Welcome back to scoring contribution week. In today’s scintillating edition, we will look at the Top 25 scorers in La Liga. Who had the biggest scoring contribution rate in La Liga this season? Was it Ronaldo? Messi? New boy Gareth Bale? And where did the ferocious Diego Costa land on the list? I’ll cover all that plus various other topics below.
The Top 5
Just like yesterday, I’ll present these in animated radar format, and then give some thoughts about the data.
[All single radars for the Top 5 are included at the end of this article.]
WOW, the scoring rate battle in La Liga was tight. You’ll see in the full Top 25 data below that Ronaldo lead the league with 1.20 Non-penalty Goals + Assists per 90 in 2013-14, but there were .01 points per90 separating him from Messi this season. And only .03 points per90 separating Ronaldo from Gareth Bale. That’s razor thin.
The other two members of the top 5 are both Barcelona players, giving the Catalan club three of the top 5, and four of the top 10. (Neymar was the other one.)
The Top 25
The thing that strikes me about this list is how few young players there are. Outside of the big 2, almost every player in the top 25 is in their prime or still performing well into their 30’s. That makes it tougher to spot bargains that English clubs should be grabbing before they explode into the mainstream.
From my transfer profiles last season, I had Costa, Vela, Ebert, Griezman, Koke, and Rakitic all as great targets. (Vela and Isco were fairly obvious, so I didn’t profile them, but I do hope Vela comes back to England this summer. He had an amazing season for Sociedad.) After that it gets tricky to find pure value for age targets in Spain right now, at least in the scoring department. Some lower-half English clubs might take shots at some of the older scorers in Spain right now, but all the best young guys are either already stars (Neymar) or simply owned by the top 2 clubs anyway (Rafinha).