With 40 points after 20 games in the Serie A this season Roma are one point above defending champions Juventus who have a game in hand. A key player in Roma’s successful journey so far this season has been Henrikh Mkhitaryan. The Armenian who was on loan last season at Roma from Arsenal, made his move to the Giallorossi permanent this summer. Mkhitaryan has started all but one league game this season and has already overtaken his minutes tally from 2019/20. No player has played more minutes for Roma than Henrikh Mkhitaryan this season. The Armenian has netted nine goals and has eight assists, which is more than any other player in the league.
This visualisation compares Mkhitaryan with some of the other Serie A midfielders from the 2020/21 season. The x-axis represents the different metrics and the y-axis represents the percentile ranks.
As you can see, Mkhitaryan ranks greater than 90th percentile for Goals per 90 minutes (96th percentile), xG per 90 minutes (95th percentile), Assists per 90 minutes (99th percentile) and xA per 90 minutes (91st percentile). An area that Mkhitaryan seems to have struggled in is finding his teammates with through balls, as the 32-year old attacking midfielder has an accuracy of only 35% with his through balls and ranks less than 50th percentile for that metric.
Conclusion
It is evident from the numbers that Mkhitaryan has been very important to Roma’s season so far and it is even more important that Mkhitaryan keeps his form going if the Giallorossi are to continue their good form in the coming months.
