When I think about some of the best dribblers that the Premier League has seen, names like Ryan Giggs, Thierry Henry, Eden Hazard and Cristiano Ronaldo come to mind. They had the perfect balance of speed and skill, each with their own unique style that allowed them to dance past defenders like they weren’t there.
Regardless of the other attributes that dribblers bring to their squads, there is always an aurora of excitement when skillful dribblers receive the ball. There is the anticipation that something exciting will happen, which provides a lot of entertainment value to football fans.
So with that being said, in this article we focus on dribbling efficiency. We first look at which squads are the best and worst at dribbling past defenders. We also take it one step further and hone in on the individual players, their dribbling statistics and the other characteristics they provide the team.
Before we dive into the details, in this article we reference take-ons a lot.
We define an attempted take-on as one in which an opponent attempts to take-on a defender by dribbling past them.
Successful take-ons are ones in which the opponent was able to beat the defender by dribbling past them.
Unsuccessful take-ons can include when the dribbler gets tackled but also when the dribbler retains possession but was unable to get past the defender.
Lastly, when writing this article, data is as of January 19, 2025. At which point, 16 teams have played 22 matches, while there are four teams who have only played 21 matches. To account for this, most statistics are presented on a per 90 minute basis, so we can compare metrics against other squads and players appropriately.
With that being said, let’s get started!
Squad Showdowns: Who Tops the Dribbling Charts?
There are four squads, Brighton, Chelsea, Tottenham, and West Ham, who are leading the Premier League with the most attempted take-ons. All four teams are around the 21 take-on attempts per 90 minute mark.
As seen in the below table, the margin between these squads is less than one attempted take-on per match.
For Brighton, Tottenham and West Ham, they each have one player who stands out above the rest of the squad with the most attempted take-ons.
For Brighton, that’s Mitoma with 18.1% of all Brighton’s attempted take-ons. Kulusevski is for Tottenham, with 18.8% of their attempted take-ons and Kudus for West Ham, with 23.6% of West Ham’s attempted take-ons.
However for Chelsea, while Palmer leads the squad’s attempted take-ons with 14%, there are three other players who have contributed a similar number of attempts.
They include Sancho (13.1% of Chelsea’s attempted take-ons), Neto (12.9% of Chelsea’s attempted take-ons) and Madueke (12.3% of Chelsea’s attempted take-ons). This player variety for Chelsea’s attempted take-ons provides an important insight into their style of play.
Instead of relying heavily on one specific player to take-on defenders, beat them and create an opportunity, Chelsea have many players who are capable of that role. It is what makes them so exciting to watch in this 24-25 Premier League season.
Attempted take-ons is one metric but are those players (and squads) often successful in dribbling past a defender and retaining possession? The average success rate of take-ons across all squads so far in the Premier League is 43.7%.
Keep in mind that unsuccessful attempts can include dribbles in which a player retains possession of the ball but was unable to get past the defender.
Manchester City lead the league with percentage of successful take-ons at 48.4%. So for every 100 attempted take-ons, Man City players dribble past the defender successfully about 48 times. On average, Manchester City have 9.5 successful take-ons per 90 minutes.
At the other end of the spectrum, Leicester City have the lowest success rating, with only 40.1%, followed closely by Tottenahm at 40.4% and Brentford at 40.8%.
The final comment about take-ons with respect to whole squads is surrounding Crystal Palace. Palace’s success rating for take-ons is 41.9%, which ranks them 15th in the Premier League.
What’s interesting about Crystal Palace is that they have far fewer attempts than the average across the other 19 Premier League squads. Palace have 284 attempted take-ons so far in the 24-25 Premier League season, which is an average of 12.9 per match.
For comparisons purposes, the average in the Premier League is 18.4 take-ons per 90 minutes or 401 total. As noted previously, Brighton lead the league with 480 attempted take-ons.
Now we’ve presented the data on squads, in the next section we take a deeper look at the Premier League’s top dibblers on an individual basis.
One-on-One Masters: Premier League’s Best Dribblers Revealed
Next, we look at the top 5 dribblers in the Premier League so far this 2024-2025 season. We define the top 5 as those who have dribbled past a defender the highest number of times.
There might be some surprising omissions from this list of 5 players: Ndiaye, Kudus, Semenyo, Doku, and Rogers.
Ndiaye has taken-on a defender 114 times and has successfully dribbled past them on 53 different occasions so far this 2024-2025 Premier League season, the most successes in the league.
Second is Kudus, with 51 successes. Semenyo is tied with Doku for third with 45 successful take-ons. While Rogers is 5th with 40 successes.
When accounting for the number of matches the players listed in the top 5 above have played, Jeremy Doku for Manchester City stands out with the highest number of successful take-ons per 90 minutes, with 5.1.
It is no wonder the City crowd stand up with excitement every time he gets the ball. On average, Doku is taking on a defender about 10 times a game and he’s successfully dribbling past that defender about 5 times a match, exciting!
So these five players are some of the best at dribbling past defenders in the Premier League, but how do their statistics measure up in other key areas?
Out of all five players, Doku has played the least amount to date in the Premier League.
However, he is ranked in third place amongst the top 5 for the most combined goals and assists with 7. He averages a combined 0.8 goals plus assists per 90-minutes, which is well above the average of 0.36 for the other four players.
Antonio Semenyo is tied with Rogers for 6 goals, the most out of these five players.
However, after taking 81 shots and only 23 have been on target, his shot on target percentage is only 28.4%. This puts him in the 25th percentile in the Premier League when compared amongst all other attacking midfielders and wingers.
Where Morgan Rogers stands out is his progressive passing percentage. Determined by taking his progressive passing yards and dividing it by his total passing yards.
It measures how fast and often a player is looking to move the ball up the pitch. Do players have that forward mindset or are they quick to turnaround and make the easy pass to a supporting player behind them?
Rogers proportion of progressive passing is 35.2% which is considerably higher than the 19.9% average amongst the other four players.
Compared with the four other top dribblers in the Premier League, Mohammed Kudus excels at passing accuracy. His average passing completion is 84.1%, the average for the other four players is 77.0%.
However, he has been dispossessed 52 times, the third highest in the whole of the Premier League, ranking him in the top 1 percentile. In this dataset, dispossessed as defined as the number of times a player loses the ball after being tackled by an opposing player.
Iliman Ndiaye has put some impressive defensive work so far this season, with 39 total tackles. Not only does he lead the Premier League with the most take-ons, he’s also helping his team defensively.
The remaining other four top dribblers have only averaged 23.3 tackles in the Premier League to date. Interestingly enough though, Ndiaye hasn’t contributed a single assist to Everton so far this season.
Summary
That’s it for this article. In this post, we take a look at the top 5 dribblers in the Premier League so far this 2024-2025 season. We defined the top dribblers as those that have the most successful take-ons (i.e., the opponent was able to beat the defender by dribbling past them).
We also looked at the dribbling efficiency for squads on the whole, focusing on which squads had the most attempted take-ons and outlined each of their success rates.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article and were provided with some additional facts about the top dribblers in the Premier League. Were there any statistics for players or squads that surprised you?
If so, add them in the comments as we’d love to hear. Also, who is one standout dribbler in the Premier League history that comes to mind for you? Add them in the comments.
Stay tuned for future posts and please send us a message if there is a specific topic you would like to see covered. Similarly, if you have some ideas on how we can improve these articles, please send them our way too.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read these posts!
JC
All data in this article is from fbref.com so, thanks to them!
One response to “Mastering the Art of Dribbling: Top Players and Squads in the Premier League”
[…] – number of times a player touched the ball. To note, in the data set we have, receiving a pass, dribbling with the ball and then making a pass all counts as one […]