Do you ever look at a player and think: I don’t exactly know what to make of you? That’s what I have with Stina Blackstenius and her period at Arsenal. She is a good player, but how impactful is she? That’s something I will try to find out using data in this article.

It’s good to know that a few years back ahead of her move to Arsenal I had a look at her record in Damallsvenskan and you can read that here:

STINA BLACKSTENIUS – SHOT ANALYSIS BK HÄCKEN 2021

We will use data and video to illustrate how Blackstenius has done in the WSL 2022/2023 and we will focus on the striker position.

Biography
Seasonal stats
Positions/roles
Ball progression
Dribbling
Key passing
Shooting
Assisting
Expected goal contribution
Comparison with peers
Final thoughts

Biography

Name: Stina Blackstenius
Date of birth: 05–02–1996
Nationality: Swedish
Position: Striker
Contract expires: 30–6–2026
Current club: Arsenal
Previous clubs: Vadstena GIF(Y), Vadstena, Linköping FC, Montpellier, Linköping FC, Göteborg FC, BK Häcken, Arsenal
International: Sweden (107 games, 31 goals)
Marketvalue Soccerdonna: €185.000

The question is when we look at Blacktenius: what profile does she have? She is good at scoring goals and providing assists. She is good in the air and can link up pretty well. These things might suggest she could do a fantastic job as a striker.

We see her as a classical striker, but she can do much more on the pitch. Not only is she good at the goalscoring aspect of the game, but can also hold the ball very well, win aerial duels and can be used as a decoy in certain set plays. She could be more versatile than we think, and that’s the reason that we are looking at her today.

Seasonal stats

If we look at this specific pizza plot, we can say a few things. But before we turn into the meaning, it’s good to stress that this mostly gives us a stylistic idea of the player rather than a definitive performance one. It’s also a general template used for all players, so it just gives us an indication.

What we can see is in the attacking metrics is that she scores well in the shooting metrics compared to her peers, but not great at the assists metrics and the shot-creating metric. This can explained as someone who is at the end of an attack, and not so much at the start of it.

In terms of the passing data, she does perform on average scoring low on the number of passes, the progressive passes and the dribbles. and higher on the progressive passes received, progressive carries and the touches in the final third. This can also be expected due to her position.

The defending metrics, aren’t something you should pay too much attention to if you would like to rate her overall, but one metric we will pay close attention to is the aerial duels won — this means that she is doing above average well in the air and when in defensive mode, she can clear a lot of balls. A valuable quality to have when you are defending set pieces for example.

Data from Wyscout — compared to Forwards + Attacking midfielders.

Here you can see the more complete radar percentile ranks on the left, as you can see Blackstenius scores very differently in the different aspects, but in general, we can conclude: that she scores very high in the shooting metrics in green, is great in aerial duels, but scores quite average on anything else.

On the right you can see the same information, how she scores compared to her peers, but this time you see it in a different visual + the actual raw data is included as well.

Positions/roles

In terms of positions, there is not a lot of variety in where she plays. She plays as the striker in the different formations that Arsenal plays: 4–2–3–1 (81%) and 4–4–2 (9%) and others. The point is not to say Arsenal play this way and this way, but to emphasise that she can play as the sole striker, in a two or as the striker interacting with the wingers.

The more interesting question is what role she can play in an attack. There are four different roles in the attack, but only two are relevant: Target striker and goalscoring striker.

Here we took the data and put emphasis and weight on the key metrics for both roles. What’s interesting is that Blackstenius is in the top 15 of the target striker role according to z-scores, but for the goalscoring role — for what we mainly praise her — according to the data she has a score of 82,01 — which is means she closer to being a perfect fit to the role rather than to the mean score..

Now, what happens if we compare her to a goalscoring profile vs her peers?

Blackstenius scores 11th of all strikers if we look at the goalscoring role. While Blackstenius scores incredibly high in the shooting and xG metrics, her fit for a goalscoring striker isn’t 100% — which means that she is more versatile than thought before, which explains the 80,32% role fit.

Ball progression

The modern striker isn’t only concerned with dribbling and crosses — but he/she also needs to be comfortable on the ball and progress play from it.

In the scatterplot above you can see the progressive metrics of progressive passes per 90 and progressive runs per 90. Blackstenius doesn’t do well here as she scores below average in the progressive passes metric, and below average in the progressive runs metric. Most strikers are doing better than her per 90 minutes.

Dribbling

How good is Stina Blackstenius in her dribbling? Let’s find out in this scatterplot below:

In the scatterplot above you can see how well the player is scoring in terms of volume of dribbling and the success rate of those dribbles. As you can see Blackstenius heavily underperforms in both metrics again. But what does the context give us?

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.vimeo.com%2Fvideo%2F950497376%3Fapp_id%3D122963&dntp=1&display_name=Vimeo&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F950497376&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.vimeocdn.com%2Fvideo%2F1859061930-ffce006f2aafd9491f21a9c806313b1f6f35cdce50a0ae4346f2a79563bb6cd1-d_1280&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=vimeo

As you can see in the example above, Blackstenius struggles with the ball on her feet in relation to dribbling. Her close control isn’t as good that the defenders can be lost to her advantage. In fact, the defenders have the advantage over her and therefore her success rate is also significantly lower than some of her peers.

Key passing

Every player makes passes in a game, but which passes actively contribute to the progression and construction of an attack? You can see that in the bar graph below regarding key passes

As you can see in the graph above, Blackstenius scores very low in comparison to her peers in terms of key passing. If we look more closely she only is on average for key passes, through passes and deep completions. Despite not scoring high. the intent of her through passes does tell a lot about how she can help in an attack.

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.vimeo.com%2Fvideo%2F950501635%3Fapp_id%3D122963&dntp=1&display_name=Vimeo&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F950501635&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.vimeocdn.com%2Fvideo%2F1859069548-a020874598720ed3f0a6467ae7fa10d36885146f937e597a9f5ddaa91d442464-d_1280&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=vimeo

Blackstenius has a good technique to pass the ball and that also can be seen in the way she conducts her key passes, through passes in particular. She positions herself well, but there’s one thing that she really can work and it’s to give the right pace and weight on the passes. That will be the key to success.

Shooting

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.vimeo.com%2Fvideo%2F950503855%3Fapp_id%3D122963&dntp=1&display_name=Vimeo&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F950503855&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.vimeocdn.com%2Fvideo%2F1859073676-4622aa20a62a1b420cd78d0cc66243c78224f090d4564706c2cc3f6a568c53fa-d_1280&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=vimeo

In the video above you can see all the goals scored by Stina Blackstenius with Arsenal in the 2023–2024 WSL season.

In the scatterplot above you can see the metrics of shots per 90 and expected goals per 90 combined. As you can Blackstenius scores above average for both metrics, with only Beever-Jones, James, Kelly and Shaw scoring better in the volume of shots and the xG generated, only Kerr, Russo, Beever-Jones and Shaw perform better.

When we look at the expected goals and the actual goals we see that she averages 0,62 xG per 90 and 0,77 goals per 90 — this means that she is overperforming on her xG.

Blackstenius does sometimes come in the position to shoot, but how does he do in the quality of shooting?

In the shot map above you can see from where Blackstenius has conducted her shots in the 2023/2024 WSL season. She had 41 shots of which 7went in goal. 34,1% of her shots were on target and she generated a total xG of 8,19 — the latter meaning that she is overperforming with +1,19.

Assists

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.vimeo.com%2Fvideo%2F950507063%3Fapp_id%3D122963&dntp=1&display_name=Vimeo&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F950507063&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.vimeocdn.com%2Fvideo%2F1859078847-dafc4ff5f56c62259edab2874b93e7615a587d3bc9047f0b670428a92edc0d9e-d_1280&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=vimeo

In the video above you can see her latest assists over two seasons with the Swedish National Team and with Arsenal.

As you can see she has an expected assists number of 0,11 per 90 and while others do score better on that front, she has an actual assist number of 0,0004 per 90 — which means he is underperforming quite significantly per 90 minutes.

Expected goal contributions

If we look at the expected goal contributions per 90 minutes we can see something very interesting. Blackstenius is expected to contribute to roughly 0,73 goals per 90 minutes. The emphasis for this, however, is on her finishing — as she isn’t doing well in the creating part.

Comparisons

Final thoughts

Stina Blackstenius was a bit of a mystery to me as I didn’t know how to rate her in terms of her performance. When we look more closely to the data we can see that’s a world-class striker of the ball and is top in the shooting metrics. In the ball progression and creation metrics, she scores below average in comparison to her peers.

In conclusion, we can state that Blackstenius is that pure number 9 and that Arsenal need to work with her in that regard.