WHEN Bernardo Silva and Jack Grealish joked about Miguel Almirón during Manchester City’s title party earlier this year they unleashed strange forces which we are only beginning to understand. Like a Forest-supporting butterfly flapping its wings and causing Derby County to pick up just 11 points in 2007-08, a relatively harmless piece of footballer banter has seemingly turned Almirón into one of the most dangerous players in the Premier League, if not the entire world. Friday brought the news that Newcastle United’s Paraguayan menace had done the rare Premier League player of the month/goal of the month double, which demonstrates just how impactful he has been. Widely regarded as a player who would not flourish or even be a part of the club’s new era, Almirón has instead become the fulcrum of a team who are now in with an excellent chance of qualifying for the Champions League for the first time since the early 2000s.
So far this season Almirón’s numbers are little short of astonishing. Eight goals in 14 Premier League games is a huge contrast to nine in his previous 110 for the club, and when you factor in some the quality too, it’s clear he’s on course for one of the most memorable campaigns in Newcastle’s modern history. Grealish aside, Almirón seems to act as some sort of strange magnet for denigration. Famously, after signing for Newcastle in the 2019 January transfer window for a then-club record fee, Danny Mills dismissed him as someone he hadn’t heard of, adding “It’s not a signing that makes you go ‘Oh wow, this is inspiring”. Mills then doubled down at the end of the year, calling out Almirón’s lack of goals and assists in his early months at the club.
But here’s the thing, sometimes players can take a while to settle, especially if you grew up in a different hemisphere and came to the Premier League via MLS. Back in their 1970s and 1980s pomp, Liverpool used to sign players for the future and place them in the reserve team for a bit, on the understanding that the step up to the first XI would take a while, but that wasn’t a reflection on their ability. Almirón had the misfortune of that club record fee and its related expectations, and had Newcastle been a more dynamic club in the Steve Bruce/Mike Ashley era then perhaps his slow start would have seen him moved on, another failed import and another reason for proper football men to tut and shake their head.
Instead, Almirón just needed the careful nurturing of Eddie Howe, and the confidence of his team-mates, which in turn has boosted his own, something noted recently by his manager. But just how good has Miguel Almirón’s Premier League glow-up been? We turn, as ever, to the numbers to provide an answer. One of Almirón’s stand-out metrics this season has been his shot conversion rate, which currently stands at 22%. That means he’s scoring with every four or five shots this season, a very good rate and probably fairly sustainable. It’s a big contrast to last season when Almirón’s conversion rate was just 3%, the Paraguayan scoring one goal from 35 shots (it’s eight from 36 so far in 2022-23). That’s an improvement of 19 percentage points from one season to the next, which certainly sounds high.
How high? Well, of players to have had 30+ shots in a campaign, it’s the fourth biggest increase in consecutive seasons in recorded Premier League history. Opta has relevant data back to the 2003-04 season, and in that time only Freddie Ljungberg in 2004-05, Yaya Toure in 2013-14 and Papiss Cissé – another Newcastle man – in 2014-15 have seen bigger. Toure’s 2013-14 was one of the most clinical campaigns in Premier League history, the Ivorian somehow scoring four of the seven direct free-kicks he took, inventing kind of a new form of penalty, taken from in and around the ‘D’ and with a wall in between the ball and the goalkeeper.
Yaya Toure in the PL in 2013-14:
Seven direct free-kicks taken, four goals. A better conversion rate than Juan Pablo Angel had from the penalty spot in his PL career.— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) May 4, 2018
Meanwhile Papiss Cissé is rightly remembered as one of the most hot-and-cold strikers the division has ever witnessed. His much improved 2014-15 is reflected correctly here, with the Senegalese scoring 11 in 22 games after recording only two in 24 in 2013-14. But even more impressive was his debut campaign, 2011-12, when he scored 13 times in 14 appearances (including that achingly good Sensible Soccer-style goal at Stamford Bridge) with a shot conversion rate of 33.3%. As it stands, the only player with 30+ shots to have a higher conversion rate than Cisse is Erling Haaland this season, the Norwegian having scored with 35.3% of his Premier League shots for Manchester City
How good is Miguel Almirón? Is he closer to a Papiss Cisse or an Erling Haaland? We wait to see if his autumn 2022 form can be extended into 2023 but it’s clear that he is enjoying one of the great spells of Premier League form. When a player is given time and shown patience, the best thing you can do is enjoy them in the here and now.
