Arsenal’s shooting stats show part of their problem | OneFootball

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Daily Cannon

·13 April 2021

Arsenal’s shooting stats show part of their problem

Article image:Arsenal’s shooting stats show part of their problem

Arsenal’s shooting accuracy is considerably worse than the sides above them in the Premier League.

Article image:Arsenal’s shooting stats show part of their problem

They say if you don’t shoot, you don’t score and, not only have Arsenal been taking fewer shots than their rivals this season, they are also getting fewer of them on target.

Arsenal have scored a total of 72 goals this season from 596 shots.


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That’s an average of 0.11 goals per shot, the same as Chelsea and Liverpool. But compared to those two, Arsenal get only 32.9% of their shots on target. For Liverpool it’s 36.2 and Chelsea 36.6.

Those numbers don’t seem like there is much in it, but in the small percentages lie big differences.

Compared to Man City, Tottenham, Man United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Leicester, Arsenal are the only side with fewer than 200 shots on target (192) with the sides sitting in first and second place in the league getting the most (City 289, United 272).

If you don’t but a ticket, you can’t win the raffle.

So, that should be easy to fix then. Practice shooting on the training ground and shoot more in games and goals will then naturally follow.

Of course, we have to play a style of football that helps get the ball into shooting positions in the first place and that is proving somewhat more difficult.

Arsenal need to score another 19 goals to reach the 93 they scored last season and another 34 to match the total in Unai Emery’s first and only full season. The 18/19 season saw us finish with 34% of shots on target. Or, to put it another way, with those numbers Arsenal would likely have scored another 23 goals this season.

How many places could that have moved us up the league?

Article image:Arsenal’s shooting stats show part of their problem

It looks even worse when you take into account the stats from Arsene Wenger’s final season.

Arsenal had a whopping 919 shots that year, not bad for a manager who many said was afraid to let his players have a go.

An impressive 37.9% were on target, too, but our goals-per-shot ratio was the same as it is this season under Arteta (0.11) and our goals-per-shot-on-target metric worse (0.29) but we still would have scored an extra 37 just by virtue of shooting so much.

Arsenal scored 109 goals in Wenger’s final campaign.

Who would have though shooting would be so important, huh?

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