Revisiting Atalanta’s Finishing Woes and Where to Go From Here

Its not a surprise to any Atalanta fan how poor the club’s finishing was this year. It was Atalanta’s demise this season, and anyone would be hard-pressed to find a more glaring issue that handicapped Gian Piero Gasperini’s squad. While its unfortunate that the year happened, it gives us an excellent data point that helps to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, and what Gasperini and new Sporting Director Tony D’Amico could do to address the problem.

If you want a precursor that dives more into Atalanta’s expected statistics at a holistic level, I recommend catching up with this article here first.

Ask an average fan across Europe, and he or she likely brings up Gasperini’s ‘beautiful attacking football,’ ripe with good finishing. It was what allowed Atalanta to put up 98 and 90 goals in Serie A in two of the last three seasons. However, a relentless offensive machine is only as good as its final output. La Dea still dominated the league in many categories this year – the squad was even third in non-expected penalty goals (according to the dataset I will be using courtesy of soccerment.com). Yet, the chances created are only as good as the player tasked with putting the ball in the net. Unfortunately for La Dea, it seemed far too often that the wrong player found himself in a good scoring position.

Comparing to past seasons, I investigated who was actually compiling expected goals for Atalanta – and there is a drastically stark difference between what occurred this year versus year’s past. Below is a table comparing who I called scorers versus non-scorers and their overall contribution to Atalanta’s expected goal tallies.

For this study Duvan Zapata, Luis Muriel, Mario Pasalic, Papu Gomez, Josip Ilicic, Robin Gosens, and Ruslan Malinovskyi are considered the scorers.

Only 57% of Atalanta’s expected goals were attributed to guys Gasperini would actually want lining up to shots! Yes Atalanta’s system is predicated, a bit, on sharing the wealth – but even in previous seasons upwards of 80% of goal scoring chances still went to attackers (or scorers in the case of Robin Gosens)! The easy scapegoat to explain this season is Atalanta losing its best attacking players for one reason or another.

Duvan Zapata, Josip Ilicic, and Robin Gosens were all absent for extended periods of time, and it certainly tells part of the story. The problem then becomes exacerbated when realizing that these absent attackers chances are being taken up by players that would never add finishing to their footballing resumes.

The below table illustrates how poorly Atalanta’s team finishing was this year, even rating as of one the worst finishing campaigns by a Serie A team over the past four seasons.

The best way to read the table above is how much does a team’s finishing improve its expected goals. Expected goals on target aggregates all chances on target, giving each shot on target a probability of hitting the net based on a variety of factors. Elite finishing can make up for off-target shots and blocks, hence why it so rare for a team’s expect goals on target to be higher than its non-penalty expected goals. No surprise that Lazio has taken the two top seasons thanks to Ciro Immobile and his lethal finishing, but perhaps just as unsurprising is Atalanta taking two top 15 positions during its “scoring-for-fun” days.

In contrast, look what happened this year – a hot pile of garbage. If Atalanta had the finishing chops of season’s past, it likely nets Atalanta another 12 goals after adjusting for the goals scored above expect on target goals that Atalanta has demonstrated (which is in fact a weakness of this study and this metric. Goalkeepers tend to let in far more shots than expected statistics would suggest, at least in Atalanta’s case). An additional twelve goals likely leads Atalanta into the race for 4th place again – instead of looking at all the teams going to galivant off in Europe next year.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Its the million dollar question that unfortunately does not have an easy answer. The first thing to do is not panic. Atalanta had its best striker out for half the season. While Zapata underperformed this year, he had been an above average finisher among strikers in previous seasons – so it may just be a blip on the Colombian’s radar. Similar to his compatriot, Luis Muriel has been THE MOST lethal finishers since rejoining Serie A when comparing his expected goals on target to expected goals.

I feel this leaves two big holes. First the Robin Gosens conundrum. Its a fools errand to find someone to replace double digits goals on the left wing, so Atalanta has to chip away at goals from other places as a result, leading to the next hole- consistent depth.

No Duvan and no Josip left Atalanta in a bind for the second half of the year. Mario Pasalic and Luis Muriel can be relied on for clinical finishing, but oftentimes they can be overburdened if they’re forced to create offense, dictate tempo, and score. Heck it would overwhelm most offensive players. Getting Muriel back into his super-sub role is vital, but Atalanta must also ensure that it is stocked with at least one reliable backup that can be counted on to score. I’ll wait for a future article to describe some names, but realistically Atalanta should be seeking players who can get La Dea back to that coveted 1.0 ratio mentioned above. For a quick precursor here’s how the top 10 most prolific expected goal accumulators ha have performed in Serie A over the past four seasons:

Data courtesy of Soccerment.com

Ideally a player in the 0.91 range is par for the course, but obviously someone with a poacher’s touch would be nice. Instead could we just clone Muriel???

Ultimately this is a good starting point, I think, on how to evaluate strikers when just looking at goals. If a player is down in Lautaro’s range or even Edin Dzeko’s range, he better provide something else valuable to the squad to make up for the few extra chances he’ll need to come good on his goal tally. All in due time. For now at least we were able to glean some insight into what made La Dea’s season so poor, and hopefully a template for how to fix it next year. Until then, and as always, Forza Dea!!!

Nick