Fred retires: Maligned Brazil striker has announced he will retire from international football after World Cup 2014

Faltering No 9 scored just one goal in the tournament

Tom Sheen
Monday 14 July 2014 08:00 BST
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Fred comes off following another disappointing display against Mexico
Fred comes off following another disappointing display against Mexico

Brazilian striker Fred has announced he has retired from international football after his team lost the third-place play-off against the Netherlands.

The 30-year-old striker came in for a huge amount of criticism for his lacklustre performances in the tournament, where he scored just once for a Brazil team that entered the World Cup with such high hopes and failed spectacularly in the semi-final.

According to ProZone statistics, Fred emerged from the World Cup having spent less than one minute in possession of the ball during his six matches.

It's a stark comparison to Brazil's golden boy Neymar who spent six and a half minutes with the ball at his feet on home soil.

Time in possession statistics show that Fred had the ball for just 52 seconds during the tournament, accounting for 129 'individual possessions' (or touches) during his six matches.

A number of those touches would have come from kick-offs and restarts (as shown in the heat map below).

He had nine shots in total, with just four of those hitting the target and one finding the net.

Unsurprisingly, his best performance of the World Cup came in the 4-1 win against Cameroon, where he recorded 28 touches of the ball and recorded three of his five shots on target. He also scored in that game, though he only had seven seconds in total on the ball.

A heat map of Brazil striker Fred's performance against Germany

In the humiliation against Germany he had just one shot and his 20 touches used up 13 seconds of play.

This pales in comparison to star man Neymar, who recorded 392 seconds on the ball, for 261 individual possessions.

Neymar also had 18 shots in five games, with 12 of those on target as he scored four goals and added one assist.

Fred retires with a pretty decent international record with 18 goals in 39 matches, though nine of those came in an 11 match spell in 2013.

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