Manchester City have a goalscoring problem. It’s such a strange sentence that it bears repeating: Pep Guardiola‘s Manchester City have a goalscoring problem.
Saturday’s 2-0 defeat to Spurs at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium means that City have scored only 10 goals from their opening eight Premier League matches this season. This is near enough the same group of players that struck a record 106 goals in a single campaign in 2017-18 and followed it up with totals of 95 and 102 in the subsequent two.
As things stand, though, City’s goal record is inferior to (in chronological order): Chelsea, Tottenham, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Everton, Leicester, Southampton, West Ham, Leeds, Brighton, Manchester United and Crystal Palace. Perhaps most damningly of all, it is equal to dreary Newcastle United.
Incredibly, City’s goalscoring record is at its lowest after eight league games since Sheikh Mansour’s takeover in 2008. Indeed, this is City’s worst return since the 2006-07 campaign when a team managed by Stuart Pearce scored six. That side ended up scoring just 29 league goals overall, failing to net at home from New Year’s Day onwards.
Things aren’t quite as bleak for City’s 2020-21 vintage as they were for 2006-07’s band of misfits. City’s fixtures are beginning to turn for the better with matches against Burnley, Fulham and West Brom to come in the next four gameweeks, so it is reasonable to expect that their goals per game figure will rise from its current 1.25 rate.
Nevertheless, their profligacy in front of goal up until this point will have alarmed supporters and Guardiola alike. “The stats speak for themselves,” Guardiola said after the game on Saturday. “Ten goals in nine games (sic) is not good enough.”
What do the numbers say?
When a team is finding goals hard to come by, usually their woes can at least be part explained by statistical metrics, such as total shots, shots on target, chances created and yer da’s favourite: expected goals (xG). Naturally, if a team is struggling to create goalscoring opportunities or test opposition goalkeepers, they are unlikely to be scoring too many goals.
That hasn’t really been the issue as far as City are concerned, though. Liverpool are the only Premier League side to have attempted more shots per game with 17.4 to 15.6. Furthermore, City rank fourth in the league for both shots attempted inside the penalty area (8.1 per game) and for shots on target per game (5.37).
In terms of creating chances, meanwhile, only Aston Villa (12.3 per game) and Liverpool (11.9) have fashioned more than City’s 11.6.
“We are quite similar to the previous seasons when we scored more than 100 goals,” Guardiola said on Saturday. “We created the chances. We had the counter-attacks for the last pass but we could not finish. We could not score.”
There are some underlying numbers that shed more light on City’s issues, however. Despite ranking third for chances created per game, City are sixth when it comes to “big chances” created – defined by Opta as “a situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score”.
And when City have created goalscoring chances, they have struggled to finish them. Only Sheffield United and Burnley have converted a lower percentage of their big chances than City, while their xG (according to Understat) ranks 10th in the division, behind the likes of Leeds, West Ham and Brighton.
Selection issues
While Liverpool have been hit by a defensive injury curse, City’s main fitness-related issues have been at the opposite end of the pitch.
Guardiola has been without Sergio Aguero for all but 178 minutes of the campaign because of knee and hamstring injuries, while Gabriel Jesus, Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling have all been absent at different points.
Guardiola acknowledged that injuries to his strikers has been a problem, saying after the Spurs loss: “For a long period we were without our strikers [Aguero and Jesus] but we cannot expect the strikers to solve all the problems.” However, he also refused to rush Aguero back to action in a bid to cure City’s goalscoring woes.
Injuries aside, City have clearly felt the loss of David Silva more than perhaps they were expected to. Only De Bruyne provided more assists (20) than Silva (10) for City in the Premier League last season and when the Belgian hasn’t been up to his usual standards, the likes of Bernardo Silva and Ilkay Gundogan have struggled to pick up the creative slack.
Another summer departure that perhaps hasn’t been as talked about as much is Leroy Sane who moved to Bayern Munich. During their title-winning seasons in 2017-18 and 2018-19, City seemingly perfected a cheat code goal whereby Silva or De Bruyne would receive the ball in pockets outside the box and thread passes through for Sane or Sterling to run onto and set the other (or Aguero) up for a tap-in.
In both 2017-18 and 2018-19, Sane and Sterling reached double figures for both goals and assists – a feat that only 38 players have managed in the Premier League’s 28 seasons. While Sterling managed 20 goals last season, he managed just a solitary assist, which strengthens the idea that City have missed Sane’s pace, creativity and natural width on the left.
Although City retain a nucleus of elite attacking midfielders and forwards, their record since the start of 2019-20 suggests that they have struggled to replace both Silva and Sane, while Jesus has often found deputising for Aguero a challenging task.
That allied to wasteful shooting is seemingly behind City’s attacking struggles. Plenty for Pep to ponder.
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