Deadly Marksmen: the top five players who beat their expected goals by the most in Europe’s top five leagues

Over long periods, players and teams generally revert to their expected goals. These players beat theirs over the whole season. Can they do it again?

Expected goals has become a widely used and accepted metric in modern football. Whilst for some, it will never be a lens through which they would enjoy to watch football through, BBC’s Match of the Day, Sky Sports, BT Sport and other mainstream media regularly use the metric as part of their analysis.  

That’s because it can help paint a picture of a team’s performance more than simple shot numbers can. One team may have outshot the other by ten shots to two, but lost the game. Looking simply at shot bumbers, one would presume that the team with ten shots had the better chances but that may well not be the case, if all of the shots were taken from range as they struggled to break through their opponent’s defence. Meanwhile, the two shots for the other team might have been one-on-ones with the goalkeeper or taken from close range.  

Expected goals is much better equipped to provide us with those kinds of details, as the values are given based on shot locations, whether the player was taking the shot on their stronger foot, whether it was on the ground or in the air, whether it was a header or a volley, the position of the goalkeeper and the position of defenders.  

This metric is helpful to assess individual games to try and understand whether a match result was ‘fair’, as well as try to predict long term trends for team’s performances due to expected goals for and against perhaps not matching up with their true scoring and conceding figure.  

However, it’s also helpful for assessing players. Again, expected goals can be used to predict whether a player might hit a goalscoring streak; if they are scoring few goals but posting high xG then the law of averages suggests they will find their shooting boots soon and hit a hot-streak. On the other hand, if they are scoring many goals from a low xG, goals may be about to dry up.  

That is not always the case though, as some players are better than the average finishers and can manage to beat their expected goals over a long period of time. For example, Heung-Min Son has scored more than expected for the last five seasons and has beaten his xG by over 22 goals in that period.  

Here are the players in Europe’s top five leagues to have bettered their expected goals by the most in 21/22. Stats 24 will attempt to suggest whether this is something they can repeat in future seasons:  

 

Kevin De Bruyne (Manchester City) 

Manchester City’s talismanic midfielder hit 15 Premier League goals in 21/22 from an xG of just 6.4, giving him an overperformance of 8.6 goals. Notably, De Bruyne has never beaten his xG by anything like this amount, so he will be unlikely to score as many next season, unless he gets much better chances. Four of his goals were from outside the box this term, with two of those being deflected. This is a figure that would be surprising were he to reproduce it. 

 

Giovanni Simeone (Hellas Verona) 

The Argentine striker hit 17 goals in Serie A this term, from a significantly higher xG of 9.9, giving an overperformance of 7.1 goals. This was his first season where he has broken 15 league goals and the first season in his career where he better his xG. This suggests a much quieter season in front of goal next season, despite the excellent performance in 21/22.  

 

Martin Terrier (Rennes) 

Terrier scored 19 non-penalty goals in Ligue 1 in 21/22 from an xG of 12.1, meaning he beat expectation by 6.9 goals. The 24-year-old Frenchman more than doubled his best tally of goals in a season with this haul but it does seem like it could be the start of him beginning to hit a high number of goals season on season.  

That’s due to the fact that he has bettered his xG in three out of five of his seasons in senior football, suggesting that he is an excellent finisher. 21/22 was also the first season where he was the ‘main man’ up front, meaning that he found consistency and more chances to score. Even if he dropped down to his expectations next season, one would still think he would comfortably break double figures.  

 

Enes Ünal (Getafe) 

Getafe’s Turkish forward scored 14 non-penalty goals from 7.1 xG, almost doubling his expectation as he overachieved by 6.9 goals.  

This was his best La Liga performance in terms of non-penalty goals, scoring nine more than his previous high of five non-penalty goals, although he did hit 18 for FC Twente in the Eredivisie. He is another who seems highly unlikely to score so freely next season, as he has never overperformed to a level anywhere like this in previous seasons.  

 

Patrik Schick (Bayer Leverkusen) 

The highest-profile player in this list after De Bruyne, the Czech striker scored 23 non-penalty goals in the Bundesliga, coming from 16.3 non-penalty xG. That’s an overperformance of 6.7 and was enough to make him the second top scorer in the division behind Robert Lewandowski.  

Interestingly, the 24-year-old has mostly hovered around his expected goals in terms of finishing performance, although he also beat it by four goals in 19/20. He seems highly likely to continue to score a large amount of goals considering the quality of chances he gets, even if he does revert to the mean in terms of finishing performance.