2025-26 Premier League Infiltrating midfielders

Frank Lampard turned this ability a career. We built a metric to find the midfielders doing it in the Premier League today, then checked whether the shots and goals follow.‍

Every coach can name the players who do this, and the ones who only look like they do. The problem is that this is hard to measure in the data. We wanted to put a number on it: when your team delivers an open-play cross, is your midfielder already inside the box, or still behind the play?

What infiltration measures

Infiltration is the share of a team's open-play crosses where a given central or attacking midfielder is already inside the opposition box at the moment the ball is delivered. A high share means the player consistently gets into scoring positions when the cross comes in. A low share means they tend to sit behind the action.

The idea is simple. Measuring it is not. You need the event data to know the exact frame of the cross, the tracking data to know every midfielder's position at that frame, a box-area filter, and a role tag to separate midfielders from the strikers already camped in the six-yard box. Most providers can give you one or two of those. Very few combine all four across a full season.

How we built it

We did not write any code for this. The entire ranking came from asking MGPT, the AI assistant inside MyGamePlan, a single tactical question. It drew on 380 Premier League matches in 2025/26 with synced event and tracking data, filtered to the 67 midfielders with at least 1,000 minutes, and returned three views on the same pool: infiltration share, shots per 90, and goals per 90.

The same question can be ask for any other leagues in one click, which matters if you scout beyond one competition.

The rankings, and the story inside them

By raw infiltration, J. King (Fulham, 53.4%) leads the league, ahead of Morgan Rogers (Aston Villa, 49.4%) and Emile Smith Rowe (Fulham, 44.6%). These are the players most often inside the box when their team crosses.

But arriving is not the same as producing. For shots per 90 from a midfield role, the top three are Rayan Cherki (Man City, 1.77), Tijjani Reijnders (Man City, 1.51) and Eberechi Eze (Arsenal, 1.47). For goals per 90, it is Cole Palmer (Chelsea, 0.37), Eze again (0.27) and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall (Chelsea, 0.25).

Line the three lists up and three patterns emerge.

One. Arriving, shooting and scoring are separate skills. A small group does all three. Eze ranks 4th for infiltration, 3rd for shots and 2nd for goals. Wirtz and Rogers are top ten across all three views. If you are looking for the closest current echo of the Lampard profile, a genuine midfielder who arrives, shoots and finishes, Morgan Rogers is the nearest thing the league has right now.

Two. The best finishers do not chase the box. Cole Palmer is the league's top-scoring midfielder while ranking only 26th for infiltration. Bruno Fernandes tells the same story, 5th for goals from 47th for arrivals. They score from deeper, more selective positions, and counting runs alone would misread them completely.

Three. Some players make all the runs for none of the reward. J. King tops the league for arrivals but ranks 38th for goals. Joe Willock, Lucas Bergvall and Emiliano Buendía sit in the same gap. Whether that is a finishing problem to coach or a profile to target in recruitment depends on which side of the desk you sit.

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Build it to your own principles

The point is not the leaderboard. It is that a specific tactical question, "who attacks the box on our crosses," became a measurable metric in minutes, on your data, with every action traceable back to video.

Your definition of a good run might be different. You might want arrivals at the near post, or runs from deep central midfield, or only in the last fifteen minutes when games open up. Because the metric is built from raw event and tracking data rather than a fixed provider stat, you can define it to your own game model and see it the same day.

Lampard did it on instinct. Now you can measure who has it.

See it for yourself

Ask MGPT a tactical question and get the ranking, the charts and the clips back in seconds. Or book a call, and we can set this up for you.