The Week in Stats: Ronaldo is among the worst finishers in Europe

We take a closer look at the figures behind some of the past seven days’ soccer headlines, including Cristiano Ronaldo’s disappointing numbers.

This week we identify Europe’s biggest over- and under-performers in front of goal, explain why having a 100 percent strike rate is no guarantee of goalscoring excellence, and show that missing easy chances doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a poor forward.

Ronaldo is under-performing badly

We’re now deep enough into the season for it to be useful to look at which players are notably over- and under-achieving in terms of their goalscoring. This is most easily achieved by comparing the quality of the chances they’ve had – measured in expected goals (xG) – to the actual number of goals they’ve scored.

While the debate about how much such outliers owe to finishing ability or luck isn’t going to be settled any time soon, we can nonetheless state with confidence that these players’ numbers are very likely to revert toward the mean over the course of the season.

Put simply, this indicates that Edin Dzeko will almost certainly not continue to be so wasteful in the coming months, while Italian soccer’s new poster boy, Krzysztof Piatek, can be expected to find the net less frequently as the Serie A schedule progresses.

For all the hype, then, Cristiano Ronaldo has been one of the very worst finishers in Europe this season. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, the form that has earned Kylian Mbappe and Reiss Nelson so many headlines looks to be unsustainable in the longer term.

The presence of some other names merely underlines what we already suspected. Nobody seriously believes that Paco Alcacer will continue scoring at a rate of a goal every 29 minutes for the remainder of the season. Similarly, Frankfurt’s Luka Jovic might never again net five goals in a single game, as he did against Fortuna Duesseldorf in October.

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Looking back a little further, the table above displays the worst under-performers in front of goal over the past four seasons. It demonstrates why the notion that Karim Benzema could step into the breach this season at Real Madrid was perhaps a tad fanciful/optimistic/ludicrous.

The 100 percenters

Lucas Hoeler’s last-minute equalizer against Bayern on Saturday brought Freiburg the first point they’ve picked up in Munich since the late 1990s.

Hoeler’s goal also meant he’s maintained his 100 percent strike rate for this season — the German forward has two goals from two shots in the Bundesliga so far. However, although this might seem to be something of a sporting holy grail, in truth it’s more of a curse.

That’s because the usual ways of maintaining such an incredible strike rate for a single club over the course of a season tend to be: (i) being injured for much of said season; (ii) being so poorly regarded that you only play a very small number of minutes for said club; (iii) being sold by said club very shortly after the season begins.

There’s one far less damning way in which this feat can be achieved, though: As in the case of Benevento’s Alberto Brignoli, it could be because you’re a goalkeeper.

While the list above includes a World Cup winner, a Liverpool cult hero, a Dortmund legend and a Frankfurt “football god,” few would claim that those players represent any kind of goalscoring dream team. Very low shot volumes are the crucial factor here, rather than very good finishing.

It’s a point that’s underlined by the list of Premier League players who have a 100 percent strike rate during the current campaign: Joel Matip, Kieran Trippier, Kadeem Harris, Eric Dier and Beram Kayal.

Big misses

Somewhat perversely, while having a 100 percent strike rate is no signifier of being a great forward, missing big chances often is. In broad terms, big chances are essentially goalscoring opportunities that even you or I would put away more often than not.

As we can see from last season’s numbers, the players who missed the largest number of big chances in the top five European leagues included many of the world’s most coveted strikers. And Christian Benteke.

Luis Suarez leads the way once more this season in what is again a star-studded list, with the exceptions of Bournemouth’s Callum Wilson and Gerard Moreno of Villarreal. Just for the record, Benteke has been injured for much of the current campaign, so we could still see a late surge from the big Belgian.