Pot shots and point-blank range: Where are the Premier League teams scoring their goals from?

Sergio Aguero's 14 Premier League goals this season have come from an average distance of precisely 8.97 yards
Sergio Aguero's 14 Premier League goals this season have come from an average distance of precisely 8.97 yards

As assassinations go, it was perhaps more Jack Ruby than Lee Harvey Oswald. Sergio Aguero, from his grassy knoll, fired three shots from an aggregate range of no more than 15 yards on Monday night and Arsenal were killed off.

Tap-ins - if that isn’t too disrespectful a term for such close-quarter goalscoring - have a long and illustrious history at the top level. Miroslav Klose’s record of 16 World Cup goals came from a total of 98 yards - just over six yards each - while the great Gerd Muller’s haul of 14 were plundered, on average, from just inside the six-yard box. Gary Lineker, the smiling face of the Goalhanger’s Union, scored just one of his 329 from outside the penalty area, a curling effort from all of 18-and-a-half yards.

It’s not, of course, that Aguero can’t wreak destruction from further out - his career’s near-400-goal repertoire includes plenty of minimal-backlift, maximum-devastation efforts from impressive ranges and angles - but the simple fact is that he often doesn’t need to. His 14 Premier League goals this season have come from an average distance of precisely 8.97 yards. Move another three inches closer in - such has been Manchester City’s relentless exploitation of corridors of uncertainty - and you have the average range of Raheem Sterling’s ten goals (8.89 yards).

It’s not all about a predatory final touch to title contenders’ surgical 16-pass moves, though. Brighton’s Glenn Murray has needed just 8.94 yards on average while Aleksandar Mitrovic - officially the deadliest man from 8.57 yards - remains the only thing keeping Fulham from having to think about next year’s trips to Preston, Rotherham and Wigan.

Meanwhile, no team are more disproportionately up in your goalkeeper’s grill than Burnley, whose 26 goals this season have come from an average of just 8.77 yards, thanks in part to Ashley Barnes squeezing most of his goals home like an end-of-his-tether commuter barging his way in to the last available space on the 07:12 to Waterloo.

At the other end of the spectrum are the pot-shots and the speculative efforts. The distinctly mid-table trio of Leicester (14.32 yards), Southampton (14.57) and Watford (14.59) are the only sides within touching distance of the Premier League’s quite literal outliers: Crystal Palace.

Palace's glaring lack of a functioning centre-forward, Luka Milivojevic’s seemingly weekly penalty-spot residency, plus the crowd urging Andros Townsend to shoot means their 26 league goals so far have come from an average distance of 15.97 yards; further out than Aguero’s hat-trick goals laid end-to-end. That’s fortunate for Roy Hodgson, since the demise of Christian Benteke has left his side with an attacking aerial presence second only to West Ham’s in its shyness: they’ve scored just two headers so far in 2018/19.

Among the division’s top-scoring forwards, there is a similar anomaly. The 10 goals of Son Heung-min, whose medium-range capability often comes in handy when Spurs find themselves banging their collective heads against a defensive brick wall, have come from nearly two yards further out than nearest challenger Eden Hazard’s collection of slaloming one-twos and impudent penalties. Meanwhile, the Premier League's leading scorer Mohamed Salah boasts a tantalisingly fox-in-the-boxy average of 9.99 yards per goal.

So what, as they say, have we learned? What is the optimum distance from which any self-respecting Premier League outfit should be scoring their bread-and-butter goals? While the average Premier League goal is scored from a not-unreasonable 12.49 yards out, the output of prolific title contenders Manchester City and Liverpool suggest the answer is anywhere between 10.93 and 11.58 yards. If anything, Clive, Sergio Aguero was almost too close for comfort.

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