It is no secret the the standard of performance Celtic have experienced at the striker position has been very disappointing this season. This is a relatively short piece to quantify the severity of the issue, as well lay out how I go about analyzing performance using metrics like Expected Goals (xG) along with related ones.
We can see from this graphic that the non-penalty goal scoring rate (all metrics are per 90 minutes) is down from 0.589 average in the prior 8 seasons to just 0.251 this season. Notably, xG and post-shot xG (PSxG) are down less, with xG down the equivalent of one relatively poor quality (0.057 xG) chance per 90 minutes.
Given non-penalty xG for the team is down almost 17% versus last season, that 11% decline suggests that “getting onto the end of chances” has not been the major issue, overall. While not shown, xG per shot is actually up 4% versus the long-term average.
But before I get into more specifics, I created this video to walk through Tomas Cvancara’s four shots in Sunday’s victory over Dundee as a way to contextualize the metrics in the first graphic:
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