The Week in Stats: Are Wilfried Zaha’s complaints justified?

We take a look at the numbers behind some of the big talking points from the past week, including Wilfried Zaha’s referee complaints.

Misfiring stars in the Bundesliga, a remarkable rearguard action from Bologna and the alleged persecution of Wilfried Zaha — these are the stats that explain the headlines.

Some very near misses in Germany

It was a weekend of extraordinary wastefulness in the Bundesliga’s big games. Firstly, Ishak Belfodil of Hoffenheim somehow failed to secure his side an injury-time win over Dortmund.

Not to be outdone, Bayern Munich’s James Rodriguez — a man with two Champions League winners’ medals and one of the most sublime left feet in world soccer — was unable to convert an equally easy opportunity in the day’s Topspiele against Schalke. Rodriguez could at least take comfort from the fact that his side ran out easy winners anyway.

Although these were very bad indeed, the worst miss of the Bundesliga season so far statistically came from Dortmund’s Abdou Diallo against Frankfurt. However, as you can see here, Diallo almost immediately made amends by knocking in the rebound a split-second later.

So the worst “true” miss in the German top flight to date belongs to Andrej Kramaric of Hoffenheim for this howler in Duesseldorf:

Bologna survive a barrage

While the headlines were dominated by how close lowly Frosinone came to preventing Juventus from scoring, an even more remarkable shut-out had taken place elsewhere in Italy. It occurred in Bologna, where the home team somehow kept a Roma side at bay that created a massive 3.2 xG of chances.

Roma took 26 shots in all, although you can only see 25 of them here, because one of Lorenzo Pellegrini’s attempts was so wayward that it couldn’t be fitted onto the map.

To put this all into context, during the whole of last season, only four away teams in Serie A put in a better attacking performance — in terms of chance creation, at least — than Roma did over the weekend.

This kind of against-the-odds shut-out is becoming a habit for Bologna — the previous highest xG by a side without scoring also took place in one of their matches. That came back in August, when they played out a goalless draw with Frosinone.

The ballad of Wilfried Zaha

Crystal Palace winger Wilfried Zaha’s recent complaints that an opponent would need to break his leg before they’re red-carded attracted plenty of media attention. And while his comments were somewhat self-pitying in tone, they did raise some interesting issues.

Firstly, in the absence of any “expected injuries” metric, it’s currently impossible to gauge the degree of malice or risk present in a foul in any sort of objective manner. Then there was the observation that players who generate high “fouled” numbers tend to be the ones who are prepared to go to ground regardless of whether any offense has actually taken place — what might be called the Cristiano Ronaldo Quandary.

Nonetheless, the top-line stats can at least give us a broad idea of how a player is being treated. At first glance, Zaha’s complaints seem justified. Both this season and last, he’s suffered the fifth-highest number of total fouls in the league. In addition, no player was fouled more often in a single game in the last campaign than Zaha against Bournemouth.

However, on closer inspection it becomes obvious that there are some double standards at play here. Of the 529 players who appeared in the Premier League last season, only 20 committed more fouls than Zaha himself. And at the very top of that list is none other than Zaha’s teammate, Luka Milivojevic.

The Serbian midfielder hasn’t changed during the current campaign, either, with only Brighton’s Glenn Murray responsible for more fouls. And no player has been fouled more in a single game than Huddersfield’s Rajiv van La Parra was when he played against Crystal Palace a couple of weeks ago.

So it’s clear Zaha and his teammates hardly have unblemished records in this regard. But by subtracting the number of fouls that a player has committed from the amount of fouls that they’ve suffered, we can create a loose gauge of how sinned against – or sinning – a player is.

And by this measure, the biggest sinner in the Premier League last season was Roberto Firmino – a player who has yet to receive a red card since he arrived in Europe almost a decade ago. Zaha’s mate Milivojevic was just behind the Brazilian.

Meanwhile, this season, Zaha is one of the most sinned-against players in the league, so maybe he deserves some sympathy after all.

Nonetheless, Zaha is nowhere near being the most fouled player in the top five European leagues. That honor goes to Ismaila Sarr of Rennes.

And when the 20-year-old Senegalese wide man isn’t being relentlessly hacked down by his opponents, he still manages to do wonderful things like this:

… and this: