I finally finished the data work I wanted to do for transfer shopping pieces, and then I got so excited about the top scorer in Europe 09-13 stuff that I had had to post that first. However, the point of all this was an attempt to build some useful baselines. What type of performance qualifies as elite? Obviously merging words and numbers is tricky, but we’re basically looking at the best of the best in terms of football performance.
The data set I have access to runs from 2009-10 through the current season and covers the big 5 leagues in Europe. For the next few days, I’m mostly going to just post data from the top tiers of performers across Europe in particular seasons so that we have reference points to determine the awesome from the good from the merely average.
Obviously one of the complications you run into is that different leagues have different strengths, and different teams (particularly Real Madrid and Barcelona) have incredible competitive advantages that seem to enhance performance of all their players. The Eredivisie (not in the current data set) has the highest scoring rate in Europe, while Ligue 1 has the lowest. Regardless, we don’t have an objective way of discounting this yet, so I’ll simply break things into league-based data dumps and for now you can make your own determinations.
Goals per 90
I covered this briefly yesterday, but it bears repeating.
Goals are the most basic scoring stat we have. However, just looking at the total goals a player has at the end of the season discounts one particularly important element: playing time. Players that play more should contribute more in rate stats. This is why Benjamin Pugsley and I usually try to normalize rate stats into per 90s. It controls for total playing time (including time missed due to injury or sub appearances), which can be particularly useful when it comes to younger players who may not be full members of the first team yet.
Another element that we want to “fix” here is goal inflation via penalty. Penalty kicks are generally converted at a 76% rate, year after year, and it doesn’t require an expert in goalscoring to do this. (Example: there have been a number of goalkeepers over the years who were designated penalty takers for their teams.) In short, it’s a different skill than normal goal scoring. Thus I’ve done my best to filter this out of the goal scoring information we’re looking at. We care more about guys who are banging them home from everywhere but the penalty spot.
Cutoffs
Going into this, I kind of had the running assumption that .4 goals per90 is the cutoff for being a useful top-level forward that is expected to score goals. Multiply .4 across 38 matches, and you get 15 goals a season – a good, but not great goal tally. (It’s probably great for wide players and midfielders, but that’s another article for another time.) At a later date, I’ll re-slice the data set into standard deviations and the like to get a real cutoff point, but for now let’s stay a bit more casual.
In 2009-10, there were 98 players who scored goals at a rate of .4/90 or better, or just under 20 per league. That seems like a reasonable number. It’s not something everyone can do, but it does indicate a high level of contribution. The tallies for players meeting this threshold across the leagues in each year is
2010: 98
2011: 99
2012: 104
2013: 116
Remove the penalty goals from those numbers, and you end up with
2010: 76
2011: 83
2012: 81
2013: 92
Which strips out about 20-25% of the contenders per year on average.
But what about elite? Where is the elite level of goalscoring?
My first guess was around .6, or 50% more than the “useful” metric. Multiply it out by a full season and it delivers nearly 24 goals from 38 matches. That us a huge number and would put any player with that rate near the top of their league in scoring almost every single year.
Again, a casual look at the numbers seems to bear this out. Number of players for each year meeting this threshold are as follows:
2010: 18
2011: 20
2012: 19
2013: 20
So the surface breakdown of categories goes a bit like this:
.4 to .49 non-penalty goals per 90: Good.
.5 to .59 non-penalty goals per 90: Very good.
.6 to .79 non-penalty goals per 90: Probable Top 20 in Europe
.8 or above non-penalty goals per 90: Probable Top 5 in Europe
[Note: These divisions aren’t perfect, and should definitely be adjusted a bit for younger players, as you expect their performance to increase until they hit their peak. If a younger player (say 22 or under) is putting up numbers in these brackets, they are probably pretty special.
EPL 09-10
Player
Team
90 mins
G
NPG
G90
NPG90
Andrey Arshavin
Arsenal
25.17
10
0.3974
0.3974
Aruna Dindane
Portsmouth
16.22
8
7
0.4932
0.4315
Carlos Tévez
Manchester City
31.87
23
18
0.7218
0.5649
Darren Bent
Sunderland
37.64
24
19
0.6375
0.5047
Didier Drogba
Chelsea
30.82
29
28
0.9409
0.9084
Dimitar Berbatov
Manchester United
23.29
12
0.5153
0.5153
Emmanuel Adebayor
Manchester City
24.58
14
0.5696
0.5696
Fernando Torres
Liverpool
19.06
18
18
0.9446
0.9446
Florent Malouda
Chelsea
25.59
12
0.469
0.469
Francesc Fábregas
Arsenal
24.37
15
12
0.6156
0.4925
Jermain Defoe
Tottenham
28.52
18
17
0.6311
0.596
Louis Saha
Everton
25.87
13
11
0.5026
0.4253
Wayne Rooney
Manchester United
30.26
26
22
0.8593
0.7271
LaLiga 09-10
Player
Team
90 Mins
G
NPG
G90
NPG90
Álvaro Negredo
Sevilla
22.6889
11
9
0.4848
0.3967
Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Barcelona
22.6
16
14
0.708
0.6195
Walter Pandiani
Osasuna
26.8444
11
0.4098
0.4098
Sergio Agüero
Atletico Madrid
24.4556
12
0.4907
0.4907
Roberto Soldado
Getafe
25.2
16
13
0.6349
0.5159
Riki
Deportivo La Coruna
16.6222
8
7
0.4813
0.4211
Pedro
Barcelona
23.5444
12
0.5097
0.5097
Pablo Osvaldo
Espanyol
20.5556
10
0.4865
0.4865
Nilmar
Villarreal
27.4778
11
0.4003
0.4003
Luís Fabiano
Sevilla
18.2667
15
14
0.8212
0.7664
Lionel Messi
Barcelona
31.5556
34
33
1.0775
1.0458
Karim Benzema
Real Madrid
14.4889
8
0.5521
0.5521
Joseba Llorente
Villarreal
19.6778
9
0.4574
0.4574
Gonzalo Higuaín
Real Madrid
26.6444
27
27
1.0133
1.0133
Frederic Kanouté
Sevilla
19.8444
12
10
0.6047
0.5039
Diego Forlán
Atletico Madrid
28.6
18
15
0.6294
0.5245
David Villa
Valencia
30.1111
21
18
0.6974
0.5978
Cristiano Ronaldo
Real Madrid
27.4444
26
22
0.9474
0.8016
Bundesliga 09-10
Player
Team
90 Mins
G
NPG
G90
NPG90
Arjen Robben
Bayern Munich
19.7556
16
14
0.8099
0.7087
Claudio Pizarro
Werder Bremen
23.6667
16
0.6761
0.6761
Cacau
VfB Stuttgart
19.3333
13
0.6724
0.6724
Lucas Barrios
Borussia Dortmund
29.1333
19
0.6522
0.6522
Edin Dzeko
Wolfsburg
33.3444
22
20
0.6598
0.5998
Stefan Kießling
Bayer Leverkusen
32.4556
21
19
0.647
0.5854
Kevin Kuranyi
Schalke 04
31.1111
18
0.5786
0.5786
Ivica Olic
Bayern Munich
19.9333
11
0.5518
0.5518
Ciprian Marica
VfB Stuttgart
16.8778
10
9
0.5925
0.5332
Albert Bunjaku
Nurnberg
24.0667
12
0.4986
0.4986
Hugo Almeida
Werder Bremen
14.9111
7
0.4694
0.4694
Mario Gomez
Bayern Munich
21.4778
10
0.4656
0.4656
Thomas Müller
Bayern Munich
29.3778
13
0.4425
0.4425
Eren Derdiyok
Bayer Leverkusen
29.0556
12
0.413
0.413
Adrián Ramos
Hertha Berlin
24.7889
10
0.4034
0.4034
Didier Ya Konan
Hannover 96
22.3889
9
0.402
0.402
SerieA 09-10
Player
Team
90 Mins
G
NPG
G90
NPG90
Antonio Di Natale
Udinese
33.4667
29
23
0.8665
0.6873
Maxi López
Catania
15.6556
11
10
0.7026
0.6388
Alexandre Pato
AC Milan
20.0333
12
0.599
0.599
Mario Balotelli
Inter
15.4444
9
0.5827
0.5827
Diego Milito
Inter
31.9889
22
18
0.6877
0.5627
Marco Borriello
AC Milan
24.5444
14
13
0.5704
0.5297
Valeri Bojinov
Parma
15.6667
8
0.5106
0.5106
Emanuele Calaiò
Siena
16.8222
8
0.4756
0.4756
Davide Lanzafame
Parma
14.9667
7
0.4677
0.4677
Sergio Floccari
Genoa
21.4889
12
10
0.5584
0.4654
Fabrizio Miccoli
Palermo
28.8
19
13
0.6597
0.4514
Francesco Totti
Roma
19.9778
14
9
0.7008
0.4505
Giampaolo Pazzini
Sampdoria
35.9556
19
16
0.5284
0.445
Alberto Gilardino
Fiorentina
32.6778
15
14
0.459
0.4284
Mirko Vucinic
Roma
28.3333
14
12
0.4941
0.4235
Adailton
Bologna
21.7889
10
9
0.4589
0.4131
Simone Tiribocchi
Atalanta
27.5778
11
0.3989
0.3989
Marco Di Vaio
Bologna
25.2
12
10
0.4762
0.3968
French 09-10
Player
Team
90 Mins
G
NPG
G90
NPG90
Mevlut Erding
Paris Saint Germain
26.9444
15
0.5567
0.5567
Mamadou Niang
Marseille
27.6778
18
15
0.6503
0.542
Ireneusz Jelen
Auxerre
26.9444
14
0.5196
0.5196
Kevin Gameiro
Lorient
33.2444
17
0.5114
0.5114
Pierre-Alain Frau
Lille
23.6
13
12
0.5508
0.5085
Gervinho
Lille
27.4556
13
0.4735
0.4735
Asamoah Gyan
Rennes
23.3222
13
11
0.5574
0.4717
Michel Bastos
Lyon
21.8889
10
0.4569
0.4569
Bafétimbi Gomis
Lyon
23.0444
10
0.4339
0.4339
Lisandro López
Lyon
28.0556
15
12
0.5347
0.4277
Emmanuel Rivière
Saint Etienne
19.2333
8
0.4159
0.4159
Check out Emmanuel Riviere sneaking in there at the bottom of the French table. He was 19 at the time - now plays for Monaco. Anyway, I'll keep doing these more complete scoring charts for the next few days so the data is out there, and next week I'll also start providing transfer recommendations for EPL squads.