22 Under 22 - Best Chance Creators
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Chance creation is something I really find interesting.
It’s a really hard thing to judge when you really look at at it… You can’t just look at total assist numbers - as someone who has played as a midfielder that’s created some great chances (and a forward that’s missed his fair share of chances) a lot of good chances don’t turn into goals.
Also, when you look at counting stats like total assists (or even total expected assists) over a season, the players that get the most opportunity to create chances get an advantage over a player who is in a side that plays more conservatively.
So someone like Phil Foden gets a way easier run than someone like Dwight McNeil.
Basically, it’s an imperfect science.
However, that hasn’t stopped me in the past - In this 22 Under 22, I’ll try and find the best chance creators.
The Search
To run this search, I put the following parameters:
Players 22 and under (obviously)
Looking at stats from the last 12 months
I didn’t put a minute restriction on this one as there weren’t too many results with super small sample sizes
I ranked the players with both shot assists per 90 and expected assists per 90
The Results
With that basic starting search, here’s the top 22, listed in order of shots created per game (with links to their eBay search pages):
Adil Aouchiche and Jadon Sancho are always towards the top of “chances created” numbers that I find with young guys - they’re both very good.
And, here are the same players organized in a table showing the total shots created per 90 (vertical), and expected assists per 90 (horizontal).
You can see a bit of a trend line going through this table.
Basically, the more shots a player creates, the higher the expected assists per 90 they’d get.
No shit.
To be honest, that’s boring as fuck and doesn’t really give us much more insight.
I’d sure hope that the guys creating the most shots are getting the highest expected assists per 90 - they’ve had the most opportunity to accumulate xA.
To combat that, I took the total number of shots created and the total expected assists per 90 and to find am “average expected assist per shot created”.
To do that, I basically took the total expected assists and dividing it by the shots created.
With that, Here are the results.
Now, we start to get a different top five.
These are the guys that create the ‘best’ chances. For example, every shot Moussa Diaby creates per 90 has an xA of 0.17 - that’s insanely good.
Note: Don’t let the green-red color sort play tricks with your mind - the red doesn’t necessarily mean ‘bad’, it just means that it’s the lowest on this specific list.
Final Thoughts
I think these numbers still have a lot to do with the way a team plays. If a player is a teams’ sole attacking engine, you’d expect them to be less efficient going in xA per chance created - with higher usage often comes lower efficiency.
A lot also looks at the players’ teammates. Are they making the right runs? Are they playing in a system that suits out player?
Ideally, I’d like to look more into this - maybe find a way to include how many opportunities a player gets to create a shot in a match (either by touches or tracking daya) - but that’s way too abstract for the purposes of this article and the tools I have on hand to work with.
However, even just playing with the numbers a little and looking at the total shots created per 90, the total xA per 90, along with the total xA per shot, we get different leaders and can find a few interesting results.
Most of all - don’t just look at a number of total assists - or expected assists - and decide if someone is a good chance creator or not.
Next Steps
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