Team Differences in Shot Creation: The First Half of the 2010/11 EPL Season

I've been spending a few posts looking at shot creation in the Premiership. One of the things I haven't spent much time on is differences across teams in in terms of who has been creating the most and least shots from different kinds of situations. These situations are open play, corners, free kicks, fast breaks, and penalties.

So here are the absolute numbers of shots created in the first half of the season per team/match from different situations in the match (shots are defined as all shots on goal; I leave out penalties since they are rare and therefore not all that interesting to look at across teams). As before, the numbers are courtesy of the Opta/Guardian chalkboards and cover the first half of this year's EPL season.

Without much ado, here are shots from open play.

Shots created from open play ranged from around 8 to about 13, on average, in the first half of the season. The ranking of teams makes all kinds of sense, given what we know about team quality. But there are exceptions: Everton is up there with the league's top teams at about 13 shots created from open play; and Man City is relatively low at around 10.

What about shots created from corners? Here we go.

Shots created from corners range from about 1 to 3 per match and team. In the first half of the season, Tottenham clearly outdid the rest of the league in terms of generating shots in the aftermath of corners; other league leaders in this category were Liverpool, Stoke, Chelsea, Villa, and Arsenal. Curiously, Manchester United created about as many chances from corners as Birmingham, Blackpool, and Sunderland. These numbers suggest some interesting differences in strategy.

Can we see these differences with regard to chances created from free kicks? Let's take a look.

And voila! Yet again, Tottenham led the league in another set piece category. Bolton, too, clearly relied on free kicks to create chances. And while lowly Wigan and stellar Man U both created very few chances from corners, both created a fair number from free kicks. Even though the league on average creates more than twice as many shots from corners than free kicks, these numbers show that Wigan and Man U create about as the same amount from each category (more than the league average from free kicks and fewer from corners). At the low end, Wolves and Villa created a tiny amount of shots from free kicks. Whether that's by design or not is another story.

Finally, my favorite kind of shot creation - the kind that's infrequent but highly dangerous: shots created from fast breaks.

Here, two top teams (Arsenal and Chelsea) and two teams in the lower half of the table (Sunderland and Birmingham) lead the league at over .8 shots from fast breaks a match. At the other end, Wolves, Fulham, and Newcastle create about a fourth of that (.2 shots) per match. One more curious factoid: yet again, Wigan and Manchester United are neighbors in shot creation at around .7. In contrast, Tottenham, the team that created the most chances from corners and free kicks, is at the lower end in chances created from transition play. The biggest surprise? How similar the profiles of Wigan and Man U are, and how mixed the teams are generally. Clearly, something happens between creating a shot and actually scoring for each of these teams to generate the match outcomes we all know (and that's not mentioning defense).

Stay tuned for a look at accurate shot creation by team soon.