Claudius Who are we being compared to? City? Chelsea? United? Liverpool who basically combined for as many passes as Vitinha the other day?
I couldn't really give a monkeys about what other teams are doing. I look at our team and see a lack of penetration. I see a lack of desire for penetration because we value keeping the ball more. I see lack of movement to create space and opportunity. Predictable passing patterns. Horseshoeing it around endlessly without any meaningful chance creation. Very little testing of opposition goalkeepers. Lack of urgency in progressing the ball from defence (outside of Raya).
We are top of the league and doing well to be there. But as a result naturally you'd expect we'd be amongst the leading, if not top, scorers in the league. City, with one game less and two more losses, are only 1 goal shy of us. We are ourselves only five goals better than last year, which was not a good year.
Qwiss no every team wouldn't have to improve altogether at once, they'd just have to become more defensive overall. Its a trend, its been happing since the start of last season. Look at the goals scored across the whole league, not just the top teams, its down all over.
20/21 - 822 goals (1st on 62; 2nd on 61)
21/22 - 861 goals (1st 73; 2nd 81)
22/23 - 856 goals (1st 74; 2nd 81)
23/24 - 1000 goals (1st 77; 2nd 71; 3rd 70)
24/25 - 915 goals (1st 72; 2nd 56)
25/26 - 845 goals (1st 61; 2nd 60)
Last year and the year before seem to be outlier years. This year is very much on par with the years prior to that, and we're still down on the scoring rates of the leading teams of those leagues, which for 22/23 included us on 74 goals at this point. In 22/23 we had Jesus and Nketiah leading the line with Martinelli and Saka either side, supported by Vieira, Trossard and Nelson. We're 13 goals down this year on our hotshots of 22/23, but there's roughly the same amount of goals in the league, so someone is scoring them, just not us.
