Who are the worst shooters in the Premier League?

It happens every weekend, in almost every Premier League game. The home team gains possession and start to pin the opposition into the defensive third. They cycle the ball across the field, as all 11 defenders scramble to maintain their shape and prevent any passes from breaking their lines.

Eventually, the ball finds its way to a midfielder, some 30 yards from goal. There’s no pressure on him, so he’s able to step on the ball and roll it forward. Frustrated by the lack of danger created from all the passing, the home fans rise up, mostly in unison, and scream that godforsaken five-letter-word: “SHOOT!”

With the entire stadium egging him on, the midfielder dials in his form, tries to keep his chest over the ball, makes sure to follow through and land on his shooting foot. This is one of the most talented soccer players in the world, and he has time and space to do the thing he has been doing since he could walk.

So, inevitably … the shot ends up in the 20th row of the stands, some lucky fan gets to see how much a $170 soccer ball weighs, the pressure disappears, and the other team gets a goal kick.

Through 11 Premier League games this season, there have been 372 shots attempted from open play from outside the penalty area. Just 104 have landed on target, while 134 have missed the frame and the other 134 were blocked by defenders. And of those 372 attempts, only 27 ended up as goals.

In this supposedly analytical era of pro sports, there are still teams and players throwing away hundreds of possessions at the behest of some primal urge that gets awoken on a 50,000 square-mile island every weekend. Who are the worst offenders? Let’s see if we can figure out the Premier League’s worst shooters.

The slow death of the bad shot

While there’s some disagreement on the cause, there is no argument over what’s happening: Premier League teams are taking fewer long-range shots each season. Some blame analytics — the obvious-but-previously-unheeded insight from expected goals (xG) is that it’s easier to score when you shoot from closer to the goal. This is soccer’s version of two is more than three, passing is easier than running and walks count the same as singles.

I don’t totally buy this as the explanation because I still don’t think analytics are having much of an impact on the way most teams are run. And I think it might be having even less of an impact on how managers manage. This is the way it went in every other sport: the outsiders had a clearer path to front office positions, so an analytics-friendly executive would get hired and then have to grapple with a coach who had his own theories about how the game needed to be played. Just go read (or watch) “Moneyball” to see what I mean.

Whatever the cause, things are changing at a remarkably consistent rate. While there are fluctuations from season to season, the trend is quite clear. In Pep Guardiola’s first season managing Manchester City in the Premier League, teams were shooting from 17 meters from goal, on average. By the end of last season, that number had dipped all the way down to 15.5 meters.

If we just look at attempts from outside the box and inside the box, the shift is even starker. In 2009, just over half of the shots in a Premier League match would come from inside the penalty area. So far this season, more than two-thirds of attempts have come from inside the penalty area.

In large part, teams are right to do this. So far this season, they’ve scored with 14.7% of all of their open-play attempts. In other words, the average shot has ended up in the goal more than twice as often as the average shot from outside the box.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. There’s the game-theory aspect — if you don’t shoot from distance sometimes, then won’t your opponent stop defending the long-range shots? And wouldn’t that have a twofold effect? Both making the long shots more likely to go in (because they’re not being defended) and the close shots less likely to go in (because they’re now being more aggressively defended). On top of that, just because a shot didn’t go in, it doesn’t mean that it didn’t lead to something else — a penalty, a free kick, a deflection to a better-positioned player, a corner kick — that then led to a goal.

Broadly, though, long shots are bad shots. Even when Vincent Kompany scored from 30 yards out against Leicester City with 20 minutes left in the second-to-last match of the 2018-19 season, all of his teammates were screaming, out loud or in their own heads, for him to pass the freaking ball:

Man City won the league by a single point and Kompany’s goal ended up being decisive. But the reason City were in that position in the first place is that they managed to lead the league in shot attempts while attempting them, on average, from 16 meters away — the second-shortest mark in the league.

Who are the worst shooting teams in the Premier League?

Despite the downward distance trend and all of the data in its favor, lots of teams and lots of players are still letting rip from long range. For today, we’re not really concerned with the outcomes of the attempts — we just want to identify who is making the worst decisions.

We’ll start with Nuno Espirito Santo’s Nottingham Forest — they’re the league’s last true defend-deep-and-counter side. That has made them, truly, one of the best defensive teams in the league. But instead of pairing that with the kind of shots we’d expect from a counter-attacking side — high-quality attempts from inside the penalty area — they’re settling for lots of long-range shots from outside the box.

In fact, Forest are bottom of the league for shots attempted from inside the penalty area and for how far they shoot from. They’re way, way, way below everyone else:

In the above, you can also see how Manchester City have struggled without Rodri and Kevin De Bruyne. The team that made the pull-back tap-in an art form are currently attempting a higher percentage of shots from outside the penalty area than all but one other team in the league.

On the flip side of the coin, unsurprisingly, are Brentford. I, for one, can’t believe that the most aggressively data-driven team across Europe’s “Big Five” top leagues are shooting from closer to goal than everyone else and averaging a league-high rate of 0.15 xG per shot. This, also, has been the case for pretty much every single season since they entered the Premier League in 2021.

Who takes the worst shots in the Premier League?

When we get to individual players and the shots they decide to take, it’s a bit harder to draw too many conclusions from this season. Only 27 players have attempted even 20 shots from open play across the first 11 Premier League matches.

Among the high-volume players, though, there’s one clear candidate for worst shooter in the league: Chelsea’s Noni Madueke. He has attempted 28 shots from open play. Only Bournemouth’s Antoine Semenyo, Manchester City’s Erling Haaland and Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah have attempted more. But the combined xG of all of Madueke’s attempts has been just 2.09, or 0.07 xG per shot — the worst mark among all the players to attempt at least 20 shots.

Except, it’s not that he’s giving in to the screaming fans. He’s rarely shooting from outside the box. Instead, he’s mostly taking shots from terrible angles. I once saw an Instagram video of Madueke practicing cutting the ball back onto his left foot and shooting, over and over and over again. I’m not saying that’s why his shot map looks like this, but I am saying that this is the shot map I would expect from a player who makes that an outsize part of his training regimen.

To his credit, Madueke has scored four times from these attempts. The training is working! But we’ll see if he can keep that up for a full season. On the other side of the right-wing spectrum would be Tottenham’s Brennan Johnson — a player who rarely creates shots for himself but uses his elite-level speed to get on the end of high-quality chances in the center of the box:

There are some other forwards who take terrible shots and lots of shots. Notably, two of them — Mohammed Kudus and Jarrod Bowen — play for West Ham. Among players with at least 15 shots so far this season, Bowen is taking the worst shots: 0.06 xG per attempt.

Manchester City’s Phil Foden and Crystal Palace’s Eddie Nketiah have each attempted 14 shots, and they’re tied with Bowen on 0.06 xG per attempt. After finishing with nearly nine more goals than expected last season, Foden has been taking worse shots this season and he hasn’t converted a single one.

But none of these players quite fit what I initially set out to find: the guy who continues to dial his own number even when the phones are down, the player who wants to land on the Premier League’s goals of the season list from 2002, the midfielder with a short-term memory who isn’t afraid to smash a beer out of that guy’s hands who’s sitting 30 yards behind the goal.

For that, this season, there’s only one candidate: Brighton’s 20-year-old midfielder, Carlos Baleba. He has attempted 16 shots this season from an average of 23.4 meters away. He has scored one goal this season, but that came from his one shot from inside the penalty area:

To zero down on the type of shot we want, I filtered out any shots that don’t occur in the center third of the field. And then I only looked at a block of space 12 yards beyond the circle at the top of the penalty area. It’s arbitrary, but it includes the kinds of shots we want — the ones where players think they can score even though they rarely do — and eliminates attempts where a player thinks he can chip a goalkeeper who is off of his line.

In this area, Baleba has attempted 10 shots — three more than any player and four more than any player who hasn’t scored a goal from this area. Baleba is averaging a shot from the “SHOOT!” zone with every 5.9 touches he takes in that part of the field.

However, you only really get egged on by the fans when you’re at home. (Pro tip: A savvy fanbase would stay silent when their home players had the ball in this area, but go absolutely wild screaming “SHOOT” when their away opponents occupied this base.) And at the American Express Stadium, Baleba has only attempted five of these shots.

Instead, the leader would be Chelsea full-back Malo Gusto, who has let rip from this range six times at Stamford Bridge. In fact, he’s shooting from this area with every third shot he takes. He hasn’t scored — he has scored zero goals in league play … in his entire professional career. Maybe he wants it too much? He has killed six Chelsea possessions for shots worth a combined total of 0.23 xG.

Still, that’s only six shots, and we’re still at the stage of the season where one huge chance close to goal can massively boost a player’s xG total and pull down his average shot-attempt distance. Now, if we look at last season too, Gusto is still averaging a shot with every fourth touch he takes in this zone during home matches — the lowest ratio for any player still in the league with at least five attempts.

However, he didn’t attempt a single one of these fan-approved shots last season, so we’ll have to keep an eye on him, rather than say that he’s the most easily influenced shot-taker in the league. If he keeps it up, Gusto will get there. But if he keeps it up, I can’t imagine that someone on Chelsea’s staff won’t pick up on it and either tell him to stop or just, you know, stop selecting him in the starting 11.

Instead, we’re going to crown co-champions for the most impressionable shooter in the Premier League. Neither name should come as a huge surprise to anyone who has watched the Premier League over the past decade.

Since the start of last season, only two players have attempted more than 13 shots from the “SHOOT!” zone during home matches, and they’ve both attempted 19. They’re both 30 years old. They’re both volatile, overly confident, visibly skilled players. They both, probably, would’ve been better fits for a previous era when everyone built their teams around a single attacking midfielder. And they’re both averaging between seven and eight touches for every shot they’ve taken from this zone.

The players: Aston Villa’s Ross Barkley and Manchester United’s Bruno Fernandes. For the seasons with data available on the site FBref, Fernandes has never gone a full season without averaging shots from at least 21 yards from goal, while Barkley has never been afraid to shoot despite only scoring 7% of the shots he has attempted in his career.