The Week in Stats: Madrid underperform again

This week we take a closer look at Real Madrid’s poor displays against La Liga’s minnows, identify Europe’s one-man teams and more.

The waiting list

Lucas Alario scored his first Bundesliga goal of the season for Leverkusen on Saturday with what was his 19th shot of the 2018-19 campaign. It’d been a long wait for the Argentinian striker to get off the mark, but others have been waiting for even longer.

A total of eight players in Europe’s major leagues have taken more than 25 shots without scoring even a solitary goal. It will come as little surprise to Liverpool fans to learn that a certain Mario Balotelli, now at Nice in France, is among them.

Alario isn’t the only Argentine forward to have been misfiring badly this season. His compatriot Nicolas Gonzalez, one of Stuttgart’s big summer signings, has been even more wasteful in front of goal.

But ahead of the pack by some distance is Tunisian attacking midfielder Naim Sliti, who’s been missing chances at a prodigious rate for Dijon in Ligue 1. The fact that his shots are averaging a mere 0.067xG per attempt might just be part of the problem. France certainly seems to be the epicentre of wasteful shooting this season.

And before we move on, we would be remiss not to remind Liverpool supporters of what they almost certainly aren’t missing.

Dependency issues

Krzysztof Piatek struck yet again for Genoa on Sunday, this time in a 1-1 draw with SPAL. That took the Polish striker to 11 Serie A goals for the season, ensuring he stayed top of the scoring charts, one ahead of both Ciro Immobile and Cristiano Ronaldo. And it also meant that he has now been responsible for a remarkable 55% of his club’s league goals this term.

That isn’t quite the highest proportion for a single player in the big five leagues, however. Uruguayan forward Cristhian Stuani has scored an even more extraordinary 65 percent of Girona’s La Liga goals so far. It’s clearly a high-risk strategy for a club to lean so heavily upon one individual.

Fulham and Monaco, meanwhile, have managed the undesirable combination of being both very bad and very reliant upon a single striker for their goals.

If Girona do end paying the price for depending too heavily upon Stuani, then they can hardly say they weren’t forewarned — he scored 42 percent of their league goals last season as well. And Espanyol seem to have swapped an over-reliance on Gerard Moreno last term for an even greater over-reliance on Borja Iglesias in the current campaign.

Madrid underperform against La Liga’s minnows

https://twitter.com/LaLigaEN/status/1071902971078823936

Real Madrid were very fortunate on Sunday to come away with a win from their visit to La Liga’s bottom side, Huesca. Although Madrid emerged with a 1-0 victory courtesy of an early Gareth Bale strike, the xG stats for the game show that Huesca, in search of their first ever home win in La Liga, created the better chances.

And as we’ll see, this is far from the first time Madrid have been outperformed by lowly opposition is recent months.

The chart above makes it clear that, after a solid start to the season, Madrid’s domestic form has been wildly uneven. Since their fifth league match, they haven’t managed to outperform the opposition in xG terms for more than two consecutive games. Moreover, they haven’t done so at all since beating Celta Vigo early in November.

Madrid have produced a lower xG than their opponents in five of their 15 La Liga matches, and in another – their home clash with Valencia at the start of December – they’ve been perfectly matched.

And while the instances on matchdays 6 and 10 came away to La Liga’s current top two Sevilla and Barcelona, respectively, those other three games were against opposition with a vastly inferior budget to Madrid: Alaves (MD8), Eibar (MD13) and then Huesca on Saturday (MD15).