Actually, in the final Pirlo did not have the ball the most for Italy because he was closely marked by Xavi. A central defender, Barzagli got more touches than him. It would be interesting to see the graph of that match.

Also your final assertion that teams set themselves up so their best players get the ball the most seems a bit off to me. Consider FC Barcelona. Lionel Messi is arguably their best player but you would be hard pressed to find a game in which he has the ball the most since he plays high up on the pitch as an attacker.

I agree with you in that single match analysis using this technique doesn't really produce any new insights. I think this analysis would be very interesting when comparing between different games however. e.g. comparing Italy's match against England where Pirlo was effectively given free reign of the pitch to their match against Spain where he was shut down for most of the match. I would love to get my hands on some raw data from Optasports!

On a tangent.. I'd love to see a heat map of Messi's movement for Barcelona (and Argentina). Whenever I watch him he's all over the place. And to my eyes, he's most dangerous when picking the ball up either from the midfield line or on the touchline half way up the field. In both cases, when runs at pace with the ball he's diabolically good. Any data/visualization to track that would be fantastic to see, especially filtering only on those instances where he causes real damage to the opponent (e.g. a shot on goal for him or a teammate)...

For any game from a major league, you can go to the soccernet game summary and click on GameCast to see a heat map for any player. Here's Messi in the Barcelona 3 - 1 Real Madrid from December: http://i.imgur.com/XEvpW.jpg

(From http://soccernet.espn.go.com/gamecast?id=323887&cc=5901 )

The ToralFootball app, now StatsZone, allows you to do some analysis yourself. Not "raw" exactly.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/total-football-2010/id3755679...

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fourfourtwo-football-stats/id...

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/euro-2012-football-stats-zone...

A trequartista is someone between an attacking midfielder and a second striker. Xavi's more of a central midfielder. He certainly wasn't at the tip of the midfield diamond--out of Spain's normal midfield six, Xavi plays ahead of Busquets and Xabi Alonso, but behind Iniesta, Fabregas, and Silva.

If anyone the closest Spain have to a trequartista is Fabregas, though he was really more of a false nine. The idea of a false nine is that you play an attacking midfielder or second striker, but there's no striker in front of him. This pulls the defenders out of position so you can get around them.

You might say that Iniesta, Fabregas, and Silva were listed as forwards. Actually, Spain didn't usually play any forwards. It might have been listed as a 4-3-3, but it was more of a 4-6-0 with three attacking midfielders. There's two reasons for this: one was that David Villa is injured and Fernando Torres has had shaky form for the past two years, and the other is that Spain has plenty of great attacking midfielders. Individually, David Silva, Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas, and Juan Mata are all major stars and are (or were in the case of Cesc Fabregas and Arsenal) the main creative force for their respective clubs.