The Prism Refractions
← All essays
Refractions/Player/Federico Dimarco

Federico Dimarco, Numbers That Pull In Two Directions

A defender who leads his position pool for aerials while carrying seventeen assists.

Mo·5 Aug 2026·3 min read

The short version

The shape of the season

Dimarco turned in 2703 minutes over 35 appearances this past Serie A season, which is a full and stable body of work rather than a fragment, so the numbers underneath it carry real weight and are not the product of a handful of games.

What sits on top of that base looks less like a defender's ledger and more like a creator's, because he recorded 7 goals and 17 assists while taking 65 shots whilst laying on 96 key passes, and those attacking totals frame everything that follows.

That gap between position label and output is the first thing the data asks you to hold, and it is not resolved by anything in the snapshot, so it stays open as you read the rest.

Where the ranks agree and clash

The clearest signal is aerial duels, because his win rate of 0.59 ranks first among the 68 position peers with at least 600 minutes and lands in the 100th percentile, though the league average also reads 0.59, which is worth holding lightly given how the pool clusters.

His interceptions per 90 of 1.03 sit just above the league average of 1.01 and rank 31st of 68 in the 56th percentile, so on that measure he lands close to the middle of his position group and neither stands out nor drops away.

The defensive picture darkens elsewhere, because his tackle success of 0.48 falls below the league average of 0.54 and ranks 59th of 68 in the 15th percentile, while his clearances per 90 of 0.93 sit far under the league average of 3.99 and place him at the bottom of the pool. His pass accuracy of 83.24 percent trails the league average of 85.14 percent and ranks 50th of 68, in the 28th percentile.

Early against recent

Splitting the season into windows shows movement in the same direction across two matched six-game samples, because his early stretch of 526 minutes carried a goals-per-90 of 0.17 and an average rating of 7.34, while his recent stretch of 504 minutes lifted goals-per-90 to 0.36 and the average rating to 8.42.

Both windows record zero assists per 90, which sits oddly against the 17 assists on his season line and points to when in the calendar that creation actually landed, though the snapshot does not say where. These are small windows of roughly five hundred minutes each, so the rating jump reads as a trend to watch rather than a settled shift.

Who the model reads him beside

The nearest comparables by similarity are Rafik Belghali at 24 with 1926 minutes and a 0.94 score, Mergim Vojvoda at 31 with 1595 minutes at 0.924, and Emanuele Valeri at 27 with 2643 minutes at 0.908, and all three cluster tightly enough that they describe a consistent profile.

That grouping leans toward wide, forward-leaning full-back and wing-back types rather than orthodox central defenders, which echoes the attacking totals up top and again pulls against the centre-back label the snapshot assigns him.

The bottom lineThe data shows a player who tops his position pool for aerials and carries a heavy assist and key-pass load, while his tackling, clearing and passing accuracy all sit below the peer average. The open question the numbers cannot settle is which role he is truly being measured in, because the profile and the label do not line up.
serie ainterdefendersplayer data

See what The Prism sees

The Prism scored every player in this essay from live match data. Join the early-access waitlist to run it on any player or team yourself.