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Every coach wants numbers in the box when the ball comes in from wide. We measured how many each Veikkausliiga side gets there this season.
When a cross is played, how many of your attackers are actually inside the opposition box, ready to meet it? Not how many crosses you hit, not how accurate they are, but how many bodies you commit to the area at the moment of delivery. It is one of the clearest attacking principles in the game, and one of the hardest to measure. So we measured it across Veikkausliiga this season.
What the metric measures
Box occupation is the average number of attacking players inside the opposition box when their team plays an open-play cross, with the crosser and the goalkeeper excluded. A high number means a team consistently commits runners to the area from wide. A low number means it crosses into space no one is attacking.
Ilves Tampere top the Veikkausliiga for box occupation, getting 3.52 attackers into the area on the average open-play cross, ahead of Gnistan (3.26) and FC Lahti (3.23), against a league average of 3.04. The chasing pack is packed with familiar names: Kuopion Palloseura sit fourth (3.17), with Jaro and Vaasan Palloseura also inside the top ten, so several of the clubs we work with are already committing real numbers to the box.
Reading the table is simple. Building it is not. You need event data for the exact frame of each cross, tracking data for where every attacker is standing at that frame, and a box filter to count who is actually inside the area. Set-piece deliveries are stripped out, so this is open play only. Most providers give you one piece of that. Very few combine all of it across a season.
How we built it
We did not write any code for this. The ranking came from asking MGPT, the AI assistant inside MyGamePlan, a single tactical question. It pulled the Veikkausliiga matches this season with synced event and tracking data, found every open-play cross, counted the attackers inside the box at the frame of each delivery, and returned the league table above. The same question can be asked of any league we cover, and of any single opponent, in one click.
Build it to your own principles
The table is not really the point. The point is that a specific tactical idea, "how many players do we get in the box when we cross," became a measurable number in minutes, on your own data, with every cross traceable back to the video. You might prefer near-post arrivals only, or arrivals from open-play switches, or only in the final fifteen minutes when games stretch. 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, for your team and every opponent.
See it for yourself
Ask MGPT your own 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.
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