Last time I looked at who the deadliest Premier League striker was based on their goal scoring rate.  Didier Drogba came out tops in that ranking (which surprised me as I had guessed that Wayne Rooney would win).  Today I am going to see which team has the deadliest group of strikers on a minute-by-minute basis using a similar method.

I took the weighted average of the goal rates of the strike force and compared them against each other (the more playing time a player has the more his rate contributes to the team rate).  Like last time, strikers who have less than 450 minutes of playing time have been omitted for the sake of cleaner results.

Before doing this I would expect that the results would look pretty similar to the current league table.  It seems to make sense that those teams whose first choice strikers score goals at a higher rate would be the ones higher up in the table.

Keeping that in mind here’s what I found:

-Table as of 4/13/10

Based on their strikeforce ranking some teams are in the general vicinity of their league position, for example the Manchester clubs and Stoke which is correctly predicted by the rankings.  Others however do not match at all, notably a number of relegation candidates have found their way into the top 10 with Wigan and Portsmouth being the greatest overachievers.  Arsenal, Chelsea, and Birmingham also do not rank favorably in the strikeforce table compared to their league position.

There are several reasons that would explain a team’s relative under or over performance relative to their strikeforce rank.

Overperformance – Or Winning More Games Than Your StrikeForce Score Suggests

1. Team Effort – more goals coming from the midfielders and defenders
2. Tighter Defense – score less goals, but concede even less
3. Nice Spread – goals are more consistently spread out among games.  (Ex. Over two games hypothetical scorelines of  3-0 and 4-2, compared to 7-0 and 0-2 represents 3 extra points with the same number of goals scored)

Underperformance – Or Losing More Games Than Your StrikeForce Score Suggests

1. No One Else Scores – goals are not contributed by other players
2. Leaky Defense – score goals, but concede more
3. Injuries – your  goal scoring rate is high but you don’t have enough playing time to make it count
4. Lumpiness – extra goals are scored in situations where they have no affect on league position (see ‘nice spread’ above)

If we look for these characteristics in some ‘out of place’ clubs:

Overperforming Clubs

1. Chelsea – Frank Lampard and Florent Malouda have contributed 28 goals from the midfield this season
2. Arsenal – Cesc Fabregas and Andrei Arshavin have contributed 24 goals from the midfield this season
3. Aston Villa – Not goalscoring fiends but (at least at one point) the tightest defense in the league
4. Birmingham – Low scorelines both home and away

Underperforming Clubs

1. Liverpool – Injury to main goal producer
2. Portsmouth – High scoring rate, but poor defensive record.
3. Hull City – High scoring rate, but poor defensive record.
4. West Ham – Decent scoring balanced out by poor defense

Liverpool is an interesting case where a commonly held perception actually turns out to be true, i.e. that if Fernando Torres had better fitness the team would have performed much better in the league.  This is supported by the fact that Torres ranks as the second deadliest striker in the league (determined last time) but ranks seventh in the playing time (26% fewer minutes than Drogba and 31% fewer than Rooney) he has gotten compared to other top 10 strikers.

Stats including defenders and midfielders coming soon!