From Harry Kane to Real Madrid: Five weird 2023-24 stats so far

The international breaks baked into a given soccer season are intrusive and far too frequent. They break the rhythm of the club season, and apparently they've been in the mood to claim some ACLs this time, too. Even FIFA company man Arsene Wenger thinks there are too many breaks, but we continue onward with them all the same.

Really, there are only two positives I can really take from having these frequent breaks in the schedule: They offer more opportunities for first-time call-ups, which I love, and they give me a chance to play in the stat sandbox for a bit and ask some questions I've been meaning to ask for a while.

Just how ridiculous are Harry Kane's scoring rates at the moment? What can interesting stats like xPV tell us about player value? Who has been particularly lucky or unlucky this season? Who has been bitten particularly hard by the injury bug? And are matches really longer this season as promised?

So consider this a grab bag of sorts: five mini-pieces on topics or stats I've been meaning to explore for a while now.

This is ridiculous, Harry Kane

Since 2010-11, here's a list of the players who have averaged at least 1.5 combined goals and assists per 90 minutes (min. 1,500 minutes) in one of Europe's five major leagues:

• Lionel Messi (five times, max. 1.97)

• Cristiano Ronaldo (three times, max. 1.86)

• Zlatan Ibrahimovic (2015-16, 1.80)

• Robert Lewandowski (2020-21, 1.75)

• Neymar (2017-18, 1.60)

• Luis Suárez (2015-16, 1.60)

• Kylian Mbappé (2018-19, 1.54)

• Gonzalo Higuain (2011-12, 1.52)

• Gareth Bale (2015-16, 1.50)

That's not an exact list of soccer's greatest players of the past decade or so, but it's not that far off.

Now here's a list of players who have averaged 2.0 combined goals and assists per 90:

• Harry Kane, 2023-24 (2.06)

Granted, he has only played 961 minutes in 11 matches, and the "You can't top Messi" rule suggests his pace will inevitably slow. But when Kane moved to Bayern Munich in August, we got a chance to ask a pretty interesting theoretical question: What happens when you take one of England's most prolific and consistent scorers, and put him on the most talented team in Europe's most prolific major league? The answer, after about three months, is that he becomes more prolific than Messi. I don't think any of us expected that.

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Kane has already produced 17 goals and five assists. That's as many goals as he scored in the 2018-19 and 2021-22 Premier League seasons -- when he respectively ranked sixth and fourth in the league, by the way! -- and more assists than he produced in all but three seasons. That 2.06 average? His best was 1.28 in the Premier League.

Throw in five Champions League matches, and he's at 21 goals and seven assists. It's not even December yet.

Whatever the reasonable expectations were, he's destroying them, and he's the primary reason why, despite injuries and weird breakdowns and random poor results -- like, say, losing to third-division Saarbrucken in the DFB Pokal -- Bayern have dropped just four points in 11 league matches. For as incredible as Bayer Leverkusen's start has been (the Xabi Alonso-led team tops the Bundesliga table with 31 points), Bayern, on pace for its best Bundesliga point total in a decade, lurks only two points back.

Bayern's best Bundesliga point total in a decade. When they've won 11 straight league titles. That seems unfair. But so is Harry Kane.

Real Madrid and Barcelona vs. the injury bug

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Goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois tore an ACL in August. Defender Éder Militão did the same days later. Aurélien Tchouaméni suffered a foot fracture during El Clásico. Jude Bellingham missed the last match with a shoulder injury. Vinícius Júnior missed most of September with a hamstring injury, then tore a thigh muscle during this international break. Eduardo Camavinga got hurt last week, too.

Real Madrid have one of the highest payrolls in the world and can handle injuries better than most, but holy smokes: this is a lot of injuries. Along with Fiorentina, Sevilla and Almería, the Blancos are one of only four teams in Europe's Big Five leagues that haven't had a single player play at least 90% of all league minutes -- on average, teams have had 2.9 such players -- and now three of the 11 players with at least 60% of minutes are out with long-term issues.

Barcelona likely aren't feeling too sorry for their chief rivals. They've had only two players top 90% of minutes thus far, and one of them is goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen. Among outfield players, only Ilkay Gündogan (95%) has hit that mark while the guy with the second-most outfield minutes, fellow midfielder Gavi (82%), just tore his ACL. Among last year's top 10 minutes earners, defender Ronald Araújo (50%), midfielders Pedri (25%) and Frenkie de Jong (50%) and winger Raphinha (24%) have all seen their minutes severely curtailed by injury.

Surely this has caused a downturn in form, and surely others in Spain have taken advantage, right? Well, no, not so much.

Barca's point total is almost exactly on pace with last year's -- they averaged 2.32 points per game while winning LaLiga in 2022-23, and they're at 2.31 this season -- while Real Madrid's are actually far better. They averaged just 2.05 points per game last season, and they're currently at 2.46. Their underlying stats suggest they've been a bit lucky to rack up as many points as they have (among other things, their +0.8 xG differential per match is barely half of their actual +1.5 per match goal differential), but they would perhaps fairly point out that said good luck only balances out bad injuries luck.

Neither Barca nor Real Madrid are leading the league at the moment, of course. But Girona, the underdogs currently leading the way, have barely played any of the top teams and got thumped by Real Madrid in September. It doesn't feel like that story's built to last, but then again, neither of the league's heavyweights are going to be anywhere close to full strength anytime soon.

You know who's benefited from the continuity Barca and Real Madrid have lacked? The aforementioned Bundesliga leaders.

Six Bayer Leverkusen outfield players have seen at least 90% of league minutes so far -- only Aston Villa, with eight, has more (but Villa lost two starters right as the season was beginning) -- and 10 have played 80%. The lineup of forward Victor Boniface, wingers Jonas Hofmann and Florian Wirtz, midfielders Granit Xhaka and Exequiel Palacios, wing-backs Jeremie Frimpong and Alex Grimaldo and center-backs Jonathan Tah, Edmond Tapsoba and Odilon Kossounou, plus goalkeeper Lukas Hradecky, has been laminated on the board for Xabi Alonso. We'll see how they fare if or when he's forced to change things up.

Bryan Mbeumo: the most underrated player in Europe

We are in the first golden age of soccer measuring stats, blessed with any number of ways to measure a player's contribution to team success. Some, like the DAVIES model, attempt to fold lots of disparate stats into an overall player measurement concept. Others attempt to measure something that hasn't properly been measured yet -- line-breaking passes, for instance.

Of late, I've been playing with a couple of Stats Perform measures that I really enjoy:

xPV Added: expected possession value added

Possession value "measures the probability that a team will score from their possession," according to Stats Perform, so xPV Added measures how much a player's action -- a pass, a carry, etc. -- adds to a team's overall PV. The leaders in this category tend to be wingers and attacking midfielders, players most likely to advance the ball into dangerous areas on the pitch.

Sequence xG

This one's a measurement of the sequences -- "passages of play which belong to one team and are ended by defensive actions, stoppages in play or a shot" -- a player is involved in and the expected goals resulting from those sequences. This is pretty good at measuring the actual scoring threat a player contributes. It also favors forwards for pretty obvious reasons: a sequence requires a shot to register an expected goal figure.

Looking at the leaders from Europe's Big Five leagues in each of these categories gives you a pretty good idea of who have been the most dangerous attacking players in Europe thus far.

Top 10 players in xPV Added, 2023-24 (Big Five leagues):

• 1. Bryan Mbeumo, Brentford (4.37)

• 2. Jérémy Doku, Manchester City (4.13)

• 3. Kaoru Mitoma, Brighton (3.85)

• 4. Iñaki Williams, Athletic Club (3.44)*

• 5. Aleix García, Girona (3.43)

• 6. Iago Aspas, Celta Vigo (3.40)

• 7. Bruno Fernandes, Manchester United (3.40)

• 8. Mathias Jensen, Brentford (3.40)

• 9. Bukayo Saka, Arsenal (3.30)

• 10. Leroy Sané, Bayern (3.26)

*Williams' brother and Athletic teammate, Nico, has 3.15 and almost made the top 10 as well

Though he can occasionally take on a bit too much and give the ball away too frequently for Pep Guardiola's system to function properly, Doku's proficiency on the dribble has drawn attention early in his time with City. This gives a point value of sorts to it. His dribbling and general ball advancement ability have been nearly the best among Europe's best leagues.

Top 10 players in total Sequence xG, 2023-24 (Big Five):

• 1. Harry Kane, Bayern (18.10)

• 2. Kylian Mbappe, PSG (17.14)

• 3. Mohamed Salah, Liverpool (15.90)

• 4. Leroy Sane, Bayern (15.66)

• 5. Erling Haaland, Manchester City (15.53)

• 6. Antoine Griezmann, Atletico Madrid (14.78)

• 7. Victor Boniface, Bayer Leverkusen (13.07)

• 8. Hakan Calhanoglu, Inter Milan (12.02)

• 9. Aleix Garcia, Girona (11.75)

• 10. Bryan Mbeumo, Brentford (11.61)

In a broad sense, the first list tells us who performs dangerous actions (Bruno Fernandes, Leroy Sane), and the second list tells us who actually turns those dangerous actions into dangerous shots (Harry Kane, Kylian Mbappe). Two players, however, are on both lists: Girona's Aleix Garcia and Brentford's Bryan Mbeumo.

Garcia, a midfielder, got lost in the shuffle coming up through the Manchester City ranks and ended up making transfers to Dinamo Bucharest, Eibar and Girona in an approximately 10-month span in 2020-21. But with Girona, he has found himself, fulfilling all sorts of defensive midfield and ball progression roles while also scoring three goals with four assists from 26 chances created. He does everything, and he just got his first cap with Spain's national team -- he played the second half of Spain's 3-1 win over Cyprus on Sunday -- because of it.

Mbeumo, meanwhile, has been a vital source of both chaos and production for a Brentford team that continues to punch above its weight class in the Premier League. If Brentford does just about anything dangerous in attack, he probably had a role to play in it. He has scored six goals with two assists, and those are actually pretty unlucky totals -- his 34 shot attempts have been worth 7.2 xG to date (fifth in the league), and his completed passes were worth 3.6 xA (third).

Even while navigating a finishing slump, Mbeumo has been one of the five or so best attackers in the league.

Union Berlin: from luckiest to unluckiest

Over the course of a nine-month, nearly 40-match league season, a lot of short-term fortune gets sanded away. You may get some breaks -- or some breaks might get you -- for a little while, but by the end of the season, the table looks mostly as it should. And if you manage to defy the god of xG for a full season, soak it in. It's probably not going to happen twice.

In Europe's Big Five leagues last season, 10 teams managed to finish at least four spots higher in the table than their xG differential suggested they should.

- Four spots higher: Bochum (Bundesliga), Fulham (Premier League), Mainz (Bundesliga), Salernitana (Serie A)
- Five spots higher: Osasuna (LaLiga)
- Six spots higher: Clermont Foot (Ligue 1), Lazio (Serie A), Lorient (Ligue 1), Mallorca (LaLiga)
- Eight spots higher: Union Berlin (Bundesliga)

On average, these 10 teams are currently 6.6 spots lower in the table than they were last season. Only Bochum, already quite low, has managed to hold steady.

Union Berlin completed an incredible ascent last season; really, it was more of a prolonged, gravity-defying experience. When they were promoted to the Bundesliga for the first time in 2019, their primary goal was to simply stay up, and they did it with ease, finishing 11th. The next year, they jumped to seventh and qualified for the Conference League. In 2021-22, they finished fifth and snagged a Europa League spot. Last year, they finished an incredible fourth ... with an xG differential that ranked just 12th in the league.

Even for this club, that was evidently too much gravity to defy. This season, they again rank 12th in xG differential, but they're currently last in the Bundesliga. They won their first two league matches of the season in dominant fashion, and they've lost nine straight since. Including Champions League and DFB Pokal matches, they've pulled just one point from their past 14 matches.

Urs Fischer, the engineer of almost everything good this club has ever achieved, left the club "by mutual agreement" during this international break and was replaced by interim manager Marco Grote. In theory, the poor fortune should dissipate, and they should be able to steer themselves to safety this season. But theory suggested they shouldn't have finished anywhere close to fourth last year either. We'll have to see how much retribution the god of xG has in store here.

Union is the extreme, but virtually everyone else on the xGD overachievers list is struggling this season. Lazio finished a surprising second in Serie A last season with the eighth-best xG differential; they're currently 10th. Clermont, Fulham, Lorient, Mainz and Mallorca have all fallen from mid-table to near or in the relegation zone. Salernitana was a semi-surprising 15th in Serie A; now they're comfortably in last place.

On the bright side, if you can survive a year of cruelty from the god of xG, you will probably be rewarded for it. Seven teams finished at least four spots lower in the table than their xG differential suggested they should have last season. Four have rebounded quite nicely.

- Four spots lower: Celta Vigo (LaLiga), Nantes (Ligue 1), Roma (Serie A), Strasbourg (Ligue 1)
- Five spots lower: Koln (Bundesliga)
- Seven spots lower: Valencia (LaLiga)
- Nine spots lower: Stuttgart (Bundesliga)

Stuttgart had the seventh-best xG differential in the Bundesliga last season. but had to win a relegation playoff against Hamburg to avoid going down. Valencia had the seventh-best xGD in LaLiga but, beset by a season-long finishing slump, finished just two points clear of the relegation zone.

This time around, Valencia is a comfortable ninth place, just four points outside the top six and 11 points clear of relegation. Stuttgart? Third place, ahead of Champions League stalwarts RB Leipzig and Borussia Dortmund. Nantes and Strasbourg, meanwhile, are respectively six and four spots higher in the table than they finished last year.

Others haven't been so lucky: Jose Mourinho's Roma finished sixth with the third-best xG differential last season and are currently seventh with the fourth-best differential this year. And poor Koln are languishing again. They were 11th in the Bundesliga with the sixth-best xGD last season; they're 17th with the 16th-best xGD this time around. Last year they were unlucky, but this year they're just bad.

Who's playing the longest matches in Europe?