In this article I want to discuss why Willian might not be as good as some people think, and whether he’s a viable option at Arsenal.
As humans, we put a lot of weight on our memory and we often remember the best events that occurred the most recently. This effect means we don’t look at things as objectively as we should. What does this have to do with Willian? Let us take a trip down to memory lane.
Willian never fails the eye test. He is fast, he can score inside or outside the box, he can cross, dribble, can hold on to the ball high up the pitch and link with other players with ease. Is he a viable Fantasy Premier League asset? As far as stats are concerned the answer is a definite no.
During the 2019/20 season, Willian made 36 appearances, but only started 26 of those and was subbed off seven times. For his time on the pitch, he managed to score nine goals, assisted seven times and got two fantasy assists by being fouled in the box and thus earning a penalty that another teammate converted to a goal.
These stats aren’t that amazing right? What if I told you that this is the best performance he had in the Premier League? Since joining Chelsea back in 2014 his second best goal scoring season was eightgoals in 2016/17 and he got his most assists in 2017/18 which was again seven assists. Pretty underwhelming for a winger that plays an advance role in a top four team.
He scored seven goals from inside the box and two from outside which if I recall correctly were direct freekicks. Willian performs in line his Expected Goals (xG) which was 8.14, outperforming it by just 0.86 while he under performed his Expected Assists (xA) of 8.68 by 1.68. Throughout the year he had 71 total attempts on goal of which 44 were from inside the box.
He also attempted 174 crosses, with 51 being successful achieving a 29.3% success rate which is pretty decent actually. So, according to the expected statistical model he is scoring as much as he should be based on the shots he is taking but he is being slightly let down by his teammates not converting the chance that he is creating for them.
Even though Willian went through his most successful FPL season yet, his stats are not that impressive. Four of his nine goals and four out of his nine assists (including the fantasy assists) came after the lockdown break. So, to put that into perspective he had eight returns in eight games. All four goals came from the penalty spot which tells an interesting story as far as his stats go. If we exclude his xG from the penalties (every penalty has awards 0.75 xG meaning 3xG needs to be deducted) his total xG drops to 5.14 and for a total of 5 goals. Although he is still performing accordingly to his xG, if we take away those penalties then we would only expect him to score 5 goals within the season.
Managers will probably fall for the recency bias as his latest performances left us with a compelling story but as we see stats say a different story. With Willian at 31 years old, it’s safe to das that he is past his prime although his prime wasn’t something to be impressed by.
