It doesn’t feel like summertime until the stat scouting can begin, and today we start with a big and slightly controversial one in Aston Villa’s Morgan Rogers.
This is a player just about everyone will be familiar with. He has played the last two full seasons in the Premier League for a rival and has really blossomed into one of the young stars of the league. His performances have earned him a call-up to the World Cup with England, and it feels like the sky is the limit with him.
He is not a tabula rasa where the opinions on the player are still there to be written, he is a player almost everyone already has a view and a take on.
The major rift here is that he is one where the eye test and the data test diverge.
Scouts and ball watchers see him as a budding if not already superstar type of player, while the stats view him more along the lines of a good, above average player. Investigating this disconnect is one of the major questions we will explore here.
Friend of the newsletter Billy Carpenter posted this on twitter and I thought it was poignant and funny.
I have some ideas about this and I will go through them as we wade into the stats and graphics.
Before we get too deep into the stat breakdowns, it helps to look at where Rogers actually operates.
Rogers has quite a bit of versatility, and that is something Arsenal have prized under Mikel Arteta. The squad is full of players capable of being deployed in a number of positions, and Rogers would fit into that nicely. When I asked my followers on Twitter where they saw him playing for Arsenal, they echoed this view with a pretty even split among the options.
Given the squad situation my guess would also be primarily from the left, but it could be a game by game and matchup by matchup type of call if Arsenal were to sign him.
His touch map is concentrated on the left and through the central attacking zones, with clear hot spots both in the left half-space high up and dropping into the left of midfield to collect.
He may not have a nailed-down, obvious position at Arsenal as we sit down to write this, but Arteta has shown the ability to be flexible and let a player’s best role present itself after some experimenting. I suspect that would be the case here, and we would get to see a few setups to help uncover the best way to utilize his very obvious talents.
Shooting
Let's start with shooting, because it is one of Rogers' major strengths.
Before I get too far, I want to bring up a quote he had from earlier this season about expected goals.
"I think xG is a whole load of nonsense. It feels like a crime - I'm scoring and xG is putting me down."
I hope that this is more a misunderstanding of xG, or a response to some of the sillier uses of expected goals, than a true feeling about it. At its heart, expected goals is about chance quality and the basic idea that better scoring chances are converted into goals more often. That is not a controversial statement, it is a fundamental truth of the game, and tactics are built around trying to create, or prevent, these types of shots.
Looking at his shot charts, perhaps he could get a bit more selective with his shooting, but ultimately I think a player of his ball-striking caliber is given the green light more often than not here.
For most of the graphics going forward he will be compared against central attacking midfielders, and let’s start with how his shooting metrics compare.
Overall it looks quite good, above average in most categories except shot quality, and he has been able to generate good volume, both from open play and set plays, to make the overall production positive and cover for the iffy shot selection.
One thing to note, the Arsenal system the last couple of years has taken players who were freer shooters, Eze, Gyökeres and Madueke all saw a significant drop in shot volume, and reined them in, getting them to favor fewer, better shots. That could end up being the case here if Rogers comes to Arsenal.
Nearly half of Rogers’ shots came from 20 meters or more from goal, with just 15.5 percent inside the key goal-scoring area within 12 meters. The big worry about Arsenal is the open-play creation, and that is something Rogers could help with. Last season he took 61 shots from open play and scored 7 goals off of just under 5 expected.
He is a plus finisher, but this is something that can be noisy. Some seasons you will get 10 goals from these, some seasons it will be more like 5 to 7, even as a plus finisher.
