It wasn’t until the 1994 World Cup in the United States when the “assist” statistic was popularized in world soccer. Before that, it was tough to quantify the extent of one’s creative brilliance, with goalscorers enjoying much of the limelight. Many of the all-time great creators, like Diego Maradona and Johan Cruyff, were reliable goalscorers, too, and perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that their careers weren’t reduced to numbers as some contemporary stars’ are. While some have argued that we’ve grown to become a little too "obsessed" with a supposedly superfluous statistic, the importance of setting a teammate up to score cannot be overlooked. Goals are the be all and end all in this sport, after all. Some of soccer’s finest technicians and playmakers have stumbled their way onto English shores since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, but the competition’s single-season assist record has emerged as a mightily tough one to break since the bar was set at 20 in 2003.…