League Focus: Analysing the Correlation of Shots and League Standings

When Egil Olsen was manager of Norway, he would insist that fans and journalists paid attention not only to the score, but to shots on goal. You couldn’t, he reasoned, trust a 1-0 win if you’d had one shot and the opposition had had 10, and equally you couldn’t get too down over a 1-0 defeat if you’d had 10 shots and the opposition had had one. Shots on goal, he argued, were as true a measure of how a team had actually performed as goals scored.

Olsen accepts it’s a fairly crude theory. Some shots on goal are more equal than others. The season before last, for instance, Tottenham for weeks headed the shots on goal chart while their league form struggled, the discrepancy pretty easily explained by the fact that Andros Townsend kept on trying speculative shots from 25 or 30 yards. The winger mustered 56 shots in total and scored just once.

Olsen worked on making his model more sophisticated. He graded chances into three grades from very likely to score to not likely to score but found, to his surprise, that the new method – quite apart from introducing an element of subjectivity into the system – made next to no difference. Quality of chance evens out.

Charles Reep, the much-maligned father of the use of statistics in football in England and for some time a correspondent of Olsen, showed in the fifties that it took roughly nine shots to bring a goal. That figure has remained remarkably constant across all levels of football, all periods and all cultures. For that reason, average shots per game remains a robust guide to how a team is actually performing.

There is, not surprisingly, a strong correlation between the shots per game table and the actual table. The league leaders Manchester City top the shots per game chart with 20.1 – nine games into the season and the mathematics of working out how many goals they should have scored on a nine shots per goal ration is very straightforward. As it is, they’ve scored 24 so are effectively 3.9 better than par, which may be coincidence or, more likely given the players they have available, it may be an indication of the lethalness of their strikers.

Arsenal, second in the league, are second in the shots per game chart, their 16 goals a slightly poorer than expected return from 19.7 shots per game. At the bottom of the shots per game table are Newcastle United and Sunderland, two of the bottom three. Newcastle’s 12 goals are better than expected from 8.7 shots per game, Sunderland’s eight goals slightly poorer from 9.4 shots per game.

But in a sense, that’s just confirming what we already knew. What’s most interesting is the outliers. Staying at the bottom, Aston Villa, second bottom of the actual table, are 14th in shots per game. Again, that may indicate they’re playing better than results suggest, or the wastefulness of their strikers.

Perhaps most striking, though, is Manchester United. Third in the actual table, they are behind Villa in fifteenth in the shots per game chart, their 15 goals far ahead of what might be expected from 11.0 shots per game. They’re ninth in shots on target per game, which suggests perhaps an aversion to the speculative, in line with Louis van Gaal’s demand that possession should be protected, but their real strength is in shots conceded per game.

Holding the ball, as Van Gaal delights in making clear, means the opposition cannot score, and United are second in the chart of chances conceded with 9.6. What’s intriguing is the one side better than them: City. That indicates, perhaps, that City are more dominant than the league table suggests and that, if everything keeps going as it is, Manuel Pellegrini’s side will pull away.

Can United maintain their efficeincy in front of goal and could it lead to a serious assault on the title? Let us know in the comments below