Have Championship strikers got the yips?

Up and down the division, second-tier strikers are performing like second-rate finishers. Ali Maxwell examines why — and invents a new metric…

I was researching the Top Goalscorer markets for a betting piece when a thought dawned on me: today’s Championship strikers are an unreliable bunch in front of goal...

Where are the finishers? The likes of Jamie Vardy, Glenn Murray, Dwight Gayle, Jordan Rhodes, Billy Sharp – reliable Championship finishers of the (relatively) modern era. The “You’d Put Your House On Him To Score” gang. Are they a dying breed? Completely extinct, even?

Which current Championship striker would you trust to finish a chance, if your life depended on it?

I’ve taken stats from Fbref to analyse this season’s Championship #9s, and I’d like you to join me on the journey. Fbref use Opta data, and Opta’s xG model is powered by more than 4.5 million shots taken by more than 100,000 players, per The Analyst.

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The Criteria:

• I filtered out wide forwards, as the demands of that role are very different to those of a central striker, and applied a fairly restrictive filter:

  • Minimum 7x 90s (c.45% of total minutes)

  • Minimum 20 shots

• Fewer than 20 shots feels like too small a sample, and small sample sizes kill. And yes, I have included Haji Wright. Even when he plays off the left, he’s still a striker in body, spirit and shot locations.

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We end up with a group of 16 strikers that fit the above criteria: Josh Maja (WBA), Wilson Isidor (Sunderland), Yuki Ohashi (Blackburn), Haji Wright (Coventry), Ellis Simms (Coventry), Thomas Cannon (Stoke), Mark Harris (Oxford), Vakoun Bayo (Watford), Joël Piroe (Leeds), Mateo Joseph (Leeds), Josh Sargent (Norwich), Emil Riis Jakobsen (Preston), Emmanuel Latte Lath (Middlesbrough), Kieffer Moore (Sheffield United), Žan Celar (QPR) and Elijah Adebayo (Luton).

Is it true that they are underperforming in front of goal? That their finishing is below average?

YES!

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Please note, if you are reading this on your mobile device, you’ll have to click the ‘view this chart’ button to see the full tables presented below.

"Scoring goals is the hardest thing in the game." — Sean Dyche

To Dyche’s aphorism, this season’s batch of Championship strikers murmur their approval. As a collective, these strikers have scored 8.8 goals fewer than their expected goals tally of 68.8 — an underperformance of 12.8%. For what it’s worth, the equivalent cohort in League One are over-performing their xG by 3.6%, while those in League Two are over-performing by 8.6%.

Seven of the 16 players are underperforming their non-penalty xG figure by more than one goal, while only three of the 16 are overperforming by the same margin.

Oh, and spare a thought for Žan Celar, the only one not to score at all. That’s a tough scene.

Why are Championship strikers struggling to finish?

These are the strikers! Finishing is their job, isn’t it? I’ll present a few hypotheses and see if the data gathered lends any credence to them.

OVERSEAS SIGNINGS STRUGGLE TO ADAPT

In the last 18 months, Championship clubs have signed a lot of strikers from outside the English pyramid and many from outside the UK altogether. Might a player, moving to the Championship from overseas without prior experience of the level, operate at an initial disadvantage?

Consider the style of football in the Championship, the speed of the game, the rigours of the schedule and the extra personal circumstances of adapting to a new nation. Are they contributors to muddled finishing?

Seemingly not. Five of our 16 players have joined from overseas leagues in the past 18 months, and while Žan Celar and Emmanuel Latte Lath are underperforming in front of goal this season, Yuki Ohashi, Wilson Isidor and Haji Wright are performing just fine, thank you very much. Equally, five of the seven major ‘underperformers’ are either from the UK or Ireland or have been in English football for two or more years. Here, it’s worth mentioning that Chris Bedia (Hull) and Žan Vipotnik (Swansea) are both new to the league and struggling in front of goal (-4.2 goals between them) but are just under the 20 shot threshold.

STRIKERS ARE OVERWORKED, TIRED AND STRESSED.

I’ve been increasingly of the opinion that the amount of work that modern-day strikers are asked to do outside of the act of shooting leads to them being physically and mentally fatigued when it comes to the moment of truth. If composure, clear-headedness and sharpness are words associated with good finishing, it stands to reason that fatigue of any kind would be an enemy of execution.

Without physical data available, how can we measure this? My attempt to measure ‘non-shooting workload’ is to add together some of Fbref’s publicly available metrics: Interceptions, Tackles Won, and Recoveries. But it’s more than just those ‘defensive’ stats. Aerial Duels are tiring — let’s stick them in there. We’ll mix in Fouls Won and Fouls Conceded, because fouling or being fouled indicates a level of physical contact, exertion and ultimately battle.

I created a metric called Total Workload, adding all of those stats together. This doesn’t take into account physical data such as distance travelled, high-intensity sprints and things of that nature, but we make do with what we have. Check it out.