The Week in Stats: Barcelona are Europe’s free-kick kings

This week we look at the free-kick kings in Europe’s big leagues. Barcelona stand out for one obvious reason.

The land of the free

Despite the excitement that they tend to generate in the stands, direct free-kicks are still a very unreliable way of generating good scoring opportunities.

As a whole, shots from outside the penalty area are converted at a rate of around 3 percent. While direct free-kicks fare slightly better with a 5 percent conversion rate, that nonetheless means that 19 out of every 20 don’t result in a goal.

Even over the course of an entire season, it’s unusual for more than one player per team to score from a direct free-kick.

So, yes, Barcelona are without doubt Europe’s free-kick kings, with their 3.05 xG total dwarfing the second-highest figure, namely Real Betis’ 1.91.

In contrast, Arsenal, Inter and Frankfurt have only taken eight, nine and 10 direct free-kick shots this season respectively in the league, despite them all having decent enough campaigns. This strongly suggests that the players at these clubs are acting under instructions from their coaches only to shoot from set-pieces if they’re very close to the goal.

xG per direct free-kick essentially measures how optimistic/ill-advised these attempts are. In other words, are sides opting to shoot on goal when playing a short pass or cross might well be the wiser choice?

So both Manchester United and Bayern Munich have been taking direct free-kick shots from areas of the pitch that are very unlikely to result in a goal. In contrast, Premier League leaders Liverpool and Manchester City are far more careful about when they decide to go straight for goal, although La Liga’s Villarreal lead the way in this regard by some way.

It certainly seems that the plaudits that have come Lionel Messi’s way in recent months have been wholly deserved. And that becomes even more apparent when we look at the figures for direct freekicks going back to 2015.

Only one player scored six league goals from free-kicks in a single campaign over the preceding three seasons — and that was Messi himself. Indeed, on just seven occasions in the past four years has a player scored four or more, with Messi responsible for three of those instances.

https://twitter.com/LaLigaEN/status/1073619626104365057

Miralem Pjanic had 21 set-piece attempts for those four goals back in 2015-16. This season at Juventus, though, he’s been allowed only five free-kick shots in total. Similarly, his Juve team-mate Paulo Dybala scored three free-kick goals in each of the past two Serie A seasons, from 11 and 18 attempts respectively. This term, however, he’s taken just three freekick shots.

The reason for this, of course, is the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo. How it must have filled both Pjanic and Dybala with joy to watch Ronaldo hog 16 Serie A free-kicks this season without scoring even once from them.

But even Ronaldo will have his work cut out for him if he’s to match Vincenzo Grifo’s achievements in the 2016-17 season for Freiburg, when he managed an extraordinary 27 free-kick shots without any of them finding the back of the net.

Christian Eriksen’s work in this area, with two entries on the list, also shouldn’t go unnoticed.