People often talk about team form, or streaks.
This team have won five on the bounce; that team haven’t scored in three matches.
Form can show whether a team has responded well to a tough run of fixtures, or is in
a slump, and long runs of bad form could be an indicator that a team has lost faith in
its manager, or isn’t coping with the absence of a key player.
But we rarely talk about player streaks in detail.
While a player might be said to be on a hot streak of scoring, aside from sites like WhoScored
that generate ratings, it’s tough to track whether players are generally performing well
in streaks or not.
Serie A this season has seen two dominant teams, a cluster of second tier sides vying
for European qualification, and a spread below that; Benevento, though, are propping up the
table and seem adrift even from SPAL and Verona.
After 25 matches, the Serie A table looks like this:The teams streaks are of interest,
too.
While top sides Napoli and Juventus have won the most games in a row, it’s actually fifth
side Inter who have gone the most games without losing; Inter also have the most draws on
the bounce, including a bizarre recent run of four 1-1 draws in a row.
Only Verona and Benevento have gone five games without scoring, while Crotono have failed
to net four times in a row.
Benevento have lost 14 games in a row.
It’s little wonder they are bottom, but they’ve had two wins in a row, which is
better than either Verona or SPAL have managed.In Serie A, only seven players have scored double
figures or more.
Ciro Immobile leads the ways with 22 goals scored.Icardi has carried Inter, to a degree,
while Napoli, Juventus, and Roma have clearly relied less on one goal scorer.
If we look at the two top scorers, Immobile and Icardi, both have only missed three games
for their team this season.
Add in Fabio Quagliarella, who has played all but one match, and you can see in more
detail how these three have performed.Immobile has the highest total for games with consecutive
scoring, a good indicator that if he scores in one game, he is most likely of these players
to score in the next game too.
He also has the highest cumulative total, which is found by adding number of goals within
an unbroken scoring run – Immobile scored seven in four and also has six in three games
from earlier in the season.
Icardi, on the other hand, scores less often in long runs, but his longest scoreless streak
is shorter; Icardi has not gone three games in a row without scoring this season so far,
though he could do this when he returns to the side, having failed to play in the last
three Inter games and not having scored in the two games prior to that.
Indeed, if you were a gambler, you might suggest that the best time to back Icardi to score
is when he has failed to score in the previous two games.
Quagliarella has the lowest cumulative total, and the longest scoreless streak but apart
from that, there’s little to choose between him and Icardi, which reflects well on the
Sampdoria player, given his age and the side he plays for.
If we look at the other big scorers in Serie A, we can see that Mertens is very streaky:
only once this season has Mertens scored and NOT gone on to score in the next game in the
league, against Cagliari; in his defence, he scored in the game before the Cagliari
match, but it was a Champions League fixture against Feyenoord.
Higuain is quite streaky: he scored in four Serie A games in a row in October and November
for five goals, and got five in three in February.
Dybala got eight goals in four games in August and September but has not scored in consecutive
matches in Serie A since and Edin Dzeko scored in four Serie A games in a row between the
home win against Verona in September and the away win against AC Milan in October, but
he too has not scored in consecutive games since.
Of course, the next stage for this sort of analysis is to look at fixtures, whether teams
face a run of easier sides and strikers exploit this, and to see individual game xG figures
to see whether some games just generate better chances in runs.
Strikers do not operate in a vacuum, and are responsive to the chances generated.
What is clear, though, is that some strikers feast in short bursts, like Dybala and Mertens,
while others, like Icardi, get ones and twos with regularity.
Whether this is due to intangibles like confidence or due to runs of teams played is not clear,
but it’s the next thing to explore.