Giroud is not the worst striker in the league

Giroud has his lovers, I’m talking about fans here so stop sniggering, and he has his haters too. Maybe haters is a tad strong as an adjective as many don’t hate Giroud they just don’t think he is good enough for the club or scores enough goals for a striker at a club of Arsenal’s stature.

This blog post isn’t about saying Giroud is amazing or we can’t do better etc. For what it is worth, I believe Giroud is a good player and performs the role he is tasked with very well. At the same time I also think he can be rash and wasteful in front of goal and his conversion rate pales in comparison to the strikers some of our competitors have.

However, what really annoys me about the Giroud debate is how often he is labelled, by the media and our own fans, as the worst striker in the league. It annoys me because that argument is always “enforced” by conversion statistics. It annoys me because those “stats” are just false.

I cannot stand inaccuracies – especially when those inaccuracies are used as a stick to beat a player with. Football statistics, as any rational person will tell you, can be manipulated to suit any agenda or disregarded to suit any agenda by way of the blanket argument “stats aren’t everything”. Statistics are important in football because they are, in raw form, an unbiased method of measuring a player. How someone chooses to interpret statistics is where bias comes into play and it is why I strongly believe statistics should be used in conjunction with instinct.

What you see on the field should be enforced by the statistics and vice-versa – in a very crude sense of course. It is impossible to use stats fairly on their own as there are far too many variables to consider and it is impossible to use instinct alone as often statistics will contradict what you believe. When stats and instinct do not marry or are conflicting I try to narrow or expand to find a common ground.

For example, Giroud doesn’t score in big games. That is true if you don’t consider Liverpool and Spurs big games. If we are purely talking about title rivals then he doesn’t score against two clubs. It’s an issue but hardly a definitively deciding factor in winning the title. This is a stat that relies entirely on your interpretation of a big game.

Unless you expand to include umpteen variables the inescapable fact is Giroud has a sub-13% conversion rate, or at least did – the latest stats are not available so I’m using ones a month or so old.

Now, whilst I agree this conversion rate is poor and irrefutably needs to be improved as it is incongruous with the standards of the great club Giroud plays for and the strikers that went before him, I feel it is wrong and harsh for people to label him as the worst in the league. He isn’t.

This image from WhoScored is the type of stat that is used to denigrate Giroud:

Strikers at the top 7

This is just the top 7. It doesn’t mention the other 13 clubs. With 17 players on that list it works out to about 2.4 player per club. So across the entire league there is a little over 48 players to choose from. Here, just 17 are shown. Of the remaining 31 are you confident each and every one of them has a better conversion rate than Giroud?

It is unlikely but you know what? Even if they do he would still be above Soldado (who has taken many penalties) so technically, no, not even technically – actually – actually he is not the worst in the league. Second bottom is hardly anything to shout about but it proves that the statement “worst in the league” is wrong. It is wrong by way of not being right.

It also doesn’t draw your eyes to the fact that 9 of the 15 players above him in that infograph had fewer goals. Or that 3 more have the same goals meaning only 3 players have more. High conversion stats are great but surely how many you score is slightly more important? Bendtner had double the conversion rate but less than a quarter of the goals. Giroud has, of course, played more minutes but surely these stats are based only on the chances you have received right? Can we say Bendtner would still have 25% if he played as many minutes as Giroud? We can’t say because that is a variable and if we are going to use one we might as well use 50 and that would render the results as “inconclusive” at best.

There is another stat that shows just the goals from all of the top strikers in Europe:

Euro league strikers

Now depending on how you look at this you could argue that Giroud (at the time, this is 2 weeks old) is the joint 11th top scorer in Europe. That’s hardly a travesty and doesn’t really fit in with the whole “worst in the EPL/Europe” agenda.

Giroud’s conversion rate has been pretty consistent (albeit low) in the (almost) two seasons he has spent at Arsenal, hovering around 12-13%. Arguably the hottest striker in Europe, Luis Suarez, had a shocking conversion rate before this season as this stat from WhoScored shows:

Suarez conversion rate

Last season Suarez got 23 league goals with a conversion rate of 12.3% – worse than Giroud’s of 12.5%. Crude maths will tell you that to score 23 goals with a conversion rate of 12.3% Suarez had 187 chances. So Liverpool must have been creating loads for Suarez to score that many (which we know they did as they topped the creation charts for last season). Yet despite having a world-class striker and creating a boat load of chances they didn’t finish above us (and look unlikely to do so this year with a vastly improved conversion rate from Suarez and an on fire Sturridge).

Did anyone say Suarez wasn’t good enough for us? No. We created fewer chances than Liverpool yet people felt Suarez would score more with us. Retrospectively that is probably right considering his current conversion rate of 22.9% but it is only retrospectively. Don’t think this is me saying Giroud is better than or could even be as good as Suarez because I don’t drink that heavily.

What I am saying is; it poses a different question – should Giroud improve his conversion rate or should Arsenal make more chances? The answer is both.

This excellent article on EPLIndex shows that Giroud is in the middle when it comes to “clear cut chances” and there are better and worse strikers than him. His conversion rate jumps up to 33% which maybe tells us he tries to score from pot-shots, half-chances or hard angles.

In both the EPLIndex and WhoScored tables Giroud does not have the worst conversion rate and both show players like Adebayor, Bendtner, Welbeck, Lambert and Rodriguez as above Giroud in conversion percentages. Would you trade him for any of those players?

Do you think Adebayor is the best striker in the land because of his conversion rate? The answer is most certainly no. So why do you think so many people use Giroud’s conversion rate to say he is crap?

It’s clear to me and to everyone else, the lovers, the haters and the non-raters of Giroud, that he needs to do better in front of goal and Arsenal would certainly benefit from having an Aguero or a Suarez in the team but we should be able to agree that it is completely false to say Giroud is the worst striker in the league or has the worst conversion rate because he doesn’t. Not in general nor in terms of clear cut chances.

Let’s not use inaccurate statements to lambaste our players. We should criticise them fairly for what they have done in a game, not for what sensationalistic journalists and fallacious statistics tell us.

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