Roberto Firmino has never been particularly known for his finishing ability at Anfield but this season, he's looking sharper than ever by converting to a high level.
Roberto Firmino is known for being good at numerous different things on a football pitch, but finishing isn't particularly one of them. Throughout his stay on Merseyside, he's proved to be quite the rounded performer.
The Brazilian has never acted like a conventional striker, instead interpreting the role like a midfielder would. In addition to posing a threat, Firmino has constructed moves for others, provided Liverpool with a glue of sorts in the final third and harried opponents by pressing more than anybody else.
“Scoring was always important but Bobby is the complete footballer,” Jürgen Klopp once said. "A football team is like an orchestra, to play we need to have people for different instruments, and Bobby plays like 12 instruments in our orchestra. He is incredibly important for our rhythm."
Even when he does attempt to convert shots into goals, he tends to struggle in comparison to more clinical players such as Erling Haaland, Harry Kane or Mohamed Salah.
The numbers can capture Firmino's finishing performance by looking at his number of goals in the Premier League, and comparing that figure with how many times the average player would have scored once presented with the exact same shots, according to Expected Goals (xG).
Between 2017/18 and the end of last season, the Brazilian international accumulated 371 shots on goal in England's top-flight, and xG suggests those shots have been worth roughly 54.7 goals — once excluding penalties — based on historical shot data.
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That essentially means that if Firmino had showcased average shot conversion, he would have around 55 goals to his name from his 371 attempts. In actual reality, he scored just 48 times, which means he underperformed expectation by around 6.7 goals.
For comparison, over the same period, Kane overperformed his expected figures by 11.1 goals in the Premier League, and Salah did the same by 10.2 goals. Sadio Mané is another player who overperformed during the period in question, scoring 3.6 goals more than expected.
The numbers capture exactly why Firmino has never been described as a poacher who will punish opponents once presented with opportunities to score but this term, things have changed.
It is early days but so far, the 31-year-old has experienced a purple patch of form, finding the net with greater consistency and proving to be much sharper in the penalty box through Liverpool's first eight games of the new campaign.
He's taken 19 shots in total this season and those efforts have been worth just 2.9 expected goals. However, he's found the net six times which equates to an overperformance of 3.1 goals.
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