Formations are a lie, for the most part. We all know this by now; learning a team’s formation generally tells you very little about how they play. One reason for this is that positions are also a lie. Nani and Diego Rossi are both wingers on paper, but anyone who watches the two knows that they play very differently. We’ve made more specific terms, like inverted winger, to help describe the difference. But what if you hadn’t seen a player play yet? What if you’d like some objective way to define a player’s role beyond just their position? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a data-driven way of determining a playstyle that we could use to give us an idea of how a winger...wings?