The Week In Stats: Corners are no longer Liverpool’s Achilles’ heel under Klopp

This week, we look at how Premier League teams are faring from corners and, Europe’s most frequent penalty takers and more.

On the corner

Prior to Lucas Hoeler’s 42nd-minute goal on Saturday, Freiburg had taken 68 corners during this Bundesliga season without a single one producing a goal. Despite the huge sense of anticipation that the award of a corner can generate among spectators — especially in England — the numbers indicate that such enthusiasm isn’t entirely warranted.

In the Premier League this term, although there’s a small degree of correlation between the number of corners a team wins and the amount of goals they score, the relationship is very weak. For instance, while Leicester have the fourth-highest corner tally, they’re currently 11th in the goalscoring charts. Huddersfield have won more corners than four other teams, but they’re the league’s lowest scorers by some margin.

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. In broad terms, crosses are an effective way of generating large numbers of low-quality chances. So there’s no reason to expect corners to be any different. They aren’t: while 38.8 percent of corners in the Premier League this term have resulted in a shot, only 3.7 percent have led to a goal.

Premier League clubs have been scoring from around one in every 27 corners this season, with each corner being worth a paltry 0.0394 xG overall. Given that a typical Premier League side is earning a little over five corners per match, this means they’ve resulted in a goal about once every six games for a club on average.

But although corners tend to be overvalued by many fans, it’s still useful and informative to look more closely at which sides are doing particularly well or badly from them. One easy way to do this is to compare the amount of shots/goals/xG etc. that teams are creating and conceding from corners. It tells us which sides are benefiting or suffering most from these set-pieces.

At the start of Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool reign, corners were considered a major weakness for the club, with good justification. In his first season in England, Liverpool conceded 10 goals from them. No other big-six team has let in that many during a single campaign since 2014.

Despite conceding to Crystal Palace from a corner in their last league game, things could hardly be more different for Liverpool in 2018-19. No Premier League club has a greater net superiority in terms of shots, goals and xG generated by corners this season.

While Liverpool stand out at the top of those charts, Burnley are equally conspicuous at the opposite end of the table.

The numbers here are very Burnley: They appear to have little control over opponents’ shot volumes but still manage to restrict the opposition to low-quality chances on average. Although they’ve created 41 fewer attempts on goal from corners than the teams they’ve played, those efforts have only resulted in two more goals than Burnley have managed.

At the same time, despite having had the fewest corners in the league, Burnley make the very most of the small number of opportunities they themselves create.

Only Southampton are producing more shots per corner, only Brighton are scoring more goals per corner, and only Cardiff are generating more xG per corner.

Pen pushers

Going into Friday’s Bundesliga game against Hertha, Domenico Tedesco’s cynical, dour and over-hyped Schalke side had scored 22.7 percent of their league goals from the penalty spot this term. Only one Bundesliga team since 2009 has ended the season with a higher proportion of penalty goals that that.

They were coached by our old friend the over-hyped Ralph Hasenhuettl, whose cynical Ingolstadt side scored nine of their 33 Bundesliga goals from the penalty spot in 2015-16, which worked out at 27.3 percent.

Seven sides have ended a league season with more than 20 percent of their goals coming from penalties, although none of them played in the Premier League. The highest figure for a Premier League team in this time period is 17.8 percent by Roy Hodgson’s Crystal Palace last year.

From 2009-2018, teams in the top four European leagues scored an average of 7.89 percent of their goals from penalties, although they constituted only a little over 1 percent of the total number of shots. They were converted at a rate of around 77 percent.

There were 22 instances of sides going an entire league campaign without scoring a penalty. Only nine clubs weren’t awarded a single penalty over the course of a full league season, with none of those teams coming from Serie A.