Alessandro Bastoni has earned a reputation for being one of the most reliable left-footed centre-backs in world football.
Having already won two Serie A championships with Inter Milan, the 25-year-old defender is now also a mainstay in the Italy national team.
He’s started and completed 90 minutes in Italy’s last eight successive games.
Luciano Spalletti clearly values his quality highly and that is why Bastoni is made to be at the center of his three-man centre-back line.
Even though Italy haven’t gotten a clean sheet in their last eight games, Bastoni’s commanding nature at the back and defensive qualities help him garner a lot of praise.
But something rather strange happened in the analysis of the Inter Milan defender’s performance in Italy’s recent 4-1 win over Israel in the UEFA Nations League.
Bastoni had a pretty admirable outing in the comfortable win for Spaletti’s side, but his statistic revelations for the game had fans utterly confused.
SofaScore, which is a popular sports application that provides real-time stat updates, showed something truly bizarre about Bastoni’s numbers from the game.
At one point, it showed that the defender had made a sensational 148 interceptions in one match.
To signify how amazing that is, the player with the highest interceptions in the entire 2023/24 Premier League season was Fulham defender Antonee Robinson – who made 80 interceptions throughout the campaign.
If one player was to statistically even reach 148 interceptions in a game, that would mean they’d need to make two interceptions almost every minute throughout the 90 minutes.
That is not only insane but almost impossible because the opposition team doesn’t always have the ball possession. But this was later clarified as an obvious glitch or bug in Sofascore system.
The reality is that Bastoni had made only 2 interceptions in the entire match against Israel, which is definitely more believable.
But the overall rating given to Bastoni in this game by Sofascore was also showing a perfect 10 initially. That isn’t surprising considering the number of interceptions.
Not only SofaScore, but Fotmob – which is a pretty popular football score app that also shows playrs’ stats and ratings – also gave him a 10/10 rating for his performance.
The reality is that both apps were somehow glitching at the same time, resulting in this kind of errors showing up.
Sofascore actually gave Bastoni a respectable 7.3 rating (out of 10) for helping his side get the comfortable win.
Fotmob gave him a better rating at 7.6, but definitely not the 10.0 that was initially showing due to some kind of a glitch.
The ratings for these websites aren’t done by real writers but with the use of AI that takes many individual statistics into considering before coming up with an average ‘score’ for the player.
Fotmob describes their ratings system as: “FotMob calculates player ratings using over 300 individual stats per player per match from Opta.”
Both Sofascore and Fotmob get their statistical data from Opta, which is the industry leader in acquiring real-time statistics.
So it appears that Opta might’ve mistakenly reflected 148 interceptions for Bastoni in the Israel game, which in turn fooled the AI software into thinking that he produced a masterclass and give him a 10.0 rating.
Bastoni might be a impressive defender who has become the darling for Inter fans with his consistency in recent years, but to actually get a 10.0 rating from these apps, he’ll need to produce some kind of an extraordinary performance with sensational defensive numbers.
