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EPL “Clutch” Goal Scorers | Players who score when most required

Some notable points:

  • What sticks out the most to me is Wayne Rooney’s position. Despite scoring 21 goals this season, Rooney is ranked 7th when the importance of each goal is taken in to account. To put it in perspective, Rooney has added 7.80 expected points with his goals, while Grant Holt has added 9.38 expected points. This is despite the fact that Rooney has scored 10 more goals than Holt.
  • It shouldn’t be a question that van Persie is leading this list. While he already leads in the number of goals scored, he has also scored a lot of crucial goals for Arsenal this season. His Average Goal Weight is .82, meaning on average, his goals are weighted as .82 expected points. If you consider the fact that a tying goal in the 90th minute is worth about 1 expected point, it is clear that RVP is scoring a lot of important goals.
  • The highest Average Goal Weight in the top 25 goes to Frank Lampard, who ranks 5th on the list despite only scoring 10 goals. On average, his goals are worth a whopping .9 expected points.
  • Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero has also not scored that many important goals. His Average Goal Weight is only .46, a little more than half of Lampard’s pace.

These are just a few points, but I’m sure you can find a lot of other interesting pieces of information from the chart. I encourage you to also look at a more extensive list on my blog here. This list is also updated weekly if you want to continue to follow the rankings throughout the rest of the season.

Conclusion

Clutch?

The Expected Points Added metric can give a lot of insights in to the true value of a goal scorer. However, I think it is important to point out a few caveats of the metric. First, it seems like this metric does not stay constant from year to year for specific players. For example, it doesn’t seem to be the case that certain players have consistently high Average Goal Weights from year to year. In other words, the metric is not necessarily predictive.  However, EPA can still be a good insight in to the performance of a player within a specific season. Second, players like Aguero and Rooney might be getting punished in this measure because they both play for clubs that often blow teams out. For example, if Aguero scores the 5th goal in a 5-0 game (which would happen more often with clubs like United and City), he would receive no Expected Points Added for that goal because it is essentially worth nothing, as City would already have a 100% chance of winning the game. However, this goal would hurt his Average Goal Weight by bringing down the average. Should he really be punished for this? Maybe, maybe not, but it is just a part of how the metric works. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to gain the insights that the chart above provides.

Overall, I encourage you to stay updated on the Expected Points Added leaders on my blog. I’m also interested to hear reader’s thoughts on if a clutch goal scorer really does exist. It’s a tough question to answer, and there are a lot of different opinions on the subject.

SoccerStatistically
SoccerStatisticallyhttp://soccerstatistically.blogspot.com/
Soccer Statistically blogger, City writer for EPL Index, economics student, and college soccer player. Twitter: @SoccerStatistic Blog: http://soccerstatistically.blogspot.com/
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