Ex-Cons Are The Best Footballers
When I compare the great soccer strikers I`m not sold on the ones that cost the most but on one that has had the toughest past of all
The best strikers in the world score the most goals with the least amount of chances.
Sure, the footballers that score lots of goals are ones that I’d love to have in my team but they may be the ones who are also missing the most amounts of chances.
And if I`ve 10 other players on my team who are creating loads of chances and working their ass off to work for a team but my striker doesn’t take most of those changes they’ve created then I`ll know I can get a better striker.
Take Manchester City’s pair of Sergio Aguero and Raheem Sterling. Both score goals but both are very different in how they score goals.
Sergio Aguero has scored an impressive amount of goals for City. In all, by a few games before the end of his City career he’d scored over 181 goals for his team. And he did that in less than 300 appearances. That means his goal per game scoring rate was 0.67.
And of course, he’s a Manchester City legend. Having scored the winning goal on the last day of the 2012 season to get City their very first Premier League title Aguero’s status as a legend of Manchester City is secure.
So what of his teammate Raheem Sterling?
He scored 95 goals in 286 appearances by the end of the 2020/2021 season. That’s a rate of 0.33 goals per game. After having 602 shots he had 246 of them on target.
So statistically speaking Aguero scored more goals per game than Sterling.
Guess who I`d prefer on my team?
Aguero of course.
Because when Manchester City were facing into a game and he’s the best chance of a goal the team will be more confident than when he’s missing and Sterling is the only striker in the team.
When the rest of the players in a team know that they have a striker in their side that has consistently taken the chances to score more often than the team are more willing to work harder for that player and to create more chances for them to score. There’s better overall team confidence in the player.
In the same Premier League, the 2020 Premier League champions Liverpool who was Manchester City’s main competitors at the time had no set striker. Rather they had a front three players.
They were Mo Salah, Roberto Firmino, and Sadio Mane.
The first of these Salah had scored 94 goals in 152 appearances for Liverpool. His goals per game ratio were 0.62. However, his teammate Roberto Firmino had only scored 63 goals in 205 games with a ratio of 0.31.
The last of the trio, Sadio Mane had 92 goals in 223 games with a ratio of 0.41.
For a few years, beforehand Liverpool had insisted that they would only play with a front three and no specific striker. And although they won the Premier League title in 2020 to end a thirty-year gap their defense of their championship the following year was one of the worst defenses by champions of the league ever.
And one of the reasons for this was because they didn’t score enough goals.
Firmino scored 9 goals in 2020 whereas he scored less the following season. Sadio Mane scored 18 goals in 35 Premier League appearances when they won the league whereas the following years with only a handful of games to go he had only scored 8 goals.
Neither player could be considered a great striker. Not with that strike rate.
However, Salah is different.
He scored 19 goals in the first 28 Premier League games in 2020/21.
So Salah is a real threat in front of goal. And he’s a player I`d love to have on my team.
But both Aguero and Salah play for top teams. You’d expect the top teams to be able to afford the top players.
But what about a team that doesn’t spend as much money or wins as much as Manchester City or Liverpool, and have they a good striker too?
Leicester City is a team that comes to mind and more notably their striker Jamie Vardy.
Vardy was not considered a top striker when he was younger. Unlike Aguero and Salah he was released from the Sheffield Wednesday youth academy. He then played in the seventh tier of English football. Worse again he had to work in a carbon fiber factory to make a wage. And he had been convicted of criminal assault.
But he never gave up.
And in the 2015–16 season, he scored an incredible 24 goals in 36 games. The following year his form dipped and he scored 13 goals in 35 games. In the next couple of year, he scored 20 goals, 18 goals, and 23 goals in the league.
And his team was not considered a top team.
Sure Leicester won the Premier League in 2015–2016 but was 5,000 to 1 favorite at the beginning of the season. And Vardy was bought for 1 million pounds in comparison to Aguero and Salah who were multi-million-pound goal scorers.
Now that’s some statistics that beats them all.
And that’s why I`d choose Vardy as my number one striker on my imaginary team after I look back on the Premier League in the early 2020s.
Get FREE Access To Dr. Conor’s VIP List Here (Limited Time Only)
