Cesc Fabregas registered his 103 rd assist against Southampton in the most recent midweek set of fixtures.
The milestone moves him into second place in the all-time Premier League
assists table, second only to Ryan Giggs on 162 and one ahead of Frank Lampard.
The assist against the Saints for Diego Costa’s first goal of a brace was also Fabregas’
eighth of the season, joint sixth in the Premier
League assists table with fellow Blue Pedro, West Brom’s Matt Phillips, and Ross Barkley of Everton.
He is one of 22 players who have assisted six goals or more so far this season and,
of those 22 players, he has the best minutes per assist ratio.
Only two players have recorded an assist every 200 minutes or less, and only 11
have recorded one every 300 minutes or less: All of the top five in the assists table are
in this list, as are three of the four players on eight;
only Ross Barkley misses out, registering an assist every 328.3 minutes.
Barkley is, though, one of only three English players to have
six or more assists, along with Adam Lallana, also in the list above, and Raheem Sterling.
Assists are converted chances and when we look at chances created including assists,
Fabregas is once again producing them more regularly than any player currently in the
Premier League.
The list is actually topped by Dimitri Payet, incidentally one of only two
players on the ‘six assists’ list, along with Gylfi Sigurdsson, who has created more
than half their chances from set-pieces.
But Fabregas is second for minutes per chance created, one of
only 12 to create a chance every 45 minutes or less:
Several things stick out from these two lists: excluding Payet, the top three for both are
Fabregas, Kevin De Bruyne, and Christian Eriksen; Alexis Sanchez appears in both despite
playing half the season as a striker; and for all the heroics of Lukaku and Barkley
at Everton, the presence of Kevin Mirallas in both lists
surely indicates his quality and importance to the Toffees.
If we take assists away from chances created including assists, we get chances created
that are not converted.
So, for example, Payet created 74 chances for six assists, meaning he
created 68 chances that were not converted for a percentage conversion of 8.1%.
Eleven players have a chance created conversion of more than 15%:
We can see several things from this.
Firstly, Wilfried Zaha is hot at the moment; although he
is only creating a chance every 76 minutes, over a quarter of his chances yield an assist.
Secondly, Chelsea have four players with whom over 15% of their chances get converted into
assists and therefore goals, one of whom is Fabregas.
And lastly, that of our three lists so far, minutes per assist, minutes per chance, and
% of chances yielding an assist, only three players are present in all three: Cesc Fabregas,
Kevin De Bruyne, and Gylfi Sigurdsson.
These three players stand out, then, and for different reasons: De Bruyne is excelling
consistently, Sigurdsson is doing almost as well in a much poorer team, and Fabregas is
doing it despite being a relative bit-part player for Chelsea.
Three players, three different contexts, but all playing key creative roles for their sides.