Much has been made over the sacking of Julen Lopetegui in recent weeks, with many blaming the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo as a reason as to why Real Madrid simply aren’t scoring as many goals. Obviously making up the 40+ goals Ronaldo brings per season isn’t easy, but there’s another significant difference that nobody else seems to have picked up on the lack of set-piece goals from Madrid this season.
Set-pieces have made up a large number of Real Madrid’s goals in recent seasons as the below picture demonstrates (data from whoscored.com):
Obviously, it’s early days in the season, but I can’t help that feel Lopetegui potentially could have still been in a job if he’d kept a similar sort of ratio (that would have potentially bought an extra 3 or 4 goals to the team) that Madrid had seen in seasons past. Let’s look at Real Madrid’s set-pieces last season, the 20 goals they scored can be broken down into the following categories:
Corners: 15 goals
Free kick (shot:) 2 goals
Free kick (crossed): 2 goals
Throw-in: 1 goal
So with corners making up a large majority of the set-piece goals, I’ll focus on them and compare the corners in the last 3 La Liga games under Zinedine Zidane against the first 3 league games under Julen Lopetegui and hopefully understand why Real Madrid simply haven’t been effective from set-pieces this season.
