You can begin to measure a player's defensive performance by working out what they allow the _opponent_ to do (or indeed not do), especially in something like soccer with larger play areas and slightly less fluidity of movement. There's a section in the Soccermatics book about an old metric I worked on called PATCH which implemented this quite naively based on defender territory and ball progression, which nevertheless flagged up people like Umtiti before his Barcelona move.

Of course there's also stuff like GoalImpact which just tries to apply plus minus to football, but all the old arguments about football being a low scoring game apply here.