Every fan of the sport has a particular favorite striker, and most fans have an idea of who they think the best one is at the moment. Ronaldo? Messi? Torres? Maybe you’ll go avant-garde and throw out Imbrahimovic, or go retro and throw out Thierry Henry.
Regardless of your criteria, though, you’re wrong. Meet the best striker in the world: Seydou Doumbia of Swiss club Young Boys Bern (no puns, please).
Or, at least, that’s what uber-expensive scouting service IMScouting says. In fact, they’ve compiled a list of the ten most efficient attackers in the world, and their complicated metric (which, apparently, just takes your total minutes played and divides that number by the number of goals you’ve scored plus the number of assists you’ve had) says it’s not even close. Doumbia, in spite of playing only 635 minutes this season, apparently makes something goal-oriented happen once every 37.35 minutes. That’s something like fifteen minutes better than Marc Janko, who’s played 1895 minutes for Salzburg and yet has only made something happen every 51.22 minutes.
Of course, this is a flawed metric; defenses aren’t taken into account, Doumbia has only played like seven games this season, and it ignores every other thing that a player can do to contribute to a goal-scoring opportunity. In a sport with very few actual statistics, though, it’s about as good as us laypeople can get to figuring out what signs to look for in a good player. If someone signs Seydou Doumbia, just remember that you heard about him hear first.
Apparently the metric also doesn’t take into account that he plays in the Swiss Super League- a league so “good” that they have to fill out its numbers with a team (FC Vaduz) from Liechtenstein.
Get Capello on the phone, post-haste. The Three Lions need all the strikers they can get.
[...] spot; fortunately, Grasshopper managed to beat ninth-place FC Sion 4-1. Elsewhere, BSC Young Boys (home of Seydou Doombia) beat previously mentioned Vaduz 6-0. Defense is optional in [...]