The best strikers in the Premier League
Erling Haaland is really good but he’s not the only one
On Saturday, at 10.45, I sat down in England to watch Australia's A-League Grand Final on TNT Sports.
The A-League has become a go-to league for me, in part because it's enjoyable but also because it just so happens that weekend mornings are a really handy time for me to be able to watch live football.
This season in particular, I've been all in. I've watched a ton of matches and all the other highlights. In every aspect apart from following a specific team, I'm invested. It's the main reason I have TNT.
So imagine my dismay when I knocked on the Discovery+ app to find that TNT Sports 4 was showing women's doubles badminton between South Korea and Malaysia. Finals never kick off on time, I thought. Fine.
Then the badminton finished around the same time as the football actually kicked off. TNT went through its badminton post-match, then to a commercial break featuring that awful bastard on the Fairy ads, then back, finally, to… more badminton.
At some point they changed the streaming start time to 10.59, and then to 11.14, effectively removing app access to it until that time. By 11.14 UK time, the Grand Final was 20 minutes old.
TNT had finally joined the football at 11.12. By the time I managed to restart the very dodgy app they use, 17 minutes had been played.
BT Sport and TNT Sports have been criticised a lot throughout their existence but one thing they've always had going for them is the access they've provided to the A-League, which, to my mind, seemed to be dealt with pretty respectfully even if the coverage itself is bought in.
This badly timed shambles was a cock-up, not a choice of badminton over a showpiece football occasion. It doesn't matter. You show what you say you're going to show, when you say you're going to show it, and you make sure it's happening.
Rubbish. Anyway…
This week’s main piece uses data from FBref and Opta Analyst.
The best strikers in the Premier League
In football’s century and a half and more, the way it's been played has been an expression of culture, a consequence of geography and a strategic arms race on grass. Above all, the history of football tactics is a back and forth of problem setting and solving, an innovation tit-for-tat that literally changes the game.
This riddle-picking in the quest for victory leads to the roles of players slipping in and out of fashion. A position might disappear almost entirely or change its assumed function. Sometimes, a couple of positions gradually become the job of one player instead of two.
Attacking formations have changed and different demands on players necessarily followed. Once, a top striker might be a deadly poacher, alive only in the penalty area, or a target player tasked with bringing others into play in the final third.
Chelsea's Didier Drogba weathered a slightly slow start in England to become not only a roaring success but the archetype of the centre forward who was expected to do it all and had all the tools for the job.
Drogba’s attributes helped shape the game. Ten years after his first departure from Stamford Bridge, the Premier League welcomed a different kind of striker altogether.
Manchester City’s Erling Haaland is a future Ballon d’Or winner, yet regarded somewhat reductively as a pure goalscorer who does most of his work between the posts. He is a formidable striker, accepted by most observers to be the best in the league and the world. But his style and his role are not those of the all-in-one super-striker that came before him.
He's also a freakish talent. Haaland isn't replicable like you’d expect a robot to be. So, is he changing the game, and how did he fit in with the Premier League's other leading marksmen in the first season after Harry Kane’s exit?
In 2023/24, there were thirteen centre forwards who scored eleven goals or more in the Premier League: Erling Haaland (27), Alexander Isak (21), Ollie Watkins (19), Dominic Solanke (19), Jean-Philippe Mateta (16), Chris Wood (14), Nicolas Jackson (14), Hwang Hee-chan (12), Yoane Wissa (12), Richarlison (11), Carlton Morris (11), Julián Álvarez (11) and Darwin Núñez (11).
Álvarez’s average shot distance might reasonably have placed him on a list of exceptions – those who aren’t centre forwards first and foremost despite being high on the scoring charts. The exclusions are Cole Palmer, Phil Foden, Mohamed Salah, Son Heung-min, Jarrod Bowen, Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz, Matheus Cunha, Leandro Trossard, Eberechi Eze and Anthony Gordon.
Haaland, naturally, has to be the benchmark. The Premier League’s top scorer is also its most prolific scorer of non-penalty goals. He attempted more shots than anyone else in the division, and his shot distance on average is shorter than any of the league’s high-scoring centre forwards apart from Wood.
His positioning and movement at close range make Haaland a very dangerous customer but where those numbers get interesting is that his average shot distance leads to a high non-penalty expected goals (npxG) but this isn’t matched by his accuracy. That’s 44.2% – not to be sniffed at, but notably bettered by Jackson as well as a top three who hit the target with every other shot or better.
Haaland’s opposite in that regard is Mateta of Crystal Palace. Aston Villa goalkeeper Robin Olsen discovered to his cost that the Frenchman has a laser-guided missile of a shot and his percentage of shots on target is highest among strikers with eleven or more goals at 56.8%.
This all boils down to the matter of npxG. The top three in the Premier League as a whole when it comes to outperforming their expected goals sans penalties are Phil Foden with an astonishing scoring rate of 8.7 over his npxG in 2023/24, followed by Callum Hudson-Odoi and Diogo Jota.
Fourth on the list? Mateta, whose actual non-penalty goals tally is better than expected by 4.6 over the season. The bottom three among the high-scoring centre forwards are Jackson, Núñez and Haaland.
Hwang is the only other striker with eleven goals or more who outscores his npxG by more than four goals. The Wolverhampton Wanderers man is third in this group of strikers for goals per shot, a reassuring statistic for a player who shows up well in a team that isn’t prone to putting the ball on a plate for its forwards.
Nestled in between Mateta and Hwang on the goals per shot hitparade is Wood. The 32-year-old New Zealander – now at Nottingham Forest, for anyone who tends to lose track of that sort of thing – had a fabulous season in front of goal.
Wood’s shot accuracy is second only to Mateta in this group of strikers, and he’s outperformed his npxG by 2.1 goals over the course of 2023/24. Only Haaland scores more non-penalty goals per 90 minutes.
Aston Villa striker Watkins is the league’s centre forward all-rounder. He’s sixth among high-scoring strikers for non-penalty goals per 90 minutes. Though he scored a not inconsiderable 19 Premier League goals thanks in no small part to Unai Emery persuading him to play more centrally, it’s only one part of his game.
Watkins is first in the division for assists – that’s first in the entire division – with 13, and his total of goals and assists (minus penalties) is fifth behind Michael Olise, Kevin de Bruyne, Jota and Richarlison.
The Tottenham Hotspur man is the steady contributor of the cohort. Third for npxG per 90 minutes, he’s second only to Núñez for average touches in the penalty area and plenty effective when he’s there. He scored 1.4 goals more than expected (npxG) and has a higher number of non-penalty goal contributions per 90 minutes played than any other high-scoring striker.
Another striker bagging more than expected is Brentford’s Wissa. He passes the eye test and finished the season on a terrific scoring run. Wissa didn’t play exclusively through the middle by any measure – the Bees also had Neal Maupay and more recently Ivan Toney at their disposal – but 12 goals and a handful of assists is not to be underestimated. There’s more to come from the former Lorient man.
But the player who’s really going to explode is Isak of Newcastle United; you’d hope so for a transfer fee like the one the Magpies paid to acquire his services from Real Sociedad a couple of years ago.
Isak seems to be right on the bubble of an even higher performance level by a lot of metrics and clearly has the talent to take that step. He’s already broken the 20-goal mark in the Premier League, and is one of only four of these high-scoring strikers with a goals per shot number better than 0.2. He just barely outscored his npxG over the season but he did so by hitting the target with one of every two shots taken.
Let's be clear; Haaland is the pinnacle. He's the scariest striker to defend against and the player you least want to find in your team's six-yard box.
He might not top every statistical leaderboard but he is, when all is said and done, the most lethal centre forward of all. Taking penalties off his tally is instructive but it doesn't reveal some hidden weakness or inferiority in his game. Haaland is the type of striker who knows they all count.
But there is serious quality elsewhere in the Premier League’s striker corps. It’s easy to think of Haaland as more clinical and less rounded than his rivals but when you dig into the details it isn’t always true.
What the Premier League doesn’t have is a singular style of striker spearheading an obvious tactical evolution. Haaland is not the same as Watkins is not the same as Wood. Mateta has emerged as a deadly sniper, Richarlison as a reliable hand and Hwang as an able scorer feeding on scraps in the worst shot-creating team in the league not called Sheffield United.
Football is a game of goals. There’s something satisfying about the fact that even in today’s tactically advanced world, even at the very highest level, it still takes all sorts to score them.
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“He’s struggled this season and Jeremy [Doku] has made an incredible step forward as everyone has seen in the last games. But Jack [Grealish] will be back at the level of last season, I'm pretty sure.”
Pretty sure. Josep Guardiola is clearly oozing with confidence in his ability to extract the necessary value from a £100m signing.
Salty beef extracts
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ITV in £15m talks with Sky to bring Championship football back to free-to-air (i)
Chelsea will never be the club they seem to want to be if they continue this managerial policy (Unexpected Delirium)
Jurgen Klopp: When funerals and wakes collide (Unexpected Delirium)
The real face of Premier League ticket price inflation (The Football Fan)
Central Coast seal historic treble in grand final thriller against Melbourne Victory (The Guardian)
Double is just the start of the journey for evolving Bayer Leverkusen (The Guardian)
Former Premier League referee banned for five months over abusive comments (The Guardian)
Dessert
The Nike Mad Brilliance pack. Get used to it. It’s going to be all over your summer.
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Really enjoyed this one Chris - will be interesting to see the tactical/striker-based trends at Euro 24