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Earlier this week, Mark Taylor, an analyst who’s worked with a number of Premier League clubs, confirmed the continuation of a trend: bad shots are disappearing.

mark taylor @MarkTaylor0

The continuing influence of #xG on declining open play shooting distances since 2014-15, although with crowds largely absent last season there were batches of games where teams went slightly rogue.

July 28th 2021

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Since 2013-14, the average distance of the average shot in the average Premier League game has declined almost every year:

-13-14: 17.9 meters
-14-15: 17.4
-15-16: 17.2
-16-17: 17.0
-17-18: 16.8
-18-19: 16.5
-19-20: 16.0
-20-21: 16.3

Is this directly because of expected goals? I’m not so sure. Every top coach is aware of the stat at this point, and most players are, too. Arsene Wenger cited it in a press conference years ago and Thomas Tuchel did the same a couple months back. The majority of coaches aren’t building their approaches based on what xG data shows them and what xG data means for the way the sport works -- Tuchel might be, though -- but it’s become hard for managers to deny that shots closer to the goal are more likely to end up in the net than shots from farther away. It’s like the current state of things in American football, I think. The majority of NFL coaches aren’t data-fluent, tradition-challenging mavericks; I doubt they give a shit about expected points; and yet most of them are tilting the balance of their play-calling toward passing over running. It’s the same situation with soccer. Thunder-bastards aren’t a best practice anymore. 

Just for fun, here’s a plot of everyone who played 900 minutes in the Premier League last season -- their average shot distance compared to the number of shots they take per 90 minutes. I highlighted the two guys who both A) take a lot of shots, and B) take a lot of bad shots:

Now, given that Arsenal have been rumored to be interested in Ruben Neves this summer -- to pair with Thomas Partey, to create a midfield that most closely resembles me yelling “KOBE” as I do a fadeaway jumper with a banana peel and miss the garbage can by two feet  -- I may have already negated my second point, but there are exceptions to every rule. While I can tell you that there are almost no clubs in Europe’s Big Five leagues that are operating, top down, by what we’ll call, crudely, the “Moneyball” model -- evidence-based decision making, actively trying to objectively quantify the value of what happens on a soccer field, etc. -- almost every team has at least one data analyst, if not more. Anyone can click over to FBref and sort through all the amazing information they’ve made available for free. There is at least an ambient awareness of what not to do: don’t sign old guys, don’t pay for a hot finishing season. Much like how teams couldn’t really ignore the logic behind taking shots from closer to the goal frame, perhaps these basic ideas have also seeped into the way the top teams do business.

Take the 25 most-expensive transfers of the summer so far, per Transfermarkt. Fourteen of the 25 deals were a “bargain”, based on the site’s crowd-sourced valuations of the players, including Manchester United’s summer-high £76.50 million paid to Borussia Dortmund for the 21-year-old Jadon Sancho. This is a crude way of looking at it, but it’s not completely useless, either. The biggest “overpay” was Crystal Palace spending 21 million pounds on Chelsea’s Marc Guehi, who the site valued at 9 million. That’s a lot of money for a player who’s never made an appearance in a professional first-division -- he was on loan at Swansea City in the Championship last season and never played a league game at Stamford Bridge -- but he’s English, which now adds an even bigger premium to player fees thanks to Brexit, and he’s only 21. Among the nine “overpays”, only one of the players was older than 24: the 27-year-old Colombian striker Jhon Cordoba, who moved from Hertha Berlin to Krasnodar in the Russian Premier League. In fact, the average age of the 25 most-expensive players this summer is just 23.12. A top player’s prime typically runs from around 24 through 29. When teams decide to spend big on players now, it seems like a lot more of them are making sure that they’re getting all of a player’s peak years. They’re paying for the future, rather than the past. For comparison, let’s go back to 2013-14, or the last year before everyone started to creep toward the goal. Among the top 25 most expensive players that season, just five registered as “bargains”, and the average age was 24.32.

Now, no team can subsist on a diet of exclusively close-range shots, and most teams can’t just fill their entire roster with 21 year olds. And as the market shifts drastically in one direction, it starts to create value where it used to not exist. As the best teams in the world have become more and more attack-oriented, we’ve seen teams like Atletico Madrid, Leicester City, and Lille win their leagues with defense-first approaches. As the NBA shifts more and more toward three-pointers and layups, mid-range artistes -- yes, the “e” is supposed to be there -- can still flourish. And in the NFL, the two smartest franchises in the league, the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens, have found success by exploiting the run game against defenses that have just begun to shift their resources toward defending the pass.

Earlier this year, researchers at KU Leuven, the university in Belgium that produced the Euro 2020 predictions we highlighted earlier this summer, published a paper at this year’s Sloan Sports analytics conference titled, “Leaving Goals on the Pitch: Evaluating Decision Making in Soccer”. It was based on the premise that while, yes, a low-probability shot is worse than a higher-probability shot, sometimes the probability of achieving a high-probability shot from a given location on the field is so low that attempting a long-range shot is actually the right decision. As they concluded:

First, we looked at whether shooting or moving in a location outside the penalty box would be more likely to yield a goal in the next one to two actions. We found that for each team, there are several specific areas where shooting tends to be the superior decision than attempting to move the ball in the hope of generating a better shot down the line. Second, we reasoned about what would happen if a team increased or decreased their frequency of shooting from distance over the course of a season. Our analysis indicates that teams are leaving goals on the pitch with their current shooting policies. If they were to increase their frequency of shooting from distance from a limited number of specific areas, they would be expected to score about one additional goal over the course of a season.

On top of the quantifiable aspects, long-range shots are necessary in order to create the space for short-range shots. Success in strategic games requires at least some degree of mixed strategy. If a team or a player never shoots from distance and the opposing defense doesn’t have to worry about it, they can just crowd the shots in the box and make those attempts less valuable than they have historically been. (At least, that all seems like it would be true. Research in the NFL has shown that effectiveness of play-action passing -- faking a handoff to a running back and then dropping back to pass -- is not affected by how often a team runs the ball.)

Since the amount of money a team can spend on transfer fees is theoretically limited by how much revenue they bring in each season, player values are all interrelated. If teams are spending too much money on older players on average, then younger players will be undervalued. But if teams are suddenly spending premium sums of money on younger players, then it creates value at the other end of the spectrum. 

Omar Chaudhuri @OmarChaudhuri

The growth rate in average fee spent on U21s has way outstripped the rest of the market, to the extent that I think 30 year olds could be undervalued soon. Some thoughts on the transfer market from me in this pod

Twenty First Group @TwentyFirstGrp

Our Chief Intelligence Officer, @OmarChaudhuri joined the @FT_Podcast_ , to discuss a growing investment in younger players in this year's transfer window. Listen in to the episode 👇 https://t.co/N23z5XH186

October 13th 2020

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Among Transfermarkt’s 25 most valuable players who have changed clubs this summer, six of them are 27 or older. All six moved for less than their Transfermarkt valulation, and four of them -- David Alaba to Real Madrid, Hakan Calhanoglu to Inter, Memphis Depay to Barcelona, and Giorginio Wijnaldum -- moved without a transfer fee attached. None of them were valued below 27 million pounds. That’s a lot of lost revenue for someone. Of course, this isn’t bulletproof proof that older players are being undervalued. To some degree, they all decided to run down their contracts, which seems like a thing that more and more players are considering. Plus, teams typically have to pay higher wages to players they’re not signing through the transfer market. But whatever the structural factors, so far this summer teams just haven’t had to overpay with transfer fees in order to acquire older, established talent.

I wouldn’t expect either of these trends to shift any time soon. Clubs across Europe are very slowly getting smarter, basing their decisions on semi-objective information rather than the institutional legends of “that’s just how things have always been done”. I’d bet that the average shot distance from goal drops again this season and I’d bet that more and more of the top-tier resources get directed toward players in their early 20s over the next half-decade. Overall, that’s the right direction for most clubs to go, but who knows. Maybe 10 years from now the way to find value and build a championship team will look a little different: buy a bunch of 30-somethings and tell them to let it rip from outside the box.