As a warm-up for the return of proper football, a look at Celtic’s scoring performances so far.

Goals Scored

Although Sinclair has the most goals (10), he is level with McGregor in averaging 0.51 goals every 90 minutes. Slightly ahead of Griffiths, who has improved his all-round play but is not achieving the near 1 goal per 90-minute average of the last two seasons.

Dembele has only played the equivalent of 6.88 matches, but is already on 6 goals and well ahead on goal per 90-minute averages.

Expected Goals (xG) tells us what the model predicts you should have scored on average given the shots taken. The Difference column is the difference between actual performance and predicted. A higher Difference means you are outperforming the model and a negative value means you are underperforming against the model. Over time we should expect to see players’ Differences migrate to the mean (nearer 0).

McGregor and Ntcham have outperformed their xG as their goals have come from long range low probability shots. Difficult to maintain that scoring rate based on those types of chances. Griffiths xG is surprisingly low whilst young Edouard, on a very small sample, shows promise.

Shots at Goal

You won’t score if you don’t shoot. Here are the statistics for shots at goal.

Ignore Boyata as the sample size is too small. Forrest is managing to take 84% of his shots inside the box and averages 2.59 per 90 minutes, second only to Dembele. Sinclair’s goal tally of 10 can be partly explained by similar good shot selection.

At the other end of the spectrum, Ntcham (whom I have consistently called out for poor shot selection), Armstrong, Rogic and Hayes should be encouraged to take shots from better positions.

Top CATs

Celtic Attacking Threat (CAT) score is an aggregation of values providing an overall assessment of a players attacking potency. It aggregates:

  • Non-Penalty Goals scored
  • Assists
  • Shots on Target
  • Possession in the Box
  • Key Passes (passes resulting in shots that are not assists)

Here are the Top CATs:

 

Griffiths is not as productive as normal, although Dembele’s score of over 11 may prove a high benchmark to reach (I have no history for this metric so not yet sure what “good” looks like). Forrest impresses as he leads the attacking midfielders. Hayes is the lowest ranked of the attacking midfielders whilst there is surely more to come from Roberts. Tierney predictably leads the defensive players.

You can find more Celtic stats and analysis at Celtic By Numbers.

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