I finally finished the data work I wanted to do for transfer shopping pieces, and then I got so excited about the top scorer in Europe 09-13 stuff that I had had to post that first. However, the point of all this was an attempt to build some useful baselines. What type of performance qualifies as elite? Obviously merging words and numbers is tricky, but we’re basically looking at the best of the best in terms of football performance.

The data set I have access to runs from 2009-10 through the current season and covers the big 5 leagues in Europe. For the next few days, I’m mostly going to just post data from the top tiers of performers across Europe in particular seasons so that we have reference points to determine the awesome from the good from the merely average.

Obviously one of the complications you run into is that different leagues have different strengths, and different teams (particularly Real Madrid and Barcelona) have incredible competitive advantages that seem to enhance performance of all their players. The Eredivisie (not in the current data set) has the highest scoring rate in Europe, while Ligue 1 has the lowest. Regardless, we don’t have an objective way of discounting this yet, so I’ll simply break things into league-based data dumps and for now you can make your own determinations.

Goals per 90
I covered this briefly yesterday, but it bears repeating.

Goals are the most basic scoring stat we have. However, just looking at the total goals a player has at the end of the season discounts one particularly important element: playing time. Players that play more should contribute more in rate stats. This is why Benjamin Pugsley and I usually try to normalize rate stats into per 90s. It controls for total playing time (including time missed due to injury or sub appearances), which can be particularly useful when it comes to younger players who may not be full members of the first team yet.

Another element that we want to “fix” here is goal inflation via penalty. Penalty kicks are generally converted at a 76% rate, year after year, and it doesn’t require an expert in goalscoring to do this. (Example: there have been a number of goalkeepers over the years who were designated penalty takers for their teams.) In short, it’s a different skill than normal goal scoring. Thus I’ve done my best to filter this out of the goal scoring information we’re looking at. We care more about guys who are banging them home from everywhere but the penalty spot.

Cutoffs
Going into this, I kind of had the running assumption that .4 goals per90 is the cutoff for being a useful top-level forward that is expected to score goals. Multiply .4 across 38 matches, and you get 15 goals a season – a good, but not great goal tally. (It’s probably great for wide players and midfielders, but that’s another article for another time.) At a later date, I’ll re-slice the data set into standard deviations and the like to get a real cutoff point, but for now let’s stay a bit more casual.

In 2009-10, there were 98 players who scored goals at a rate of .4/90 or better, or just under 20 per league. That seems like a reasonable number. It’s not something everyone can do, but it does indicate a high level of contribution. The tallies for players meeting this threshold across the leagues in each year is

2010: 98
2011: 99
2012: 104
2013: 116

Remove the penalty goals from those numbers, and you end up with

2010: 76
2011: 83
2012: 81
2013: 92

Which strips out about 20-25% of the contenders per year on average.

But what about elite? Where is the elite level of goalscoring?

My first guess was around .6, or 50% more than the “useful” metric. Multiply it out by a full season and it delivers nearly 24 goals from 38 matches. That us a huge number and would put any player with that rate near the top of their league in scoring almost every single year.

Again, a casual look at the numbers seems to bear this out. Number of players for each year meeting this threshold are as follows:

2010: 18
2011: 20
2012: 19
2013: 20

So the surface breakdown of categories goes a bit like this:

.4 to .49 non-penalty goals per 90: Good.
.5 to .59 non-penalty goals per 90: Very good.
.6 to .79 non-penalty goals per 90: Probable Top 20 in Europe
.8 or above non-penalty goals per 90: Probable Top 5 in Europe

[Note: These divisions aren’t perfect, and should definitely be adjusted a bit for younger players, as you expect their performance to increase until they hit their peak. If a younger player (say 22 or under) is putting up numbers in these brackets, they are probably pretty special.

EPL 09-10

Player	Team	90Mins	G	NPG	G90	NPG90
Fernando Torres	Liverpool	19.06	18	18	0.9446	0.9446
Didier Drogba	Chelsea	30.82	29	28	0.9409	0.9084
Wayne Rooney	Manchester United	30.26	26	22	0.8593	0.7271
Jermain Defoe	Tottenham	28.52	18	17	0.6311	0.596
Emmanuel Adebayor	Manchester City	24.58	14		0.5696	0.5696
Carlos Tévez	Manchester City	31.87	23	18	0.7218	0.5649
Dimitar Berbatov	Manchester United	23.29	12		0.5153	0.5153
Darren Bent	Sunderland	37.64	24	19	0.6375	0.5047
Francesc Fábregas	Arsenal	24.37	15	12	0.6156	0.4925
Florent Malouda	Chelsea	25.59	12		0.469	0.469
Aruna Dindane	Portsmouth	16.22	8	7	0.4932	0.4315
Louis Saha	Everton	25.87	13	11	0.5026	0.4253
Andrey Arshavin	Arsenal	25.17	10		0.3974	0.3974

LaLiga 09-10

Player	Team	90Mins	G	NPG	G90	NPG90
Lionel Messi	Barcelona	31.5556	34	33	1.0775	1.0458
Gonzalo Higuaín	Real Madrid	26.6444	27	27	1.0133	1.0133
Cristiano Ronaldo	Real Madrid	27.4444	26	22	0.9474	0.8016
Luís Fabiano	Sevilla	18.2667	15	14	0.8212	0.7664
Zlatan Ibrahimovic	Barcelona	22.6	16	14	0.708	0.6195
David Villa	Valencia	30.1111	21	18	0.6974	0.5978
Karim Benzema	Real Madrid	14.4889	8		0.5521	0.5521
Diego Forlán	Atletico Madrid	28.6	18	15	0.6294	0.5245
Roberto Soldado	Getafe	25.2	16	13	0.6349	0.5159
Pedro	Barcelona	23.5444	12		0.5097	0.5097
Frederic Kanouté	Sevilla	19.8444	12	10	0.6047	0.5039
Sergio Agüero	Atletico Madrid	24.4556	12		0.4907	0.4907
Pablo Osvaldo	Espanyol	20.5556	10		0.4865	0.4865
Joseba Llorente	Villarreal	19.6778	9		0.4574	0.4574
Riki	Deportivo La Coruna	16.6222	8	7	0.4813	0.4211
Walter Pandiani	Osasuna	26.8444	11		0.4098	0.4098
Nilmar	Villarreal	27.4778	11		0.4003	0.4003
Álvaro Negredo	Sevilla	22.6889	11	9	0.4848	0.3967

 

Bundesliga 09-10

Player	Team	90Mins	G	NPG	G90	NPG90
Arjen Robben	Bayern Munich	19.7556	16	14	0.8099	0.7087
Claudio Pizarro	Werder Bremen	23.6667	16		0.6761	0.6761
Cacau	VfB Stuttgart	19.3333	13		0.6724	0.6724
Lucas Barrios	Borussia Dortmund	29.1333	19		0.6522	0.6522
Edin Dzeko	Wolfsburg	33.3444	22	20	0.6598	0.5998
Stefan Kießling	Bayer Leverkusen	32.4556	21	19	0.647	0.5854
Kevin Kuranyi	Schalke 04	31.1111	18		0.5786	0.5786
Ivica Olic	Bayern Munich	19.9333	11		0.5518	0.5518
Ciprian Marica	VfB Stuttgart	16.8778	10	9	0.5925	0.5332
Albert Bunjaku	Nurnberg	24.0667	12		0.4986	0.4986
Hugo Almeida	Werder Bremen	14.9111	7		0.4694	0.4694
Mario Gomez	Bayern Munich	21.4778	10		0.4656	0.4656
Thomas Müller	Bayern Munich	29.3778	13		0.4425	0.4425
Eren Derdiyok	Bayer Leverkusen	29.0556	12		0.413	0.413
Adrián Ramos	Hertha Berlin	24.7889	10		0.4034	0.4034
Didier Ya Konan	Hannover 96	22.3889	9		0.402	0.402

SerieA 09-10

Player	Team	90Mins	G	NPG	G90	NPG90
Antonio Di Natale	Udinese	33.4667	29	23	0.8665	0.6873
Maxi López	Catania	15.6556	11	10	0.7026	0.6388
Alexandre Pato	AC Milan	20.0333	12		0.599	0.599
Mario Balotelli	Inter	15.4444	9		0.5827	0.5827
Diego Milito	Inter	31.9889	22	18	0.6877	0.5627
Marco Borriello	AC Milan	24.5444	14	13	0.5704	0.5297
Valeri Bojinov	Parma	15.6667	8		0.5106	0.5106
Emanuele Calaiò	Siena	16.8222	8		0.4756	0.4756
Davide Lanzafame	Parma	14.9667	7		0.4677	0.4677
Sergio Floccari	Genoa	21.4889	12	10	0.5584	0.4654
Fabrizio Miccoli	Palermo	28.8	19	13	0.6597	0.4514
Francesco Totti	Roma	19.9778	14	9	0.7008	0.4505
Giampaolo Pazzini	Sampdoria	35.9556	19	16	0.5284	0.445
Alberto Gilardino	Fiorentina	32.6778	15	14	0.459	0.4284
Mirko Vucinic	Roma	28.3333	14	12	0.4941	0.4235
Adailton	Bologna	21.7889	10	9	0.4589	0.4131
Simone Tiribocchi	Atalanta	27.5778	11		0.3989	0.3989
Marco Di Vaio	Bologna	25.2	12	10	0.4762	0.3968

French 09-10

Player	Team	90Mins	G	NPG	G90	NPG90
Mevlut Erding	Paris Saint Germain	26.9444	15		0.5567	0.5567
Mamadou Niang	Marseille	27.6778	18	15	0.6503	0.542
Ireneusz Jelen	Auxerre	26.9444	14		0.5196	0.5196
Kevin Gameiro	Lorient	33.2444	17		0.5114	0.5114
Pierre-Alain Frau	Lille	23.6	13	12	0.5508	0.5085
Gervinho	Lille	27.4556	13		0.4735	0.4735
Asamoah Gyan	Rennes	23.3222	13	11	0.5574	0.4717
Michel Bastos	Lyon	21.8889	10		0.4569	0.4569
Bafétimbi Gomis	Lyon	23.0444	10		0.4339	0.4339
Lisandro López	Lyon	28.0556	15	12	0.5347	0.4277
Emmanuel Rivière	Saint Etienne	19.2333	8		0.4159	0.4159

Check out Emmanuel Riviere sneaking in there at the bottom of the French table. He was 19 at the time - now plays for Monaco.

Anyway, I'll keep doing these more complete scoring charts for the next few days so the data is out there, and next week I'll also start providing transfer recommendations for EPL squads.