The beautiful Spanish game, the famous ‘tiki-taka’, and arguably the greatest show in football in the last five years is undergoing a torrid time in front of goal, particularly when disregarding the two big teams in La Liga; Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Real Madrid and Barcelona have scored 73 of the 279 goals in the division, in other words 26.16% of La Liga goals this season. Madrid and Barça are averaging 3.55 and 3.09 goals per game respectively. On the other hand, the rest of the teams in Spain are scoring an average of 1.04 goals per game. In the meantime, the three teams at the bottom of the table are only averaging 0.61 goals per game.
The two big teams are, as usual, having their private fight in the La Liga standings above the rest of the teams. Madrid, with 39 goals, and Barcelona, with 34, are the only two teams in La Liga that have scored more than 20 goals. From the ‘big five’ leagues in Europe, only Serie A fails to feature two teams with at least 20 goals to their name, but no team in Italy has played more than 10 games.
The team that has struggled the most in front of goal this season are newly promoted Granada, who have scored in only four games so far this season. However, the Andalucian’s are not the only team to blame. Actually, eight teams are averaging less than one goal per game this year (Betis, Sporting, Espanyol, Villarreal, Real Sociedad, Mallorca, Racing and Granada). Last season only four teams scored less than one goal per game and Sporting were the only one that didn’t get relegated.
Of course, with the low production of goals there has been an increase in clean sheets this season. With only 110 games played in Spain, 82 clean sheets have been kept, and there have already been 16 bore draws. In the last round of fixtures there were four 0-0 results and half the teams in La Liga failed to score.
Compare this to last season and you see just how much of an increase La Liga has seen in the numbers of clean sheets kept. In the 2010/11 season, there were a total of 216 clean sheets. If this year’s average continues there will be 285 in a total of 380 games. In addition, the number of goals per game by the average team has decreased from 1.37 to the previously mentioned 1.27. The average of the rest of La Liga – excluding Real and Barca – stood at 1.24; considerably better than the 1.04 so far this year.
With only 11 games played, every team has kept at least one clean sheet and also failed to score themselves at least once. In fact, only Valencia and Athletic haven’t played out goalless draws this season.
Barcelona, who last year kept an incredible 19 clean sheets, are actually on course to keep an unbelievable 28 clean sheets this season, with 8 in 11 games already. In an unprecedented season up-to-date, only four teams, if form continues, will keep less than 10 clean sheets this season (Athletic, Mallorca, Sporting and Real Sociedad), and all four are the only teams that look set to manage less clean sheets than last year.
Considering these numbers, perhaps the performance of Spain against England wasn’t as big of a surprise as some would have you believe, and was only a reflection of what is going on in La Liga this season.
