Now that the transfer window’s excitement and fun has died down, we find Stoke City having added no strikers and lost one loanee in Liam Delap, shifted off to Preston.

This leaves the remaining trio of Jacob Brown, Tyrese Campbell and Dwight Gayle.

The fanbase has been, to say the least, divided over the roles each of the 3 should be playing, and so I thought it would be useful to give some added context through the lens of stats and a little bit of tactical analysis.

I’ll focus on style, strengths and weaknesses, and try not to swerve too much into critique, although I’m not perfect!

If there are any metrics you’re unsure of or haven’t heard of before, please feel free to visit WyScout’s Glossary for a full definition.

Strikers?

Central to our discussion is the role each striker plays, and one initial marker of this can be where each player takes their touches on the pitch, shown by the heat maps below.

Remember the colour of these maps is relative to the player, not to each other. So an area of 10 touches for one player could have the same colour as an area of 100 touches for another, more active on-ball player.

First off, Jacob Brown’s heatmap shows a few interesting things. This is selected through WyScout’s filters to exclude games where Brown played at wing back.

We see a lot of touches on the right hand channel, which is reasonable as he’s been favoured on this side of a front two in a 352, and rarely on the right in a 433.

We also see very few touches in the central areas outside the box, but a hotspot in the space between the 6 yard box and the edge of the penalty area.

As an initial assessment, this tells us that Brown gets into the box readily, and appears to rarely contribute to creation outside the area. When we look into deeper analysis, this is what we should check.

Second up, we see Dwight Gayle’s map. Lots of his touches are around the penalty area, where he’s been played as a central striker.

However, we also see that Gayle is much more active outside the box. Lots of link-up between midfield and attack, particularly off the left, where he’s linked with Tymon.

This means we’re probably looking for some creative stats alongside his shooting in our analysis.

Finally, with Tyrese Campbell’s heatmap, we see a much more interesting plot.

This only includes games where Campbell has played as a striker, and we see that he’s a much more nomadic player than Brown or Gayle.

He appears to love attacking the box from the right half space, and dropping off the front line to receive in the deeper half spaces.

All this gives us a baseline from which to build some insights into each of our strikers.

Shooooooooooot

Let’s start with somewhere we see great variety in our strikers: the finishing.

Beginning again with Brown, with the least exciting data of the 3. We have a radar plot, where the length of each bar is the rank among EFL Championship strikers, in the past calendar year.

Brown’s chart is probably unsurprising here, he gets an above average number of chances, scores a good amount of goals, but underperforms his xG (i.e. scores fewer goals than expected given his chances) by about a goal every 14 games.

Interestingly, xG underperformance is a stat that generally tend to regress to the mean over long periods of time. This means that players in general, including some of those we think of as the best ‘finishers’ of all time, tend to score a number of goals relatively close to their xG over the course of a career. For further reading on this I highly recommend this article from James Tippett and his book: ‘The Expected Goals Philosophy’.

But xG is still an interesting indicator, and what we often see is that players who are at a higher quality get into positions to get more xG than lower quality players.

Brown seems to be a strong box presence, who can get into positions well to generate a fairly high quantity of xG through the course of games.

Gayle’s chart, however, is very revealing.

The xG underperformance, as above, is not necessarily in itself the worst thing possible, but the fact Gayle has a very low number of shots is a poor indicator, and particularly worrying are his general xG stats.

As mentioned, high-quality forward players tend to be getting into positions where they find lots of xG, but Gayle seems to have lost that completely.

A lack of xG overall, and a well below average xG/shot shows that Gayle is not only getting few chances, but that the chances he does get are of relatively poor quality.

This fits well with the fact his heatmap showed lots of touches outside the box, but he seems to have lost a lot of in-box presence since his prolific 18/19 season.

Gayle appears to have changed his style quite considerably from that time, but we can tell that he’s no longer a nippy, clinical, movement-based goalscorer.

Now we come to, in my opinion, the most interesting and nuanced plot of the 3 forwards. Tyrese Campbell.

Looking at the xG and xG per shot, we see that Campbell is actually alongside Gayle in terms of raw numbers and percentile ranks. But I think this is a case where the eye test can help us out.

Campbell’s shot map helps with this.

We see that he takes a lot of shots from towards the edge of the box, and particularly coming in from those half spaces we mentioned before.

Campbell’s xG is very low, but he takes an above-average number of shots, leading to the very low xG/shot values.

Alongside these stats, video analysis, and his very high xG over-performance, we find that Campbell is almost a specialist at finishing certain types of tough chances. As we said before, xG is rarely a stat people outperform over long periods, but Campbell has now done so for several seasons.

Although he takes low-value shots, he takes a high volume of them, and crucially, gets an exceptionally high percentage of them on the target. We also see some large variation across models for Campbell’s xG particularly. This is explained nicely in our blog post about xG in general, please feel free to check it out here!

Let’s hope this means the xG over-performance can continue!

The Creator?

But we’re looking at roles here, and we need to take into account more than just where forwards take touches and how they finish and get chances.

This time we’ll look at the creative influence of our forwards through a similar radar of metrics.

Again, we’ll start with Brown.

Unsurprising metrics to most Stoke fans, I’d imagine. Brown isn’t much of a creative force. He does progress the ball well for an out-and-out 9, and his running into the channels means he does put a high volume of crosses into the box.

As Brown tends to be found in the box when Stoke are high up the pitch, he doesn’t provide much in the way of key passes or xA for other players, preferring to be on the end of the move rather than creating from it.

Looking into Gayle’s creative stats is much more interesting however, as we now see the big shift in Gayle’s style of play.

The increase in touches deeper in his heatmap further contextualises this radar, where Gayle produces above-average numbers of progressive passes (passes that move the ball significantly closer to the opposition goal), shot assists, key passes, and through passes, alongside high expected assists (xA) numbers.

We further solidify the view that Gayle is losing his movement and on-the-shoulder-poacher instincts, and transferring instead to playing as a deeper linking forward.

However, with Tyrese Campbell we see a very efficient creative force.

Very high xA numbers, very high key passing numbers, and very high crossing numbers show the story of a player who is very keen to get the ball into dangerous areas for his teammates.

This also fits well with the heatmap we saw before. Campbell is a player who, whether off the right in a 433 or up front in a 352, drops into those half spaces outside the box, and sets up chances for others.

Particularly interesting here is that Campbell has a very high xA for a slightly lower number of shot assists, and a small difference between xA and assists. This indicates that his passes/crosses to teammates are putting them into areas where they are highly-likely to score.

You Got The Style

Finally, we can look at similar radars of some metrics that indicate a little more of the player’s style as a forward.

As ever, we start with the lovely Halifax-born Scot, Jacob Brown.

Here is where we can really pinpoint some markers of Brown’s identity as a forward player.

Unsurprising to any Stoke fan is his very high number of successful defensive actions, denoting his ability as a pressing forward, the first line of the defence.

He’s also a well-above-average player in the air, winning 36% of aerial duels, and competing in over 10 per 90 mins, more than >75% of the league’s forwards.

The markers of a combative forward continue as he undertakes a high number of offensive duels, and suffers a high number of fouls.

As we mentioned before, he’s also predominantly a box striker, with a very high number of touches in the box.

Most interestingly, though, are the two markers we don’t perhaps expect of Brown. He is in fact a strong dribbler, largely through running channels, and is successful in more than half of his attempts to take-on his man.

The interesting stats don’t stop there (I know, I’m biased) though, as we look into the same metrics for Dwight Gayle.

We see further evidence of Gayle’s changes, particularly that he very rarely accelerates, and very rarely dribbles.

Alongside his lack of offensive or defensive duels, and his low progressive running numbers, Gayle appears to be trying to take up the Stephen Ireland-esque role of being a player to bounce the ball off and play it into good areas, but not really one who can do a whole lot of moving or progressing when he’s on the ball.

Clearly again, a huge shift since the days of his all-action off-the-shoulder poaching.

Finally, looking at the stats for Tyrese Campbell shows the picture of an attacker who loves being on the ball.

Few aerial duels and few defensive actions are expected of him, but even then he is surprisingly (to some) about average at winning aerial duels.

He’s also incredibly good at winning duels generally in attacking positions, and clearly he has a fantastic penchant for dribbling and making progressive runs.

Also exciting is the fact he gets a huge number of touches in the box, despite playing largely outside the area as we saw in his heatmap. A player who can pick it up deep, progress it forward with solid dribbling, and get into the box to create, alongside winning offensive duels and scoring well above xG consistently is gold dust.

Conclusions? Please?

I know what you’re thinking, and yes we’re nearly done, don’t worry.

The conclusions I, personally, draw from these stats are as follows, but remember stats and analyses are only part of the picture, and even with the whole picture a lot of the inferences and conclusions can be debated!

These are vast, sweeping conclusions from only some points of data, albeit backed up with video analysis, but please take these with a pinch of salt.

Jacob Brown: A strong, combative player who is good in the air and positive at moving into positions to get chances. Largely a box presence and doesn’t contribute much creatively, but his pressing and dribbling are traits that make him a good, solid number 9.

Dwight Gayle: Appears to have completely changed his style of play since his WBA days. He drops off and seems to have lost the quick movement and acceleration needed to get into good positions in the box. His finishing has been poor, but more worryingly he isn’t getting the chances in the first place. He does, however, create for the team. High xA numbers and lots of through balls are an indicator of a high-quality creative player.

Tyrese Campbell: xG over performance is incredible, if a little strange (and possibly model-dependent). He consistently gets his shots on target despite them being worse chances on average than most strikers in the league, and his movement and dribbling numbers are very high. Surprisingly strong in defensive duels too, but his major traits are in his creativity. High xA, crossing, key passing, shot assists, and passes into the area make him a formidable deeper-lying forward/wide player.

It appears to be a fairly balanced strike force, but I’m sure many would argue for the inclusion of another to help out, perhaps some would even think Delap going back wasn’t a good decision.

I hope this helps provide context for the strikers we have, and please feel free to comment your opinions or share the article!

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George