Premier League clubs spend too much money on wingers who can’t score goals

Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and all the guys who came next – Arjen Robben, Gareth Bale, Neymar, Mohamed Salah – changed our perception of what a winger should do.

It used to be this: put chalk on your heels, stay back, wait for a pass, get around your defender and pass the ball to the big striker in the box. And then you will do it again and again and again.

The problem, however, is that even the best crossers are incredibly ineffective. Depending on where and when you look, X’s turn into Goals anywhere from 1-3% of the time.

Many a dominant performance from a winger has ended as an exercise in frustration: his team feeds him the ball, he proceeds to beat his defender, and then the cross inevitably comes to nothing. If only his teammates could reach his level! Much of the dominance disappeared as soon as the ball left the winger’s foot.

What Ronaldo and Messi did – and made everyone else realize – is that you can take the same striker skills, speed and technical prowess and turn them into something even better. The average shot is converted about 10% of the time, so every time a winger receives the ball and turns it into a shot instead of a cross, that player on average increases your chance of scoring by 233-900%.

For all the emphasis on pressing and possession, this shift has become a defining feature of the 21st century version of the sport. Strikers like this had never existed before, but now they were more important than anyone else.

Or at least they were. Given the departure of Salah from England, as well as Messi and Ronaldo from the international scene, perhaps this is appropriate. Premier League teams seem to have forgotten what their strikers are supposed to do.

Bringing back wingers who can’t score goals

The state of forward play in 2026 is best summed up by Manchester City’s move to sign Iliman Ndiaye.

The 26-year-old French-born Senegalese international is one of the best dribblers in the Premier League, if not the world. His current team-mate Jeremy Dokou exists in his own world of possession, but Ndiaye finished second behind him in doubles completions last season with 72, according to statistics app Futi. And the previous season wasn’t much different: his 75 doubles ranked fourth behind Doku, West Ham’s Mohamed Kudus and Liverpool’s Salah.

If you watch the highlights compilation NBC Sports put together following Ndiaye’s move to City, you’ll be convinced you’re watching one of the best players in the world. Explosive athleticism, mesmerizing footwork, powerful shots and plenty of dribbling that leads straight to goals.

The problem, however, is that the 17-minute video contains almost every goal Ndiaye has scored in the Premier League over the past two seasons. Apart from penalties, he found the back of the net 11 times for Everton in that period. Include his three assists and that adds up to 0.25 non-penalty goals + assists per 90 minutes with the Toffees.

Last season in the Premier League, the 96 qualifying players had the best attack per minute. Manchester City paid 70 million euros to acquire Ndiaye.

However, he’s not the only high-priced striker who bypasses defenders for fun, blows up YouTube and can’t turn it into goals.

Among the players classified as wingers by Transfermarkt, Premier League clubs have spent at least €40 million on transfer fees for 23 different players over the last three seasons. Here’s the list, sorted by fee:

When scouting a player, there is a lot of noise involved in converting shots into goals and passes into goals. Expected goals and assists are a much better indicator of how dangerous a player was around goal, as they account for every shot and every pass a player makes.

For xG+xA without penalties, 0.5 per 90 minutes is an acceptable rule of thumb for above average performance. At the very least, when you’re playing for a Premier League team and you see a winger break that threshold, you should take a closer look at the player.

If we ignore the four strikers who joined from outside Europe’s Big Five top league, we are left with 19 players. And among them, only five reached the 0.5 mark in the season before the move: Barkola, Uttara, Madueke, Mbaye and Johnson.

It might even resell it. Although Johnson is a striker, he is technically more of a wide center forward, meaning he simply makes attempts to get to the back post. He is the only player on the list who has not completed at least one shot in 90 minutes. And then Mbaye played just 900 minutes, mostly for the best team in the world.

Among the true wingers who played consistently, there were three of the 19 who were able to get past their defender and produce above average performances. And it’s not even clear that the production – you know, the part where you turn your play into goals – brought any prize. The same happened with Barcola, who leads all players with 0.8 xG+xA, but then Madueke’s fee is 10th and Uttara is 17th.

In fact, among the seven players who paid over €60 million, four (Savio, Ndiaye, Kudus and Elanga) did not even achieve 0.4 xG+xA. Among the players with at least 900 minutes of game time, 53 different Premier League players made it last year.

Why don’t Premier League clubs care about goals anymore?

This has been going on long enough that it’s not just some random quirk. Over the past three seasons, enough teams have spent a lot of money on these flashy forwards without the end product that it has to count for something.

Yes, I realize I’m sounding like your grandfather now, but back in the day it seemed like teams were starting to realize that dribbling skill in and of itself wasn’t worth anything. It had to be about performance because that’s what the game is all about. As they competed for titles every year under Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola, Liverpool and Manchester City squads were filled with wide players who scored a lot of goals and won a lot of games.

So what’s changed? I think it’s a combination of three things.

First: change of tactics. At the top of the table, most clubs have moved to a style that prioritizes control and risk limitation. See: Arsenal’s ever-growing collection of converted centre-backs or coach Enzo Mareschi, who brought Marc Guei into the central midfield role in his first two games for Manchester City. Instead of quickly attacking and potentially turning the ball over with a defensive structure that looks something like this…

… the better teams began to hold more bodies while attacking, and also began to move the ball further up the field more methodically. When you do this, you don’t have many players moving forward to disrupt the opponent’s defense, and you don’t move forward fast enough to prevent the defense from being disrupted.

So what is the solution, beyond the standard provisions? Pass the ball to your lead striker and let him try to break down the defense on his own. Last season in the Premier League, only 17 players made at least 1.75 interceptions per 90. Of our list of 19 players, 14 reached this mark in their final season before moving to another club.

In the worst case scenario, your striker will lose the ball, but he already has all the cover behind him. Also, losing the ball towards the sideline is much easier to deal with than losing the ball in the middle. Just look at the entire sequence in the screenshot above to understand why many managers don’t want turnover and risk to fall in between:

This is all connected with the second reason. As I wrote about Tottenham earlier this year, there is a growing obsession with physicality. We now have all sorts of metrics that measure how much a player runs away from the ball, what types of runs they make, how fast they can run, how quickly they can slow down, etc.

These new numbers are gaining acceptance among front offices across the continent, multiple sources in Europe tell me. Clubs have acted on this data much more quickly than ever before, using any numbers and models that try to link themselves to scoring and preventing goals.

But all these numbers are not much different from dribbling indicators. They tell us what the player is doing, but they don’t tell us how effective what he is doing actually is. And, in addition, there is some correlation between explosive physical indicators and the abilities necessary to get past an opponent: speed, acceleration, agility. Prejudice reinforces each other.

And all this constitutes the final cause. The fatal flaw of most professional sports teams for most of the history of professional sports has been the obsession with potential. Scouts and coaches love to imagine what a player could do in the future, how he could become something new if he could teach him a few things.

And a maze dribbler is football’s version of a wide receiver who runs a 4.3-meter 40-yard dash, or a 7-foot center who can move like he’s 6-foot-4. It doesn’t matter if these players don’t score goals, rarely catch passes, or can’t shoot well. What matters is what might happen if one day they do.

Although the Premier League has been modernized, hierarchical decision-making structures have been built, data has flooded the game and two of the greatest footballers of the 21st century have proven otherwise: clubs simply cannot quit. If you can get past your defender, someone will give you and your old club a lot of money – whether it’s the best move or not.