The Week in Stats: Dortmund’s creative excellence

This week we look at the teams and players in Europe’s top leagues that are enjoying the highest-quality chances on average.

Total expected goals (xG) figures for teams are very useful in measuring the overall quality of a team’s forward play and in predicting whether a side’s attacking performances are sustainable or if their goalscoring rates are likely to rise or fall in the future.

But such top-line stats often offer little insight into the attacking styles of the clubs. One easy to way gain at least a general sense of those approaches is to look at teams’ xG per non-penalty shot numbers.

In broad terms, two ways to post high xG totals are to create large amounts of low-quality chances or to fashion small numbers of relatively high-quality scoring opportunities.

Borussia Dortmund and Eintracht Frankfurt have only posted the fourth- and fifth-biggest non-penalty xG totals in the Bundesliga this season. But on average they’re creating the highest-quality chances of any clubs in the top four European leagues.

The German top flight provides a useful example of contrasting attacking styles. Hoffenheim have created the second-highest non-penalty xG total in the Bundesliga this season at 37.24, very close to Bayern’s leading figure of 37.67xG. But they’ve done so from 306 attempts at an average of 0.1213 xG per shot.

In contrast, Dortmund have taken only 213 non-penalty shots, but at a continent-leading average of 0.1493 xG per attempt. Dortmund are currently top of the Bundesliga, while Hoffenheim lie in seventh, although expected points totals indicate that Julian Nagelsmann’s side have been a tad unfortunate, as their performances would typically have put them third in the present standings.

There are some surprises here. Manchester United have created the seventh-highest average quality of chances overall, at 0.1298 xG from 269 non-penalty shots. That will seemingly come as a surprise to a great many of their own supporters, let alone the rest of the soccer world.

Meanwhile, despite currently sitting in Serie A’s European places, AC Milan are creating some of the poorest opportunities on average. The obvious explanation is that Milan have taken a league-high 164 shots from outside the box this season, with Suso (36), Hakan Calhanoglu (31), Gonzalo Higuain (21) and Ricardo Rodriguez (19) the main culprits.

Open-play efforts on goal from outside the penalty area are converted at a lowly 3 percent. Direct free-kicks fare slightly better, but even then the average conversion rate is still just one in 20. Suso at least has four league goals from outside the box this season including this beauty:

However, Calhanoglu, Higuain and Rodriguez haven’t managed a single one between them. That amounts to 71 shots without any return.

For the record, Atletico Madrid are the side whose attempts have been closest to the season average, at 0.1009 xG per shot.

Moving on to look at individual players in the Premier League who’ve taken a minimum of 10 non-penalty shots from open play, we see not one but two Wolves midfielders propping up the table.

It probably won’t come as too much of a shock to learn that just one of Ruben Neves’ 46 shots in the league have come from inside the area, while none of Joao Moutinho’s 12 attempts have. They’ve managed a goal apiece from those efforts.

So it seems that the perennial demands from the Molineux faithful that Neves shoots every time he enters the opposition half may be a little optimistic, even if they did work out very well indeed when Liverpool visited for Monday’s FA Cup tie.