The Week in Stats: Players to target from relegated sides

This week, we look at attacking players from relegated teams in the big European leagues who are likely to attract interest during the summer.

With the relegation battle now having been decided in England and with two of the three relegated teams in Italy and Spain already being known coming into this weekend, it seems a good time to begin looking at which players from those sides are likely to attract interest over the coming months.

At the time of writing, the relegated teams are: Cardiff, Fulham and Huddersfield in the Premier League; Frosinone and Chievo in Serie A; and Rayo Vallecano and Huesca in La Liga.

Ahead of this matchweek, seven clubs in Italy (Cagliari, Fiorentina, Parma, Bologna, Genoa, Udinese and Empoli) and five in Spain (Celta Vigo, Levante, Villarreal, Real Valladolid and Girona) were still mathematically at risk of relegation.

In Germany, things are slightly different: Hannover, Nuernberg and Stuttgart will definitely make up the bottom three, but one of them will end up contesting a relegation playoff against the third-placed team from the German second-tier, which could well turn out to be Hamburg.

La Liga

Starting in La Liga, Celta Vigo’s Iago Aspas, Rayo Vallecano’s Raul de Tomas and Cristhian Stuani of Girona are all among the top eight La Liga non-penalty goalscorers this season. However, Aspas surely loves Celta too much to leave, de Tomas is on loan from Real Madrid and Stuani will turn 33 in October.

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But another Celta Vigo striker, 22-year-old Maxi Gomez, who as you can see above was on target when they beat Barcelona at the start of May, could well depart in the summer. Gomez has 12 non-penalty league goals so far, which puts him joint-ninth in the charts, and he’s also produced five assists.

In recent weeks he’s been linked with Barcelona, Tottenham, West Ham and Liverpool, the latter of which have a pretty good track record when it comes to signing promising Uruguayan forwards.

Another name that stands out is Ezequiel “Chimy” Avila, who’s managed nine non-penalty goals at struggling Huesca, where’s he playing on loan from Argentine side San Lorenzo. While he’s been over-achieving slightly, with those goals coming from an overall xG of 6.07, he’s certainly capable of the spectacular, as demonstrated here:

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A second Huesca player who’s posted impressive attacking numbers despite his team’s woes is Juan Camilo “Cucho” Hernandez. The Colombian forward, who’s only 20, is there on loan from Watford and has an expected goals plus expected assists per 90 of 0.57, which is the 17th-highest average in La Liga this season.

This goal in late March saw him become the first Huesca player ever to score at the Bernabeu:

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We’ll now move on to look at creators rather than finishers. Three of the most common ways of measuring a player’s creative output are their expected assists — in other words, the number of goals that the chances they’ve created would have resulted in on average — on both a total (xA) and per 90 (xA90) basis, as well as the number of actual assists a player has earned.

Looking at the top 30 players for each of these metrics in La Liga this season, only two from the relegated/relegation-threatened sides appear in all three lists. One of them is the aforementioned Aspas, without whom Celta would have been doomed already.

The other is Rayo Vallecano captain Adrian Embarba. The Madrid-born 26-year-old was once on the books at Real Madrid as a youth player and has been with Vallecano, who are also based in the Spanish capital, since 2013.

Embarba helped them to the Segunda Division title last season and this term he’s managed five La Liga assists from an xA of 5.79, which suggests that these figures don’t flatter him, as well as four league goals, although two of those did come from the penalty spot.

You can see one of those assists, a wonderful piece of play to set up Raul de Tomas against Valencia in April, here:

Serie A

Shifting our sights to Italy, the players at relegated/relegation-threatened teams who are doing well in terms of non-penalty goals are all a little long in the tooth.

There’s Gervinho, formerly of Arsenal and Roma, who moved to Parma from Chinese side Hebei China Fortune last summer, but the Ivorian will be 32 before the start of next season

Similarly, Empoli’s Francesco Caputo, playing only his second season in Serie A having previously been at Bari in the 2010–11 campaign, will turn 32 in August.

While it appears unlikely that either of them will move on in the coming months, there could well be interest in Cagliari’s 30-year-old striker Leonardo Pavoletti, who made his Italian national team debut in March.

He was signed by Napoli in 2017 for €18 million but only played for them six times before moving on, although he scored a lovely goal against his old side earlier in May, which you can see here:

Standing at 6-foot-2, he might be a target for one of the lesser Premier League sides due to his physical stature, which he demonstrates well in this header against Empoli:

If we broaden our scope a little, then some younger faces do enter the picture. Only 28 Serie A players have posted an xG of 7.0 or above this term, so it’s remarkable that one of them plays for a woeful Chievo side that have only managed 15 points, two wins and 25 goals all season.

That man is 23-year-old Mariusz Stepinski, one of a crop of young Polish strikers currently playing in Serie A that also includes Arkadiusz Milik (25) of Napoli and Krzysztof Piatek (23) of Milan. Here’s an impressive strike by Stepinski against Napoli last year:

Three other forwards from relegated/relegation-threatened sides are to be found in the group of 28 players who’ve posted an xG of 7.0 or more.

Udinese’s Kevin Lasagna (26) has already played for the Italian national side three times and scored this wonderful counter-attack goal against Milan in April:

Having lost Piatek to Milan in January, it’s likely that Genoa will strongly resist any bids for 21-year-old Ivorian forward Christian Kouame. You can see why here:

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Finally, there’s Bologna’s Federico Santander, a Paraguayan striker who joined from Denmark’s FC Copenhagen last summer after catching the eye with performances such as these:

We’ll look at Serie A’s creators, as well as players from the Bundesliga and Premier League, over the coming weeks.

Data from Understat.