Shots on Target to Goal Ratio

Football Analytics.

Shots on Target to Goal Ratio 

After a couple of hours of looking through the mounds of data from the 2011/2012 season I decided to sneak a peak at the average goals to shot ratio, here's the low down of what the season told us.

Per Player per Game, 3.44 Shots on Target resulted in a goal. 

Per Player per Game (Considering players with 10 Goals & over only,) 2.64 Shots on Target resulted in a goal. 

The latter is probably the better stat from a fantasy football perspective, after all Goalkeepers and Defender's don't shoot too often.

The data was taken from the MCFC 'Premier league 2011-12 Match By Match' Data File, which shows that there were 3,522 Total Shots on target and 1,025 Total Goals (1,025 goals is a tad short of the actual goal scored for the 2011/12 season, although I don't think MCFC included Own Goals in the per player stats.) Overall according to their data, there were 10,369 Appearances by Premiership Players, this seems to make sense, 14 Player (11 & subs) * 38 Games in Season * 20 Teams = 10,640 Appearances. So I'm pretty happy these Stats are sound. 

Out of the 10,369 appearances, only 2,535 players actually bothered to shoot in a game, that's less than a quarter of all the players for the whole season (24.45%) I was surprised by this, I would have thought more players would like to take home a bonus in there weekly wage packet.

Looking at the data, the Number of Shots on Target seems close to the Normal Distribution, however goals clearly are not from a normal distribution, well least not for the 2011/12 seasons data.

From the Players who scored more than 10 goals in the season we begin to see a clear difference in the way they got there goals. As if we didn't know already RVP is truly an immense player, he was nearly top of every aspect considered as can be seen in the table below. Another player that sticks out at the other end is Newcastle's Cisse for the opposite reasons. Cisse who scored the lowest in all categories expect for Heading, where he was also one of the lowest players. The stats show Cisse definitely clinical, across all the metric's he lags behind all of the other players, he has to make the most of all the chances he gets.

Whilst on the topic of biting, or well maybe not.... Suarez is well know for all his Shots off Target, however RVP and Rooney weren't far behind his shots off total though, it's just they both have a lot more Shots on Target than Suarez so don't get tarred with the same brush.

Suarez, Dzeko, Ba, Dempsey, Aguero, Rooney & Van Persie are the top performers. This can be seen by the Total Column = Shots on Target inc Goals + Shots off Target inc Woodwork + Blocked Shots +Head Shots on Target +Headed Shots off Target. If a manager wanted to build a team around a player then this could be a pretty good Stat to investigate, (perhaps I should invest in Opta and see if I can pick any gem's out from the rest of the leagues.) Sunderland's Fletcher (Ex-Wolves,) Stand's out for his heading ability which has to be reconised, or it may imply that Wolves were playing lot of crosses and long balls that season, either way he's good with his head.

At the bottom of the above table, I included three players that have done well this year, Bale, Walcott & Mata, none of them scored more than 10 goals in 2011/12 hence didn't make the first table. Looking carefully, Bale stats from last year indicated he was a Top Performer without the goals to boot, Walcott and Mata however are average at best. The Illustrations below empirically show the players performance, and if MCFC had made the data avaliable earlier, perhaps I would have predicted Bale would be as good as he is today.

@Mattistician