The signing of Pedro Neto came as a massive surprise to nearly everyone and was completed extraordinarily quickly.
Pedro Neto has been identified by many as an extremely talented up-and-coming winger and despite heavy injury problems at Wolves, has impressed many.
Neto offers a vast array of things to a team, from tactical flexibility to great transitional threat.
He can play all across the front three but more importantly, can play great on both wings.
Neto is also extremely useful in a system like Maresca’s.
Enzo Maresca tends to operate with a touchline winger that provides width in attack, Neto can do this.
Time for the data….
Pedro Neto is by far more creative than the wingers at the club.
He contributes 4.45 Shot Creating Actions per 90.
A shot-creating action is quite literally Neto doing something on the pitch that results in a shot.
In my personal opinion, this is a far better metric to judge a player’s creative output than assists.
Chelsea’s wingers performed unremarkably in this aspect with Noni Madueke being the only one coming close.
Below are the totals..
Neto – 4.45 SCA/90
Madueke – 4.35 SCA/90
Sterling – 3.87 SCA/90
Mudryk – 3.43 SCA/90
Pedro Neto also contributed 0.83 Goal Creating Actions per 90 last season, meaning he was almost involved in a goal a game.
A goal-creating action is basically the same as a shot-creating action, though it obviously results in a goal.
Here’s how Neto performed compared to the current Chelsea wingers…
Neto – 0.83 GCA/90
Madueke – 0.68 GCA/90
Sterling – 0.63 GCA/90
Mudryk – 0.51 GCA/90
As we can see, Neto beats all of the wingers currently at the club. Despite this, let’s add a bit of context to the numbers.
Neto actually comes third in SCA/90 from open play, with Sterling and Madueke coming higher.
He does come top, by far, in SCA/90 from set pieces, however.
So, he isn’t as creative as them from open play, right? Yes, but actually no.
When looking at the GCA/90 data, he actually comes top in open play at 0.48 GCA/90.
This is compared to Madueke and Sterling at 0.34 and 0.32 respectively.
From this, it is only logical that you can assume the quality of Neto’s actions is simply better in open play and will lead to more goals.
Let’s look at a few other statistics then, this time sourced from Understat instead of Fbref.
In short, xG Chain and xG Buildup are basically expected goals but without taking a shot or making a key pass.
It helps quantify involvement in moves leading up to shots and chances, similar to goal-creating actions and shot-creating actions.
You’ll be surprised to know that Pedro Neto actually comes bottom in both metrics when compared to all of Chelsea’s wingers.
This is fine, however, considering that Chelsea created 30 xG more than Wolves did last season.
Taking that into account, I can still roughly estimate that Neto would compete very well with Chelsea’s wingers if Wolves made as much xG as Chelsea did.
Obviously, Footnall isn’t that simple and we could go on forever as to how you can’t really make this comparison (Neto himself could have resulted in less or more xG within a team so the number I conclude can only ever be rough).
Despite this, I am going to make it anyway.
xG Buildup/90:
Madueke – 0.40
Sterling – 0.34
Mudryk – 0.25
Neto – 0.21
xG Chain/90:
Sterling – 0.82
Neto – 0.82
Madueke – 0.66
Mudryk – 0.63
As we can see, Neto is relatively unremarkable here, though he still stands up quite well for himself in a worse team and with dodgy maths done by me.
It gets better for Neto however now that we look at basic creativity metrics.
Key passes per 90:
Neto – 2.20
Mudryk – 1.84
Madueke – 1.69
Sterling – 1.21
Assists per 90:
Neto – 0.54
Madueke – 0.17
Sterling – 0.15
Mudryk – 0.12
Expected Assists per 90 :
Neto – 0.31
Mudryk – 0.22
Sterling – 0.19
Madueke – 0.18
So yes, to conclude, Neto is pretty creative and will add a lot into our attack, assuming he stays fit.
He fits the role Maresca wants to play his wingers in and while his goalscoring numbers are pretty remarkable, he might just be the creative spark and balance our attack needs to finally reach the next level from last season.
