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Going to talk about something that's widely known in stats based people's minds but perhaps less common generally. Strikers. The general consensus seems to discuss strikers in terms of "finishing", where finishing is the act of scoring goals (i.e. shot conversion)
Analytics/stats led minds have discussed this topic for AGES but question remains, how stable is "finishing" as a skill? If i say who's the best finisher in the world? Most people go to guys who've scored tonnes of goals i.e. Robert Lewandowski or similar.
Yet through prism of xG we can see that actually over large enough samples over performance of xG is actually not that stable/not that large for majority. Lewandowski a great example, for a large portion of his career he's actually underperformed xG.
So back to lehmans terms/footballing terms is finishing something you should really care about? sure it's a thing to look for but is it that important? is the more important factor guys who consistently get shots off, in good areas & get on the end of passes/crosses or chances?
Without bringing out various research in this area (because my intention is for this to be digestible) i'm always opting for finding the guy who consistently gets "good" (high value) shots off, at a good volume. Why? because if he can do that, if my team is setup to create....
chances that suits the forward we have then we know from xG that over time most strikers sit around that xG average number. So process is technically more important than outcome long term, i.e. creating the chances, getting on end of chances, taking good shots is probably more...
important than being a good finisher (just to sum it up). So yes you can look at various methods of finishing ability & of course you don't want a career under performer of xG on the whole as if it's a long term trend there is an issue of below average finishing but...
season by season xG/finishing swings shouldn't be "that" important over the ability to consistently rack up the xG by being in right place at right time.
Of course some guys are just neat finishers, Danny Ings, Jamie Vardy etc great examples of guys who are consistently....
Of course some guys are just neat finishers, Danny Ings, Jamie Vardy etc great examples of guys who are consistently....
over performing their xG across their career showing there is clearly a skill to what do they do in terms of getting the ball into the net but yet again as 1st filter, as a 1st port of call the question often shouldn't be centered around finishing but more on who can consistently
get good shots off at a decent volume/consistent quality. Start there and you'll be on right track.
