Sunderland striker woes laid bare as they rank in bottom four for key statistic

Just how wasteful are Sunderland in front of goal this season? The statistics paint a sorry tale.

Michael Graham | Nov 26, 2023

Sunderland striker woes laid bare as they rank in bottom four for key statistic /

While we might not agree on much, but one thing we would all concede is that it has been incredibly frustrating supporting Sunderland in the last month.

The momentum from positive home wins has been decimated by the away form. Sunderland haven’t scored on their travels for three matches now, and one of those was against ten men for more than an hour.

The most recent of them came in the 2-0 defeat at Plymouth, and there were a lot of worrying stats that emerged from that one regarding how wasteful Sunderland have become in front of goal.

With that in mind, I had a look at the Expected Goals metric to see what was going on there.

READ NEXT: Four shocking statistics that highlight Sunderland struggles in front of goal

What is Expected Goals (xG) and how it is calculated?

Expected goals is a relatively new ‘advanced’ football statistics which essentially attempts to measure the quality of a chance rather than the quantity of shots.

The number of shots that a team has had has been a standard part of a statistics package from a football match for decades now. It has always been a bit of a flawed statistic though. After all, a team who has 10 speculative long-range efforts on goal during a match would, from the shots statistic alone, appear to have been more dominant than a team who missed four gilt-edged chances.

The expected goals (xG) stat has, therefore, been created and introduced to clean things up a little in that regard.

How is Expected Goals (xG) calculated?

According to Opta, more than 1million previous shots have been analysed to created a formula to determine how likely a shot resulted in a goal.

They say that the following factors are all taken into account.

Distance to the goal.
Angle to the goal.
Goalkeeper position, giving us information on the likelihood that they’re able to make a save.
The clarity the shooter has of the goal mouth, based on the positions of other players.
The amount of pressure they are under from the opposition defenders.
Shot type, such as which foot the shooter used or whether it was a volley/header/one-on-one.
Pattern of play (e.g., open play, fast break, direct free-kick, corner kick, throw-in etc.).
Information on the previous action, such as the type of assist (e.g., through ball, cross etc.).

A value between 0 and 1 is then assigned to the shot based on the calculation according to it’s likelihood to result in a goal.

A shot with an xG of 0 is a shot from which it is impossible to score, while 1 would be a shot which should result in a goal every single time.

In practical terms, then, 0.01 xG would be a shot from a player’s own half and 0.99 a tap-in from three yards.

Sunderland xG statistics

When you look at the xG for Sunderland this season, it really is a bit of a good news/bad news situation.

Let’s break it down then and look at both, starting with the good.

The good news…

The good news, and it is very good news, is that Sunderland’s expected goals this season is exceptionally high.

In fact, only the top two of Leicester and Ipswich (both 30.1) can better Sunderland in this regard (28.6).

That means that Sunderland are creating more quality chances than every other team in the division other than the current top two. Leeds are fourth on the list just behind Sunderland with (28.2).

You have to say that in that regard, and for that metric, those teams are exactly the kind of company that Sunderland would like to be keeping.

Best Championship xG

Team	Expected Goals (xG)	League Position
Ipswich	30.1	2nd
Leicester	30.1	1st
SUNDERLAND	28.6	9th
Leeds	28.2	3rd
Middlesbrough	27.7	12th
Blackburn	27.2	10th
Southampton	25.8	4th
Coventry	25	20th

The bad news…

The bad news is that while Sunderland are in the top four in the Championship in terms of creating quality chances, they are in the bottom four for actually taking them.

For this metric we are going to take penalties out of it and look at non-penalty goals minus expected goals score (np:G-xG). That is just a long-winded way of saying we’ll compare the non-penalty goals to the expected goals to try to get a measure of two things: how efficient are Sunderland in front of goal and how does that compare to the rest of the Championship.

Neither makes for good reading.

In fact, Sunderland have the fourth worst rating here (-3.5) in the whole division. When compared to the company Sunderland were keeping in the xG category, it really highlights the size of this particular weakness. Ipswich are positively ruthless at +3.7 while Leicester (+0.1) and Leeds (-0.4) are just about efficient enough.

And, while Leicester, Ipswich and Leeds – the current top three in the Championship table – are the company you’d like to keep in terms of xG, Huddersfield (21st in table), (Coventry (20th) and Sheffield Wednesday (24th) is the company you don’t want here. Sadly, it’s the company Sunderland have in this key metric.

Worst Championship np:G-xG

Team	np:G-xG	League Position
Sheffield Wednesday	-8.2	24th
Coventry	-6.0	20th
Huddersfield	-4.3	21st
SUNDERLAND	-3.5	9th
Middlesbrough	-3.2	12th
Stoke	-2.7	16th
QPR	-1.5	23rd
Bristol City	-1.2	11th

Conclusions

Well ultimately everyone can draw their own conclusions I think. As ever, they will be aided by the statistics but primarily based on what we all see with our own eyes.

It’s obvious that Sunderland have problem in turning possession, dominance and change creation into goals in the volume that you’d expect. Too often Sunderland are receiving the plaudits from opposition fans whose team has the points in their back pockets. No one wants to be the likable losers.

What is less clear is whose fault it is. Is it the players’ fault for missing too many chances? Something tactical that Tony Mowbray is doing wrong? Is it a recruitment issue? A bit of all three?

Or is it, as Mowbray has said, the kind of natural naivety that comes with fielding such a young team and as such there is no ‘fault’ at all? Just nature taking its course and we have to stay with the young players while they mature, develop and settle?

One thing that is quite clear is that the defence is not the thing that is keeping Sunderland from flourishing right now.

Could the defence be improved? Obviously. It just wouldn’t be something that made a huge difference right now. After all, in the last three away games the defence could have been absolutely perfect and it would have still been only worth three points in total, or two more than have actually been won.

It is at the other end of the pitch, inside the opposition box, where the most points are being dropped.