Florian Wirtz – Elite Creator, Elite Dribbler, and Statistically, Truly Elite Finisher

A study of over 100 of the best strikers/attackers since 2017 (and their 45,000 shots)

“What sets him apart,” Gerardo Seoane, his future Bayer Leverkusen coach, said at a press conference in 2021, “is that he is very, very clear-headed in the final third. He has nerves of steel and keeps a picture of what’s happening, giving him the quality to make the right decision.”

One thing that may go overlooked with Florian Wirtz is how extraordinary his finishing is. He leads the way in many metrics from dribbles to chances created, but finishing efficiency is what I’ve looked into.

Indeed, I didn’t know how good he was until I compared advanced data on a ton of the best strikers and attackers, and he sits among the truly elite. As well as elite finishing data, he is also remarkably consistent.

Finishing in general is massively streaky, and I’ve advised against people looking at xG performance for a player in the most recent (or any single) season, as it fluctuates wildly for almost all players year to year, bar a few outliers who are regularly over or under; but even the best have bad seasons (except one guy doesn’t...).

Wirtz is the opposite of streaky, which makes him an outlier; and he also ranks almost top out of 105 players I looked at for overperformance per shot vs xG, while he ranks top for consistency (he has the least variability, season on season).

So, despite leading various dribbling and assist and chance-creation metrics (as well as pressing like a demon), Wirtz seems to be a generational talent as a finisher too.

However, he is nowhere near the top shot-takers (yet), so is not seen as a ‘goalscorer’ per se; but as with a lot of younger players, is now taking more shots as he plays more minutes and has more responsibility, and perhaps the increased ability to find space and make and take shots when others couldn’t.

The shot-monsters tend to be the ones trusted to take the most shots, naturally. Or those whose egos are so big that they take them anyway. You want players brave enough to take shots, but wise enough not to take silly shots.

The question then is, if Wirtz were to take more shots, would he remain consistently good?

That provides interesting and positive data, too, as I’ll show later in the piece.

You could ask an attacker to shoot on sight, rather than letting the attacker only shoot when he felt it was really worth it; while some strikers resort to shooting out of desperation, 5-10 times in a game, if they haven’t scored or are seeking a hat-trick or landmark.

More shots from the same player leads to diminishing returns, in that they are more likely to be thoughtless or speculative.

Cristiano Ronaldo is a below-average finisher (since 2017), but scores so many goals by having the most shots.

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100+ of the Best

So anyway, I looked at the xG under/over performance of 105 strikers in Europes top leagues going back to 2017, when the public data dates back to. (This was from FBRef, and generally I collated it for league only, as the default setting on the site, but did go further for more data on Wirtz.) All data is non-penalty only.

These were pretty much all the big names, who in that time played 15,403 games (or “90s”), taking 44,759 shots, and scoring 7,618 goals; 731 different “player seasons”, at an average age of 25.16, so players as young as 16 (including Wirtz) when the seasons started, up to players approaching 40; albeit stars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were only included up to when they left Europe (so no Saudi or MLS data counts).

I included only the top tiers of the main five European leagues, plus Holland and Portugal, as close contenders for the 5th-best domestic league with France. Data for other leagues is spotty, so I stuck to these.

It’s clearly not every single player, but mostly those big names who sprang to mind, plus those FBRef suggested as similar to the big-name strikers, wingers and attacking midfielders I looked up. (You can see the full list of the players ranked below later in the piece, and I’m sure I must have missed out a big name or two.)

Players aged 24 and under represent 359 player seasons; 25 and over, 372 player seasons. So the split is roughly 50-50.

Those younger average +0.53 more goals per season than expected, and those older average c.50% better, at +0.75. (Older players play more minutes, and take more shots, so the key data is xG performance per shot, which I’ll get onto.)

So on average, it’s +0.64 over expectations for all the players included, which means that a lot of the wastage is probably low-scoring midfielders and defenders.

These could be someone like Andy Robertson, who has neatly alternated a small overperformance with a small underperformance eight times since 2017 (over, under, over, under, over, under, over, under ... which sounds like dialogue from ‘Airplane’), for an overall -0.4. So, not bad for his 16 league goals. Or Joël Matip, who also had over and under seasons, to end up at -0.3 (as a cumulative sum, not an average) for his eight Liverpool league goals starting from 2017/18.

Multiply this by hundreds of players and you’ll see that, on average, the better finishers are ... the attackers.

But don’t mistake even them for being consistent, while some of them are pretty consistently bad at converting xG into goals; in the data I extracted, the worst two player seasons from the 731 were:

• 730th Karim Benzema, 2017-2018 (aged 29) Real Madrid -8.2

• 731st Robert Lewandowski, 2018-2019 (aged 29) Bayern Munich -8.5

(A poor takeaway would be that 29 is a very bad age for a striker, or that these are bad footballers; and each had better seasons after. And 29 was the best age for Son Heung-min and Harry Kane so far, and for others.)

Obviously you need to have a lot of shots to end up with such big negative numbers.

Two of the three best seasons I found, behind one of Lionel Messi’s Barca seasons (+12.1), were:

• 2nd Alexander Sørloth, 2023-2024, Villarreal (aged 27) +10.7

• 3rd Paulo Dybala, 2017-2018, Juventus (aged 23) +10.7

Yet even Messi had a -4.0 season at PSG, making him the highest-variance player of the 105, with the best season and also a pretty bad one too (range of 16.1).

Sørloth’s came after six seasons of being ‘under’.

The truly massive goal-hoarders are shot-monsters, but they are not necessarily the “best finishers”.

However, on average, they are good enough finishers – with a range of from below average to above average, and they are the ones prepared (or asked) to put themselves in front of goal, time and time again, and that may be easier in a better team.

(One of the reasons Rasmus Højlund does not rate too terribly per shot is that he simply doesn’t have many shots, which is partly due to the dysfunction of Man United, but also, he appears unable to create for himself or is unwilling to try. He averages just 1.86 shots per 90, and his finishing is not too bad, at just below the conversion rate based on xG of Mo Salah.)

The biggest shot-monsters as an average across the last eight years in league games are:

1. Cristiano Ronaldo 5.47 per 90

2. Lionel Messi 4.99 per 90

3. Kylian Mbappé 4.38 per 90

4. Robert Lewandowski 4.17 per 90

5. Sergio Agüero 4.15 per 90

6. Lautaro Martínez 4.04 per 90

7. Darwin Núñez 3.96 per 90

8. Edin Džeko 3.94 per 90

9. Victor Osimhen 3.91 per 90

10. Harry Kane 3.87 per 90

(Erling Haaland would be in there on his City data, but had far fewer shots at Dortmund.)

Yet of these 10 shot monsters, only Messi (+0.033), Sergio Agüero (+0.032) and Kane (+0.029) are well above average for np:G-xG Per Shot (non-penalty goals minus non-penalty xG per shot). And even then, none of that trio are especially close to the very best xG conversion per shot.

Salah ranks 12th on shots 3.77 per 90, with a positive return (+0.008 per shot), but fraction below the average of +0.011 all the 44,503 attempts in the study; and Ronaldo totally neutral (0.000) – but thus below the average from this sample of over 100 attackers and strikers.

Cole Palmer is negative per shot at -0.002, and Edin Džeko, despite being a shot-monster, seems to be a terrible finisher, at -0.028 per shot. Džeko is the worst performer when looking at high-volume shot takers.

**The majority of this article is for paying TTT Main Hub subscribers only.**

*I go on to look at how Wirtz’s data is elite, how his numbers are improving, and how, if he were to take even more shots, he could break the 30 goal mark; as well as analysing many of the other 100+ players in the mini study.*