Firstly apologies for not updating this website in over a couple of months, a combination of factors have been in play here. For one may day job working with football statistics has meant that I’m not necessarily in a rush to have my dinner and do my stats and secondly I’ve been probably putting a bit too much time into my main website Real Football Man and as a consequence this has been neglected. You could say I’ve been lacking efficiency
Thankfully though I’m back with a new concept and it is just how many shots a team needs to score a goal on average in La Liga. Now starting in Week 10 is handy because it is simple maths and thankfully everyone has played the same amount of fixtures so it is very easy to plot.
How it works is thanks to the data provided from whoscored.com we will take the total amount of shots a team has had and then divided that by the amount of goals that they have scored to give us a ratio of shots to goal. We will then rank them in order (smallest to largest) to see who is the most efficient not only that though but we will then look at the variance between their efficiency and their league placings.
So first up here is the data:
LR | Team | Shots pg | Games Played | Total Shots |
1 | Barcelona | 15.1 | 10 | 151 |
2 | Valencia | 13 | 10 | 130 |
3 | Real Madrid | 19 | 10 | 190 |
4 | Atletico Madrid | 11.4 | 10 | 114 |
5 | Leganes | 11.5 | 10 | 115 |
6 | Athletic Bilbao | 11.3 | 10 | 113 |
7 | Villarreal | 12.3 | 10 | 123 |
8 | Sevilla | 11.8 | 10 | 118 |
9 | Real Betis | 11.2 | 10 | 112 |
10 | Celta Vigo | 13.4 | 10 | 134 |
11 | Real Sociedad | 15 | 10 | 150 |
12 | Espanyol | 11.2 | 10 | 112 |
13 | Getafe | 10.8 | 10 | 108 |
14 | Girona | 14 | 10 | 140 |
15 | Deportivo La Coruna | 13.5 | 10 | 135 |
16 | Levante | 10.7 | 10 | 107 |
17 | Eibar | 11.1 | 10 | 111 |
18 | Las Palmas | 11.7 | 10 | 117 |
19 | Alaves | 9.6 | 10 | 96 |
20 | Malaga | 11.8 | 10 | 118 |
And here is the ranking of the 20 La Liga Clubs by shot efficiency
Team | GF | Total Shots | Shot Efficency |
Valencia | 27 | 130 | 4.8 |
Real Betis | 21 | 112 | 5.3 |
Barcelona | 28 | 151 | 5.4 |
Celta Vigo | 19 | 134 | 7.1 |
Real Sociedad | 21 | 150 | 7.1 |
Getafe | 15 | 108 | 7.2 |
Atletico Madrid | 15 | 114 | 7.6 |
Villarreal | 16 | 123 | 7.7 |
Levante | 11 | 107 | 9.7 |
Real Madrid | 19 | 190 | 10.0 |
Deportivo La Coruna | 13 | 135 | 10.4 |
Sevilla | 11 | 118 | 10.7 |
Athletic Bilbao | 10 | 113 | 11.3 |
Espanyol | 9 | 112 | 12.4 |
Girona | 11 | 140 | 12.7 |
Leganes | 9 | 115 | 12.8 |
Las Palmas | 8 | 117 | 14.6 |
Malaga | 6 | 118 | 19.7 |
Eibar | 5 | 111 | 22.2 |
Alaves | 4 | 96 | 24.0 |
But now we will take a look at it in graph format (smallest figure the ‘best’ in this instance)
As you can see it is not league leaders Barcelona who are top but actually Valencia, they only require 4.8 shots per goal whereas Barcelona need 5.4. Now you could argue that Barcelona are creating more hence a higher ratio but it also shows that the chances that Valencia create they do not waste as much and their second place in the table would be a good indicator of this.
Now as you can see Real Madrid sit 10th in this table and they need 10 shots per goal, they are having more shots on goal but also scoring less for a team of their stature to be in the middle of this ranking shows that their is a lot of wastefulness going on with Zinedine Zidane’s team in these first few months of the season.
Which leads me to the next graph, what if we compared the team’s place in the La Liga table versus that of their efficiency ranking. Who would be over performing and who would be under performing, that we can answer below.
Here the thing to look out for if the value is 0 then there efficiency matches their league placing any positive number means their are more efficient than their league placing and any negative number the opposite.
So we can see that Real Betis, Getafe and Levante are more ruthless in front of goal than their league position would suggest. For example Betis are the second most efficient team in terms of opportunities but they currently find themselves 9th in La Liga.
Barcelona for example would be looking to break even with 0 but due to the fact that they are 3rd in the rankings means they have a variance of minus 2. We said Real Madrid are 10th in the ranking which means they are the joint second under performing team as their league position is currently third after 10 weeks. But special mention has to go Leganes who are currently 5th in the table but have only the 16th best shot efficiency in the division.
So that is what we know this week but this is obviously going to be in a state of flux over the weeks and months to come and thankfully we can update relatively quickly so we can look back and give us something to compare and contrast. Not only that but we can look across Europe and see who are the most ruthless clubs around the continent.
I hope this was of interest to you and if you have any football data work available then please contact me at realfootballmanwordpress@gmail.com as I am always looking to undertake additional projects to the ones I already have. Thanks, Dan.
November 19, 2017 at 10:35 pm
Hello, I enjoy reading through your article post.
I like to write a little comment to support you.