Central forwards or the more general accepted ‘strikers’ are very important for a team for obvious reasons. You might have read many pieces on the best strikers of the ball in the Top 5 and I must admit, it’s very interesting to read. My focus however never has been with those leagues for several reasons, but I think scouting those league are not really feasible when scouting for a non-top 5 league.
If you want to recruit a top striker for your club in one of the Scandinavian leagues, Scottish Premiership, Dutch Eredivisie, Portugese first tier, Austria or Russia – it could prove very useful to look in the same countries as the Top Five, but focus on the second tier. And that’s what I’m doing in this analysis – I’m looking for the best central forwards.
Sample size
There are 149 players in my sample across five different leagues:
- The English Championship
- The Italian Serie B
- The French Ligue 2
- The German 2. Bundesliga
- The Spanish Segunda Division A
These have been selected from Wyscout and they are thought by Wyscout to be the best allround strikers of the 2020/2021 season in their respective leagues. Obviously many players feature for their club in cup competitions and some for their country, but this data is not included in this analysis.
I’ve thought on what the minimum of minutes would for this season and I found 600 minutes to be an acceptable amount of minutes. In the dataset each player has played 10 games with an average above 600 minutes. The reason that I took this relatively low number is because strikers can make an impact more than defensive-minded players in general.
Goalscoring
First we look at the goals scored in comparison to the expected goals in the 2020/2021 season. It shows us the probability of the amount of goals per 90 minutes versus the actual goals scored per 90 minutes in the first viz. In the second you can see the table of the top 10 performers when we look at the amount of goals per 90 minutes.
As you can above is that players with a high xG tend to score more goals, because the probability of scoring a goal is evidently higher. Hamburger SV’s Terodde leads the way with 1,07 goals per 90, followed by Toulouse’s Healey (0,93 per 90) and Lucas João from Reading with 0,91 goals per 90.
Expected goal is a nice metric to measure how big the chance was to convert a ball into a goal. You can also look at how much quality a shot had and measure the xG from there. This happens in the image below.
The scatterplot above shows a couple of things. It shows the data of the player in expected goals per 90 and the data for shots per 90. In terms of expected goals per 90 Terodde again leads the way obviously, but if we look at the amount of shots taken two players are noticeable: Armstrong from Blackburn Rovers and Coda from Lecce. They each produce a lot of shots per 90: 4,79 shots per 90 and 4,9 shots per 90 – but their xG is not as high as Srbeny and Terodde.
Creativity
Next to actually shooting at goal and converting chances, strikers are also judged by their ability to create goalscoring opportunities for other strikers or other attacking players. In the image below you can see how they directly contribute to a goalscoring opportunity.
You can see the expected assists per 90 which tells us the probability of the striker providing a pass that directly leads to a goal and we can the actual assists per 90 minutes that striker provided.
In the scatterplot above we can see five players standing out: Nürnberg’s Lohkemper (0,53 assists per 90), Monza’s Gytkjær (0,38 assists per 90), Erzgebirge Aue’s Testroet (0,38 assists per 90) and Krüger (0,36 assists per 90), and finally, Hannover ’96’s Ducksch (0,36 assists per 90). They contribute from to a goal via assist from 1 in every 3 games to 1 in every two games.
Dribbles
In the scatterplot above I’ve plotted the progressive runs per 90 vs the dribbles per 90. Dribbling can be a vital part of a striker’s movement. The way they move, the 1v1’s against defenders and the way they lure defenders to them, creating space in other sides of the pitch.
If we look at the top performers in these specific metrics, we see three players doing really well: Paris FC’s Laura, Toulouse’s Adli and Monza’s Danny Mota.
Data from Wyscout
Tableau Public: https://public.tableau.com/profile/marc.lamberts#!/vizhome/Shotsper90vsxGper902ndtiertop5/
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