The two Sydney Cup friendlies saw Celtic dominate but bag merely one deflected Kyogo Furuhashi goal for their troubles.
Coming off a European campaign where the perception was of missed chances, does the Hoops have a finishing problem?
For this piece, I’ll compare the performances as shown in key attacking metrics for the main forward players between Europe and Scotland.
Be aware that, especially in European football, the sample sizes are quite small – each player has completed 200-400 minutes of play.
Attacking Metrics (Europe vs Scotland)
The Scottish champions have had six main attacking players this season in the centre-forward and wide areas: Sead Haksabanovic, Liel Abada, Jota, Giorgos Giakoumakis, Furuhashi, and Daizen Maeda.
Here are their relative performances per 90 minutes across a range of metrics contrasting domestic football (SPFL and League Cup) with the UEFA Champions League.
Goals
Only Jota and Giakoumakis managed to score in the Champions League campaign.
The Portuguese netted in both the Bernabeu and Leipzig. The Greek scored Celtic’s only home goal, against the Ukrainians, Shakhtar Donetsk.
Only the former Benfica man of the forward players is matching his domestic goal rate in Europe.
What also has to be appreciated is that Furuhashi, Abada and Giakoumakis are averaging well over one goal per 90m.
Haksabanovic has the lowest goal return with a mere 0.51 goals per 90m – or a goal every other game. Pretty good.
This supports the notion that there is a big difference between outcomes in goals scored on the scoring rates between Scottish and European football.
But as we hopefully all understand now, goals scored are a poor predictor of performance, so let us look at some of the underlying metrics.
Expected Goals (xG)
Once again, most of the players have a lower xG in Europe than in domestic matches per 90 minutes. The exception is Maeda, who has a higher xG in European matches (0.54 to 0.42).
I see a lot of criticism of Furuhashi, yet he has the highest xG of all the forward players at 1.09 per 90m. There are unlikely to be many strikers in the Champions League with over one xG per game.
Apart from Maeda, Jota is the player whose European xG is closest to his domestic number.
Shots
Again, it is the 23-year-old and the Japan international who are able to replicate the number of shots taken in domestic football and apply that rate to the higher echelon of the game.
Furuhashi managesd 4.38 in Europe compared to 5.92 in Scotland, whilst for Giakoumakis, there is a big gap of 3.58 to 6.43.
Possession in the Box
Continuing the theme of “getting into the positions to score”, in terms of getting possession of the ball in the opposition box, the trend here is that it is the two strikers Giakoumakis and Furuhashi who were able to get the most.
Maeda, albeit with low volume, again manages to have low variance depending on the level of competition.
Celtic Attacking Threat Score
The aggregated attacking threat index shows across the box that Ange Postecoglou's men are providing less productivity in the final third in Europe compared to Scotland.
Maeda and Haksabanovic have the lowest average scores but the lowest differentials too.
As per the other metrics, Abada has a big gap between the higher-level competition and the domestic game.
Statsbomb Shot OBV
StatsBomb’s aggregated on-ball value metric for assessing shots absolutely hates Celtic players in Europe!
All have generated negative OBVs apart from Jota.
While in Scotland, the Portuguese winger and Israeli international, in particular, are in the top percentiles for shot OBV.
The percentage differences between OBV values vary from -84 percent (Jota) to -371 percent for Maeda.
Summary
It is not surprising that over a number of underlying metrics, Celtic players’ numbers in Scotland are much higher than those seen in Europe in the Champions League.
What is a shock is the size of the gap.
I often comment that there are very small differences between a “good” number and a “poor” one despite the tendency to articulate performances in extreme language.
This is probably a bad use of numbers, but if you look at the difference between the metrics in Scotland and Europe at the highest level, Hoops players’ metrics are, on average 46 percent lower in the big cup! A huge difference.
Nuance within that is mainly focussed on Jota, who has the lowest average difference – he has 15% less productivity in Europe.
The second “worst” difference is Maeda averaging 24% lower numbers in Europe than Scotland but generally has the lowest scores across the board.
The player with the biggest difference is, perhaps not surprisingly, the youngest player, Abada. His domestic numbers are 71% higher than in the Champions League.
Fans should not be so critical of the strikers in particular as over a very small number of games they are generating high xG’s and if they continue in that vein can be expected to score.
Abada and Haksabanovic have a significant drop off in performances in Europe to improve on.
Maeda seems to do Maeda things irrespective of the opponent. Not particularly productive, but consistent.
What may have scouts in Europe taking notice is that it is Jota who was most able to take his Scottish league form into the Champions League arena.
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