couple of defenders to break into the box, or cutting inside and racing away from a marker to find room for a shot? Common sense would say 'YES' - but heaven knows what FIFA and their Fantasy game has decided. And I'd really love if it included key contributions earlier in the move - the tackle that wins possession, or the early pass that carves open the defence - rather than just the final 'assist' (which is often just an easy lay-off, or sometimes even a miskick or an accidental deflection).

Alas, I think the definition the game is using can include none of these latter possibilities, since only a handful of players in the whole competition so far seem to have been credited with even 2 'chances created' in a match.

Shots on target - that ought to be a bit less problematic, but it's not entirely straightforward either. It's always frustrated me that stats compilers treat attempts that strike the woodwork as 'off-target' - which seems very harsh. (We really need an additional category of 'near miss' to give proper recognition to such efforts.)  Presumably headers, etc. count as well as shots with the foot; so, that's clumsy wording right there - why don't they say 'attempts on target'? And do they draw any distinction between shots blocked close to the player and further away? A player who just fires off a shot when there's a crowd of players in front of him, hoping that his effort might somehow find a path through their legs, probably doesn't deserve to have that considered a 'shot on target'; and it's difficult to see where the shot is bound anyway, when it hits another player almost immediately - on target or not? But... sometimes such hit-and-hope efforts do end up going in! Where do you draw the line on this - between a shot that never had much chance of getting past an intervening player and one where you're crediting the defender with making a fine block?  And what about 'tame' shots that are hit too softly and/or too close to the keeper to be of any real danger - do they not count? Again, occasionally a keeper will make a complete pig's-ear of such an unthreatening attempt and fumble it into his own goal,...... so, perhaps they all should count??? And, wait.... are actual goals excluded from this 'shots on target' count?? (It looks to me as if they must be.)

Saves - that last point feeds into this as well: does a keeper get credit for catching a ball that's kicked pretty much straight at him? What about if it's hit with a lot of pace, and maybe swerving in the air a little, but still straight at him? And I rather fear that 'saves' are only seen to encompass blocking, diverting or catching attempts which are bound directly for goal; but smothering the ball at an attacker's feet or pawing it away from him (especially if the keeper is the last man) or diverting a square-ball across the six-yard box heading towards an onrushing attacker, or catching a cross that's bound for an unmarked opponent at the far post - these are also 'goal-preventing actions' and really ought to receive the same credit as conventional 'saves'.

In the Euros last summer, they were awarding defenders and midfielders points for 'ball recoveries'. That seemed to work a bit better, in that it was fairly consistent and predictable which players would benefit most from this, and - in the absence again of conventional 'bonus points' - it had a significant impact on points returns and was a major driver of selection decisions. But even there, there was an opacity about what the hell the term actually meant.

Ball recoveries - presumably refers to 'turnovers of possesion' (but why didn't they just say that?); but it sounds as if it should mean only recovering possession after a ball has run loose, after it has not been clearly under either team's control for a short period; and that would be a very narrow category indeed! They probably wanted to come up with a term that suggested all forms of recovery of possession - but why didn't they just say that? Or why didn't they content themselves with using 'tackles' or 'duels' instead? Those terms aren't completely free of ambiguity, but they're more common and more straightforward than 'ball recoveries'. 'Duels', I suppose, encompass both tackles with the feet and aerial challenges - and perhaps also shouldering an opponent off the ball or using your body to stop him reaching the ball (without it being a foul!)? 'Duels' would have been a more readily understood category description to adopt than 'ball recoveries', I think. But 'duels' can be both active and passive: taking the ball off an opponent (or prevailing in a '50/50' contest) or resisting having the ball taken off you. I suppose 'ball recoveries' refer only to the former - but it wouldn't be too difficult to make that clear.

Tackles - this would appear to be the simplest and most uncontroversial category for deciding additional points allocations of this sort, and I wish they'd use this instead. But even with this, there are some potential problems. Is a tackle 'won' the moment it dispossesses an opponent, or does the tackler have to retain possession of the ball himself?? Very often a ball will break to a teammate - perhaps somewhat fortuitously - rather than being retained by the tackling player. And sometimes the ball will just run loose into space, with neither team immediately having possession of it, but a teammate of the tackler will be able to respond quickest to recover it. Are these 'tackles won' or not?

Definitions MATTER. And they're too complex to be encapsulated in a simple phrase or sentence; they require extended explanations to clarify them.