African club football is still an unknown world for most football fans and analysts. The lack of quality footage and data for most of the local leagues makes it difficult to follow and analyze it. Even considering African football as a single identity is quite misleading as differences across the 54 countries in the continent are huge in style, resources and quality.
The CAF Champions League, the highest-level continental competition in Africa, is the best chance we have to see the top teams of every country play each other with quality footage and data. Ahead of the final on Saturday between Kaizer Chiefs and Al-Ahly, we’ve looked at the data to highlight some interesting names in this edition of the tournament.
All the data is taken from InStat and we have only considered players who have played at least 270 minutes.
Goalscorers
Starting with the most important data, we’ll have a look at the goal-scoring ability of the players in the CAF Champions League. Here, we have only considered midfielders and forwards and have looked at their expected goals (xG) per 90 in the y-axis and their scored goals per 90 in the x-axis. The colour of the dots shows the total number of goals scored, with dark green being the highest.
The clear standout player here is Firas Chaouat. The 25-year-old Tunisian striker played four games in the CAF Champions League this season with CS Sfaxien and scored five goals. He leads the ranking in goals per 90 with 1.19 and is second in xG with 0.77 per 90, an overperformance of 54.5%. He scored these goals by shooting 3.8 times per 90, 69% of the time on target. Chaouat, who has 12 caps to his name for Tunisia, has only played abroad for 10 months in Saudi Arabia and he didn’t really work out there but looking at his form this season, it could be tempting for foreign clubs to give him another chance.
One that could have done much more but deserves credit is Al Ahly’s Kahrabi. The 27-year-old Egyptian striker had the highest xG per 90 with 0.79 but only managed to score 0.55 goals per 90 and a total of two in the tournament. He has had a very successful career so far, getting 27 caps with Egypt and playing in Portugal, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia apart from Egypt. At his age, he can still be an important player but seems to have had a bad spell in front of goal.
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