Why can’t we score goals? (Not the Wout bashing thread)

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Hoof The Ball said:
We do.

https://www.premierleague.com/stats/top/clubs/big_chance_created?se=210

We are 6th highest in the league, however, Arsenal are only one place higher with the 5th most big chances this season and it has been sufficient enough for them to bag 81 goals thus far, so, the statistics argue for chance creation being sufficient.

The major issue isn't isn't big chance creation, but big chance conversion.
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I'm not sure what the methodology is but it's hard to take a table seriously when it claims Bournemouth created more chances than Arsenal this season.
 
I mean, we were hardly blessed for goals as it was, but we've essentially replaced Ronaldo, Cavani and a certain discredited forward with Weghorst.

Hardly a surprise we are struggling to score.
 
DWelbz19 said:
No bagsmen in our squad. No idea if these are true because anyone can say things on twitter, but these sound very believable just looking with your eyes:

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How do they define a big chance? I remember plenty of easy tap-ins by City players but I don't remember many simple misses by our players.
 
The reason is because we create very few clear chances and we don't have a striker as well. City, Liverpool, Arsenal create plenty of chances and half chances and we don't match that. I don't remember Antony assisting with a cross all season, Rashford only finishes chances and there is no body in the middle especially with Wout/Martial/Sabitzer stinking up.
 
Martial, Sancho, Antony, Weghorst have all been abysmal in the final third. All season. They're all anti-forwards.

Rashford and Bruno also miss absurd numbers of easy chances, although they play a much bigger part in chance creation so it's easier to forgive.
 
Production in the front line is pathetic. Even if we get a striker who'll get us 20, the RW positions offers the square root of feck all in terms of goals or assists.
 
In fairness to Rashford, he’s improved and is doing the business but can still be erratic in the final 3rd.
But everyone else is shite. Bare minimum, a top striker is needed: Kane/Osimhen.
But a pacy right winger who can score 10-15 and assist every season too.
 
The drop in Fernandes’s goal production has been costly, he’s been playing more of a midfield role and done his part for the team. But I think his best role is off the striker and making sneaky runs into the box and in behind. He does that a lot less these days than he did under Ole. It’s not just a positional fault, he’s missed plenty of chances too. But 6 league goals is poor by his standards, we would be hoping for 10-15.
 
SadlerMUFC said:
For me, the biggest problem is that our wingers try too hard to score individual goals more often than they look to assist
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Partly because we don’t have a decent CF I would say. Even Ronaldo struggled to get into the box.
 
Someone said:
It's not just missing a top CF, it's our entire forward line, they rarely can finish it's a surprise some of them have kids.

Bruno and Antony specifically have missed an incredible amount of chances this season, add to that the general selfishness and the poor decision making.
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Bruno and Antony are underperforming their xG by one and one and a half goals respectively. Fans tend to remember the chances they have missed, but, on the other hand, they forget the low probability chances they have converted. This notion that we are creating bags of chances but we can't finish our meal is plain false.

We are underperforming in the attacking third by about 9 goals, but you can't put this on one or two players. All our players are, give or take a couple of goals, about where they should be statistically. The problem isn't finishing, it (mostly) lies elsewhere: Our xG, according to Understat, is 58,22. In contrast, City's xG is 76,12 Arsenal's 74,56, Liverpool's 72,09 and Newcastle's is 65,57. Even if we had scored all our chances, we would still struggle to reach their expected goals stats. That's why we're currently 6th on the xPTS table, behind both Liverpool and Brighton. Missed chances or not, our ceiling is still very low.

That's why we need to find a way to contextualize stats posted on Tweeter. I showed the post in this thread to a colleague of mine and he replied with this and with the question "So, the problem is Rashford?". Obviously, not. Take a closer look at the number of combinations between Arsenal players, there's something to be learned there.

We can fork out 100 million to get Kane, and he will make us better because he's a world-class player. What he won't do is provide us with a significant variety of options. And options is what we lack. We are a team that does one thing on the pitch: Try to play a quick pass to Bruno, who, in turn, tries to get Rashford in-behind. Kane will provide another option for the long-ball in behind and he can also interchange with Bruno when one comes deep to receive the ball and the other makes a run in the box. If people believe that this is enough to win the title, fair enough. People also believed that all we needed was an out-and-out defensive midfielder with enough energy to screen the defence. Well, we got him and, surprise-surprise, we are on our way to let in close to 50 goals. Football rarely works like that. The same with the RvP mentions. Brilliant forward and an absolute joy to watch, no doubt about that. He led us to that 12-13 title. The difference is that United already knew how to get 80+ goals in the league. We scored more in the previous season when we lost the title on the final day. Yes, tactical adjustments were necessary to get the best out of the chances RvP could create for himself, but the basis of a good team was already there. We "had" 25 goals for our striker, we just knew that neither Rooney (any more) nor Welbeck could get them for us. City are doing the same with Haaland now. United aren't there yet.

There's a lot of work to be done. In a team that wants to play with inverted wingers and a forward that drops deep to open up runs in-behind from the midfield, meaning that the attack is by default very narrow, you need to control the midfield and generate link-up plays in the tight spaces between the lines. And the worrying thing isn't that we lack these things. It's that we don't seem to even care about them. Then there's the notion that Kane plus a Hazard/Bale type of winger will do the job with their individual brilliance. They may do just that, but it won't last. Both Conte and Mourinho did just that at Chelsea, but everything went down to ashes once their team's cycle was completed.
 
The obvious answer is the glaring omission of a top CF in the team, but Arsenal don't have a prolific striker either and manage to share the goals out quite well.

We're also astonishingly bad at set pieces given we have guys like Bruno, Eriksen and Shaw capable of good delivery. That could add another 5-10 goals a season if we were any good.

It's clear we need a CF in the summer, and a top one at that. But does he add to Rashford's goals, or will we see a drop-off in Rashford's numbers if we had a Osimhen there? Do we have the creative players to accommodate a top No. 9 on the wings, or will Bruno be the only creative force in the team?

EtH needs to solve it in the summer as a top, top priority. We need to hit 80 goals a season in the PL minimum you'd think to even come near City.

I think we have a Harry Kane shaped hole in the team but I don't know if he's available or worth the cost at his age.
 
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One factor we don't talk about enough is the lack of combinations in and around the box. I don't know if this is down to a lack of proper coaching or our players not being intelligent enough to apply the patterns they are being thought, but our attacking play (bar on counters) is extremely poor compared to other top teams. It seems like our players haven't got a clue how they're supposed to pass and move to create chances and that is my biggest worry for the team.
 
A huge part of it is just down to a lack of an elite striker with the instincts needed to score frequently.

Putting the chances we've missed to one side for a second, there have been loads of times where we've seen a cross put into the box that nobody has been on the end of, or shots that have been parried into dangerous areas that nobody has followed up.

For the strengths he does have, this is an area of Martial's game that's really lacking. He completely lacks these instincts, and it inhibits him from being a truly effective striker. Weghorst is better at it but is hindered by being slow and technically deficient.

People talk about our chance creation being off but I think that is primarily a result of a lack of a focal point for these chances; our interplay in the final third is actually quite good at this stage but it's often all fart and no shite because nobody is making the movement that turns good interplay into a goalscoring opportunity.
 
redIndianDevil said:
The reason is because we create very few clear chances and we don't have a striker as well. City, Liverpool, Arsenal create plenty of chances and half chances and we don't match that. I don't remember Antony assisting with a cross all season, Rashford only finishes chances and there is no body in the middle especially with Wout/Martial/Sabitzer stinking up.
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Yeah our chance creation stats are diabolical
 
Look what we have at United, then compare to City and Arsenal (top 2) and see how we can overcome them:

------------------ Striker ---------
Rashford ----- Bruno -----------Antony


City

------------------Haaland ------------
Grealish ---------KdB -------------- B. Silva


Arsenal

-------------------------Jesus ------------
Martinelli -------Odegaard-------- Saka



Would buy a WC striker be enough? City's and Arsenal's attack are full of creativity, whilst us...
 
Too many people in this thread putting it down to poor finishing and lack of a striker. Our xG shows we're not creating enough chances. We'd have more goals if we matched our xG but it still wouldn't be impressive. We're simply still not nearly good enough at opening up defences and creating attacking openings. The lack of fluidity and attacking patterns we've talked about for years remains a problem.
 
It's the players unfortunately. Other than Rashford, who the heck in the forward line is going to score those goals or even has the quality to do so in great numbers? Bruno, Eriksen and even Casemiro are/can be very creative players and Bruno can get double figures easily but let's look at the forward options:

  • Antony- i like him and he still could get 10 goals for the season but that's not a lot. It is his first season though
  • Sancho- meh! not sure he's suited to this league. Two seasons here and probably likely to get under 8 goals in each season.
  • Garnacho- still young and learning
  • Wout- let's not go there
  • Martial- let's not go there mk. 2
A side issue, but the right-back role is an obvious reference point for another aspect of our blunt attack. Luke Shaw on the left is a very creative player that can supply the strikers but AWB and Dalot, not so much.

Also, and i'm probably going to get pelters from the positivity police on here, but I do wonder if Rashford can be more of a supporting player rather than the main man in the attack. I'm not bashing him, he's been our POTY, but his instinct this year has been to shoot whenever possible (and thank god or else we'd never fecking score a goal!). But if you put a lethal striker in the number 9 role and I wonder if he might get a bit pissed off at our Marcus (and Antony as well for that matter). Merely conjecture at the moment but it is something i wonder about.
 
Let's see. Upfront we have a Not a Striker, an average sick note, a lampost and not to mention (but still mentioning) The Suspended One with the occasional (thankfully) appearance from the new bambi.
On the sides we have the one trick pony and Mr soft as a baby's bum.
So, our goal scoring with this lot is pretty much par for course.
 
We can't score goals because we don't have goalscorers. It was always the problem going into this season and if something drastic isn't done in the summer it's pointless to even get into the Champions League or have any notion of launching a serious title attempt in the league next season.

We have players who can create, and we have players who can get into dangerous positions, but we don't have players we can count on to finish off chances. With all the good chances we've squandered this season we could easily have 20 more goals than we currently do.
 
We lack footballing IQ in the final third and the players that display it are also the least aggressive (Sancho and Martial). The player that shoots almost the most out of anyone in the squad is a RW that sucks at finishing. We've lacked a fit decent striker all year (our options have been a finished Ronaldo, crocked Martial, or he who must not be named). Bruno hasn't been great as a finisher this year. And in many bigger games we struggle to impose territory on our opponents, which means we have to play more direct which in turn relies on lethal finishing. Our fullbacks aren't particularly creative outside of Shaw. The last time we were a great attacking team was 19/20, where you had Rashford/Martial/Greenwood who were all lethal in front of goal and dangerous on the break, with Pogba and Bruno providing them service. Compare that to now and it's a bit more obvious
 
Isotope said:
Look what we have at United, then compare to City and Arsenal (top 2) and see how we can overcome them:

------------------ Striker ---------
Rashford ----- Bruno -----------Antony


City

------------------Haaland ------------
Grealish ---------KdB -------------- B. Silva


Arsenal

-------------------------Jesus ------------
Martinelli -------Odegaard-------- Saka



Would buy a WC striker be enough? City's and Arsenal's attack are full of creativity, whilst us...
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Bruno and Rashford don't look out of place compared to their positions. Its the striker and Antony where things take a significant nosedive.
 
Murder on Zidane's Floor said:
So the stats back up my observations, interesting.
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Honestly I don’t think we create that many good chances at all. What we do tend to focus on is a long ball over the top to Rashford. There seems to be very little variation in our play except from that. So it’s easy to see why Bruno and he dominate the attacking stats as we tend to focus on that one thing.

There was actually a map of Bruno’s chances created about a month ago on here and when you look at it it paints a picture of how poor in general we are as a team at creating quality chances.

A striker will hopefully improve this stat but the team itself needs to get much better at creating quality chances. As like I said I don’t think we create that many quality chances.
 
El Jefe said:
Bruno and Rashford don't look out of place compared to their positions. Its the striker and Antony where things take a significant nosedive.
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True. If we're going with Rashford, we need at least one good playmaker of those Striker and RW positions.
 
Todd said:
We can't score goals because we don't have goalscorers. It was always the problem going into this season and if something drastic isn't done in the summer it's pointless to even get into the Champions League or have any notion of launching a serious title attempt in the league next season.

We have players who can create, and we have players who can get into dangerous positions, but we don't have players we can count on to finish off chances. With all the good chances we've squandered this season we could easily have 20 more goals than we currently do.
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Its true. If we started the season without Ronaldo then instead of Antony I imagine we spend big on a CF, since we have sancho and Pellistri. Unfortunately that all happened later rather than sooner.

still though, January we should have signed someone instead of Weghorst.
 
croadyman said:
Along with no one to keep and progress the ball effectively through the midfield
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I no longer worry about us creatively though. Whilst being 4th on the log, We are third in the league in big chances created with 72. Yet we have just 49 goals! 2nd placed Arsenal in comparison are down in 6th place with just 67. Yet have 86 goals! That tells the tale of what we truly lack.
 
TheRedHearted said:
Its true. If we started the season without Ronaldo then instead of Antony I imagine we spend big on a CF, since we have sancho and Pellistri. Unfortunately that all happened later rather than sooner.

still though, January we should have signed someone instead of Weghorst.
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We couldn't afford to. That's why ended up with Wout. The alternative was no one.
 
Skills said:
Production in the front line is pathetic. Even if we get a striker who'll get us 20, the RW positions offers the square root of feck all in terms of goals or assists.
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This is to be seen. The way Antony played for us is distinguishable different than how he played for Ajax with Haller as CF. You can easily pull some highlight of last season Ajax CL games on Youtube and see that he tried more to cross, or passing to players in central position making stride toward opposition goal.

He is morphing to a eight forward for us which he's not that good in this role that demand hard number in term of goals.
 
Red Indian Chief Torn Rubber said:
I no longer worry about us creatively though. Whilst being 4th on the log, We are third in the league in big chances created with 72. Yet we have just 49 goals! 2nd placed Arsenal in comparison are down in 6th place with just 67. Yet have 86 goals! That tells the tale of what we truly lack.
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Surely we need to be keeping the ball better
 
I'd say the main issues are striker obviously, but also having a high chance creation fullback (City get by without but they're miles ahead of us at chance creation, and guys like Trippier and TAA and Robertson do a lot for their less possession intensive teams), keeper who can pass, and then Antony being in his first year and maybe being a year or two away from creating more for others.

If next year's lineup is:

-----------------Kane--------------
Rashford-----Bruno-----Antony
-------------#8------Casemiro------
Shaw-------------------------Frimpong
---------Lisandro---Varane------------
-----------------Keeper---------------------

then I think we'll score a healthy number of goals.
 
KeanoMagicHat said:
The drop in Fernandes’s goal production has been costly, he’s been playing more of a midfield role and done his part for the team. But I think his best role is off the striker and making sneaky runs into the box and in behind. He does that a lot less these days than he did under Ole. It’s not just a positional fault, he’s missed plenty of chances too. But 6 league goals is poor by his standards, we would be hoping for 10-15.
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You're right about the lack of production (although he missed some absolute sitters) and 10 is a better spot for this season considering our lack of potency in attack but I actually think I prefer him in his new role, only needs to give the ball away a little less. He's pumping out great passes one after another. He can always rotate from centre mid to 10 mid-game if needed though. That said, I hope we never see him on the right side ever again.
 
TheRedHearted said:
Its true. If we started the season without Ronaldo then instead of Antony I imagine we spend big on a CF, since we have sancho and Pellistri. Unfortunately that all happened later rather than sooner.

still though, January we should have signed someone instead of Weghorst.
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Sancho stunk up the first two games as RW, that forced us to go back for a RW, which Antony happened to be top of the list because they left the responsibility to pick target to ETH.

The overrating of Pellistri is ridiculous now. People have a point about not shoehorn WW as no 10 and moving other players out of positions, so Pellistri should have gotten a chance. However, when it come to competition between the other wing attackers, I don't see what people see in Pellistri, that people can say he's good enough to even have bigger role if we didn't buy Antony or another winger. He's way down the talent ladder. People talk like he's on Garnacho level that ETH won't play Pellistri because some kind of favoritism for Antony, Sancho. Some decent raw attribute doesn't make you that much of a player. Pellistri may possibly be the new Tosic of today where he would end up less recognized at top flight football than Weghorst in Bundesliga.
 
11101 said:
It's quite a simple explanation.


Strikers in the first PL team:
Eric Cantona
Mark Hughes

Strikers in the Double Double team:
Eric Cantona
Any Cole
Ole Gunnar Solksjaer

Strikers in the Treble team:
Dwight Yorke
Andy Cole
Teddy Sheringham
Ole Gunnar Solksjaer

Strikers in the early 2000s team:
Ruud Van Nistelrooy
Ole Gunnar Solksjaer
Diego Forlan

Strikers in the 2008 team:
Cristiano Ronaldo
Wayne Rooney
Carlos Tevez
Louis Saha

Strikers in the last title season:
Robin Van Persie
Wayne Rooney
Javier Hernandez
Danny Welbeck


Our success over the years has largely correlated with the number and quality of the strikers in our team.

Strikers in the 2023 team:
Wout Weghorst
Anthony Martial
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This, basically.

Also.

Strikers who recently left the club:
Lukaku
Cavani
Greenwood
Ronaldo

Strikers who recently joined the club:
Weghorst

Promising young striker playing for U-21s:
N/A

One thing’s for sure. Our goal drought was nothing if not predictable.
 
croadyman said:
Surely we need to be keeping the ball better
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Yes. But that is about control. We still have to upgrade our starting 8 to some one with the required physicality and game control ability with passing. Upgrade our main sub's for the starting pair (Fred and Scot) and to top it all get in a striker who can hold up the ball and link play in additon to consistent goals. That's the next step in evolution for this team. Lacking these things is why were are so poor away from home as compared to our home form in the league.
 
I think it’s important to keep in mind that Ten Hag started the season with Ronaldo and Martial as his two #9s

And Ronaldo has probably played more minutes this season?
 
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