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)

Efficicency

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.

Variance

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.