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Pépé Creativity - Thread
Having analysed his shooting (here and here ) it is time we moved onto his creativity in the final 3rd.
Having analysed his shooting (here and here ) it is time we moved onto his creativity in the final 3rd.
Many of the most valuable attacking players in world football are players who can both score and create at an elite level. Messi perhaps being the prime example of this as he lead La Liga in both goals and assists last season; 49 goal involvements in total.
Looking purely at end product, Nicholas Pépé would perhaps be the player in Ligue 1 who had the most productive season as he finished 2nd in terms of both goals scored and goals assisted.
However, we often see a lot of variance in players numbers from one season to the next. We saw this with Aaron Ramsey's goal scoring numbers at Arsenal. However, when you dig deeper, you see his underlying numbers were pretty consistent, it was merely variance with his goals.
So when we see Pépé having just 1 assist in 2016/17, 4 in 2017/18 and then 11 in 2018/19 - we should ask whether he is merely improving rapidly, is this an over-performance that we should expect to regress towards mean or something else?
Firstly, looking at the situations he is creating chances from, we can see that 9 of his assists have come from open play with 1 coming from indirect freekicks and another from corners. Pepe wasn't on setpiece duty for Lille last season. Yassine Benzia and Anwar El Ghazi were 
the two largely responsible for most of their corners and freekicks last season. Likewise, at Angers in 2016/17, he wasn't involved in setpieces either. Therefore, it's logical we see an increase in his creative numbers now he is involved in setpieces also.
We can also see the open play (OP) expected assists (xA) from all the chances he has created this season is 8.57. Therefore producing 9 assists from OP xA of 8.57 is pretty much bang on the money. Indeed, looking at his last 3 seasons, he has 16 assists from an xA of 16.21.
We can safely say that this isn't some huge over performance that should be expected to regress. He is created good quality chances that are being converted at around the expected rate by his team mates.
We can also see in the time graph the the quality of chances spikes at the beginning and end of matches. This is fairly typical as it can take some sides a little time to settle into a game. Likewise, at the end of games, it can be easier to find space when teams open up
chasing a goal, or as they tire. We see most of his assists clustered in the second half of games which is encouraging as it shows he remains a threat for the full 90 minutes and doesn't fade out of games as he tires.
Looking at the category of chances being created, we can see he is created a good number of big chances and they are being converted at more or less the expected rate. Interestingly, looking at previous seasons, he only created 3 big chances in 2016/17 and 6 in 2017/18.
It does indeed look like his end product has just clicked into place. This is all fairly normal though for players in their early 20s. Players like Owen, Fowler, Mbappe, Messi, R9 tend to be the exception rather than the rule in terms of having elite end product in their teens.
Looking at the last action on chances he is creating, it is interesting to see so very few crosses from a 'winger'. Similar to Salah, his role isn't that of a winger but as a goalscorer who attacks the box in this system. He is also very one-footed and unsurprisingly
isn't whipping balls in from the right wing too often. It is also good to see very few small chance crosses being put in. Crosses can be very poor chance generators for players who just 'lump the ball into the mixer'. Pepe seems to only cross the ball when he can pick someone out
He is playing a good number of high-quality through balls and has created 4 big chances from them this season. He is also attempting chipped balls to play team mates in. This is a good passing selection to create chances and very similar to that of Salah.
His chance creation map now. Remember this is a map of the shots resulting from chances he created. It is NOT the position from which he is playing the final pass from.
The interesting thing to note here is that none of his chances created are where he has layed the ball off to a team-mate to drill into the roof of the net from 40 yards. Or crosses that happened to float over the keeper to become goals.
All his created chances resulted in shots that are fairly central to the goal. Likewise, none of his assists are little green dots from outside the box. All the goals he assisted were legitimate chances created.
This is further underlined in the donut charts here. Only 2 of his 11 assists were goals scored outside the box. As we saw on the map, one of those was from inside the 'D' space outside the box (also referred to as the penalty arc).
The other from right on the edge of the box, slightly left of centre. We can also see from the line graph of his creative numbers over the course of the season that he created more chances at home (43 vs 26) but created better quality chances away (0.16 vs 0.13 xA).
This makes perfect sense again, as at home sides are likely more conservative and therefore harder to open up. While away from home, Lille can counter attack more and have more space to exploit, thus creating more quality chances.
Lastly, I am sure you all notice the spike on that xA graph. That was a game against Caen in which he absolutely ran riot. He created 3 big chances, 2 of which resulted in goals, He also scored and missed a big chance to add a 2nd.
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