The Week in Stats: Salah follows in Messi’s footsteps

This week, we look at the shot quality of the top goalscorers in Europe’s big leagues.

Big shots

At the time of writing, the average xG of a non-penalty shot in the big four European leagues was 0.104, ranging from a low of 0.091 xG in Serie A to a high of 0.111 xG in the Bundesliga.

The figures for the Premier League and La Liga are almost identical, at 0.107 xG and 0.106 xG respectively. So in all four divisions, as usual we’d expect non-penalty shots to be scored at a rate of around one in 10.

Here we’re going to look at the chance quality of the shots taken by the top scorers in those big leagues.

Starting with the Premier League, what stands out immediately is the high number of low-quality shots being taken by Mohamed Salah in comparison to the league’s other top scorers.

This becomes even more apparent if we instead break the shots down into just three groups: below average chances (0.1 xG and under), slightly above average opportunities (0.1-0.2 xG) and good chances (anything above 0.2 xG).

Salah’s 37 shots from outside the box in the league have resulted in just a single goal — although the strike in question is of course one of the frontrunners for goal of the season.

The contrast between Salah and the Premier League’s other leading scorers is also apparent if we look at the shot heatmaps for the five players in question — in other words, where on the pitch they’ve been taking their scoring attempts from.

Salah is taking far more shots from both outside of the penalty area and wide of the six-yard box.

Salah’s Liverpool teammate Sadio Mane is a study in caution and economy by comparison. At the time of writing, he’d taken 80 shots in the league, 40 fewer than Salah had.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s map again underlines that his greatest gift is an ability to get himself into scoring positions close to the goal.

The good news for Salah is that his shot distribution looks very similar to that of a certain Lionel Messi, so this isn’t the sort of thing that will necessarily stand in the way of being the greatest soccer player alive.

Another obvious takeaway is that — remarkably for someone who was frequently criticized during his years in England for shooting indiscriminately — more than one-third of all Luis Suarez’s La Liga shots have come from high-quality chances of 0.2 xG or over.

That’s the joint-highest proportion of the 15 players covered here, level with Sevilla’s Wissam Ben Yedder.

Moreover, Salah — and indeed the rest of the soccer world — have a long way to go before they match the undisputed king of the optimistic/unwise/vainglorious shot: Cristiano Ronaldo.

And while it’s impossible not to take pleasure from Fabio Quagliarella’s Indian summer — the 36-year-old currently heads the Serie A scoring charts with 23 goals for Sampdoria, although seven of those have come from the penalty spot — it’s also clear that he’s been weaving gold from straw this season.

Finally, if we look at these 15 players’ shot volumes and average xG per attempt on goal, we can see that although he’s had the largest number of shots, Ronaldo’s overall chance quality is barely above the average for all players in these three leagues, which is represented by the dotted line at the bottom of the chart.