La Liga's greatest creators since 2000

Four things have to coincide. The player has to occupy a role where he touches the ball in the final third more than anyone else on the pitch. He has to play for a team that scores a very large number of goals, since an assist requires one. He has to take set pieces, or at least some of them. And he has to do all of it for over a decade without a serious loss of form.

Remove the decade and the total halves. Remove the team and it halves again. The player at the top of this list had every one of the four conditions for an unusually long time, and the size of his lead is really a measure of how unlikely that combination is rather than a claim that he was twice as good as anyone else.

It is the same structure as the great single-season goal hauls: extreme individual numbers come from extreme situations, and the player is the necessary but not sufficient part.

Assists deserve more scepticism than they usually receive, and a table spanning twenty-five years is where the problem shows. There is no single universal definition — providers differ on whether a pass that requires a beaten defender still counts, on how to treat deflections, on rebounds and on won free-kicks — and the conventions have shifted over the period this table covers.

The practical consequence is that a gap of two or three assists between adjacent rows is not meaningful. A gap of ninety, as at the top of this table, comfortably survives any definitional quibble you could raise.

That is the right way to use most football statistics: ask whether the difference is large enough to survive the measurement error, and ignore the ones that are not. It resolves a surprising proportion of arguments. It also tells you when a statistic is being asked to carry more than it can: a table like this one settles who created the most chances that were converted, and it settles nothing at all about who was the better passer.

Assist boards are consistently harder than scoring boards for the same league and era, and the reason is about how football is remembered rather than how it is played. Goals are events with a clear author; assists are the thing that happened immediately before the event everybody was watching. We encode the finisher and discard the supplier.

The result is that most people can produce a league's top scorers with reasonable confidence and are lost by row four on assists. The names are not obscure — many of them are famous players — they are simply stored under the wrong heading in memory.

The correction is to think in terms of teams rather than individuals. Pick a side that scored a lot over several seasons and ask who was supplying it. Three or four rows of any assist board will fall out of that exercise.

Spanish football adds a wrinkle that is worth knowing before you play one of these boards. The possession-based style that dominated the league's most successful period distributes the final pass more widely than a counter-attacking system does, which means several members of the same midfield can post similar assist numbers across the same seasons. Getting one of them usually means the others are nearby on the list, and that is a useful thing to notice mid-round.

The full-back point applies here as strongly as anywhere, incidentally. Spain was early to the attacking full-back as a primary creator, and one of the highest totals on this table belongs to a defender. If your instinct on an assist board is to name forwards, that instinct will cost you two or three rows every time.