Finishing

How Do Goals Get Scored? 

If I (or anyone else) had the answer to this, well, I wouldn't be writing this sorry little blog!

There are a few things I can share with some confidence.  Certainly, practice pays off.  Players who play forward positions all their life have an advantage over players who don't.  Players who play against good defenders develop into more effective attackers (or they don't make the grade as they age up.)  Players who play for teams that use game-like situations in training more become better goal-scorers (and for teams which go to goal more in training.)

However, those are generalities.  Specifically, what characteristics do goal-scorers exhibit?  Physical talents do play a part; speed, strength, and quickness among the most important, though not all those characteristics must be present at once.  Vision is crucial.  But so is the psychological side.  A player who is calm under pressure, who can make observations coolly will be more successful than a panicky player.  A player who expects to score, who knows he/she can score, one who has already pictured the goal happening in their mind is better prepared to finish a chance.



Assuming a player has most of these things (relatively speaking, for a youth- or college-level team) though, what makes the difference?  Time on the field is an important one.  A player at the top level might get 5 shots in 90 minutes.  And finish three of them.  But at the youth level, where coaches manage expectations (sometimes their own, sometimes those of the administrators they answer to, or the families of the players) players might only get small portions of game time.  Ergo, fewer shots, fewer chances, fewer goals...and over the course of the player's career, literally thousands fewer experiences in front of goal than his or her counterpart in Europe, Africa or South America.  Hence the need for thoughtful and high-volume training.

    But those things are intangible, genetic, and sometimes completely uncontrollable.  What can a player do to help his or her own cause?  Here's the fun part, some numbers by folks much wiser than me, about what a goal looks like, statistically.

Three Takes By Statdna:


The good folks at Statdna gather data like George Clooney gathers 25-year-old underwear models.  This post is an amazing look at Brazilian league teams, and where they take shots from, versus how many goals they score.    http://blog.statdna.com/post/2011/03/02/The-key-to-goal-scoring-taking-shots-inside-the-18-yard-box.aspx

A second look at Brazil's Serie A, which reveals how volume must meet with quality at some point to produce consistent scoring and winning:  http://blog.statdna.com/post/2011/04/07/Finishing-quality-less-variance-than-shot-quality-but-still-important.aspx.  Some good thoughts on the factors of a shot.

Statdna gives us yet more to think about: http://blog.statdna.com/post/2011/03/29/What-determines-shot-quality.aspx.  Would-be goalscorers read with care...The law of averages doesn't always work the way one would think.

Others Weigh In:

Here's Sarah Rudd (www.onfooty.com), a Microsoft employee of some kind, and a numbers whiz.  Her writing is worth keeping up on for any stat-interested soccer fan.  I think this article is brilliant:

By Sarah Rudd | January 26, 2011

Soccer By The Numbers recently had a post about using conversion rate (Goals/Shots on Target) as a metric for a team’s offensive production.  The idea behind it is to estimate how well a team is at converting its chances, or essentially, how good are they at finishing.  I think this is a good start, but it says nothing about how many chances are created.  Is the team that scored from its only chance more productive than a team that creates 6 chances but only finishes 2?  Conversion rate only tells part of the story.  To get a better idea of offensive production, we need to add another dimension that quantifies offensive opportunities in addition to efficiency.

To start, I decided to look at shots as an estimate of an offensive opportunity.  There are obvious shortcomings with this, but I prefer it to shots on target used by Soccer By The Numbers.  Shots on target encapsulates something about the execution of the opportunity and that is precisely what we are trying to isolate, so instead we’ll use shots which has less information about the execution.

Using the league averages for conversion rate (finishing) and shots (creating), we can start to see if a team’s offense is struggling because it can’t finish or because it isn’t creating enough chances.  The upper right quandrant (teams that are above average at both creating and finishing) contains the MLS Cup Finalists and the number one seeds for each conference.  If we were going by conversion rate alone, Houston and Philadelphia would appear to have strong offenses, but in reality they were quite poor.

By looking at both dimensions, teams can start identifying the cause of their offensive woes more clearly.  Is it poor execution or lack of opportunities?  The approach to fixing it is drastically different.

    Ok, so we are starting to get a sense of the considerations that go into goal-scoring.  This last article is the cherry on top.  A Cornell professor writes the blog www.soccerquantified.com and has some absolutely amazing stats/charts and analysis.  This was submitted to his blog by a fellow named Ian Graham:

Why Shots From Free Kicks Are A Good Idea, Or At Least Not A Bad One

By Ian Graham  Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Here's my defence of free kick shots. Chris makes the point that FK shots are rare - it's a good point, but the really interesting question is what they're worth when you have the chance to perform one (after all penalties are rare, but clearly valuable). Chris showed that most teams failed to convert any direct FKs into goals, & that most of the teams that did manage it had poor conversion rates hovering around 5%.

But we can't compare direct FKs to other types of shot - they come from outside the box, by definition! So I looked at the Opta data that goes into the Castrol Rankings to try and benchmark FKs against other shots more fairly. The data set includes all shots except penalties recorded by Opta from the Premier League 10/11 season.

The results? First I found that "normal" shots from outside the box (i.e. not direct FKs) originate about 23.5 metres from the goal line, compared to 24.5 metres for direct FKs (see graph 1). I think that's close enough to say we're comparing like with like.

When we compare like with like, the true value of a direct FK is revealed! 4.5% of direct FKs are converted compared to only 2.6% of normal shots from outside the box. So, in an average situation a player might double his chances of scoring a goal by diving for a FK rather than taking a shot from open play.

I would say this is decent evidence that direct Free Kicks are a valuable resource. Phew. One final point of interest: Any sort of shot outside the box is clearly rubbish compared to one from inside the box.

Taken from www.soccerquantified.com.

Play The Odds:

Knowing that a pro scores 2.6% of the time from outside the 18, it begs the question why any player (or coach) would practice shots from that range.  Free kicks, sure, but not shots in open play.

One last key that is worth noting for young players would be simply to watch plenty of soccer.  It needn't all be Champions League stuff; your local colleges and semi-pro teams will offer just as effective modelling.  But before the actual finish, note the work done by the goal-scorer.  Runs made, options offered, passes completed and received, even the defensive work.  Most invisibly, watch what attackers do when they are not actively defending (1st defender) or covering (2nd defender) and how they position themselves to spark the attack when their teammates recover the ball.

With a sense of how hard an adult-level player (even an amateur one) works to get into scoring situations, young players can begin to incorporate team play into their skill set.

Young players might try these finishing exercises:

• Place a bench or board or other object in front of a goal (or goal-shaped target) to create rebounds; hit the object with a pass, then finish the rebound.
• Have a teammate play passes from the goal line to your feet and finish 1-time (both feet,) two-touch (both feet,) and take balls out of the air- chest, thigh - volley and/or settle to the ground to finish.  If you don't have a GK to train with, put a trash can or several backpacks on the ground in a rough approximation of the GK's position from where you'll be shooting and find the body position/angles you'll need to beat a GK.
• Start on the 18, give or take, even with or wider than the back post; run across the face of the goal toward the near post/corner of the goal area, and finish a ball rolled and/or tossed to you from just inside the side of the penalty area.  Think a short cross-type of a play.

Some additional data courtesy of FIFA.com...rough distances from goal for all the goals in the 2010FIFAWC:

Where the goals were scored from in 2010, South Africa World Cup:
Group matches (48 matches) 101
– Inside the goal area 22
– Inside the penalty area 56
– Outside the penalty area 16
– Penalties 7
Round of 16 (8 matches) 22
– Inside the goal area 5
– Inside the penalty area 12
– Outside the penalty area 3
– Penalties 2
Quarter-finals (4 matches) 10
– Inside the goal area 3
– Inside the penalty area 3
– Outside the penalty area 4
– Penalties 0
Semi-finals, match for third place 
and fi nal (4 matches) 12
– Inside the goal area 1
– Inside the penalty area 8
– Outside the penalty area 3
– Penalties 0
Overall (64 matches) 145
– Inside the goal area 31
– Inside the penalty area 79
– Outside the penalty area 26
– Penalties 9
82% of all goals were scored inside 18 yards.  hmmm....