Individual skill or just luck? Decomposing individual finishing and shot-stopping performance in European football

Tom Böttger and Lars Vischer

No 3/2026, Discussion Papers of the Institute for Organisational Economics from University of Münster, Institute for Organisational Economics

Abstract: Expected goals (xG) are widely used to evaluate football performance. However, it is unclear whether players who consistently outperform their xG do so because of skill or because of luck. To our knowledge, this paper provides the first meta-analytic estimate of between-player heterogeneity in finishing and shot-stopping overperformance, extending existing team-level skillluck decompositions provided by Holzmeister & Johannesson (2025) to the individual player level. We analyse data from the English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 across eight seasons (2017/18-2024/25), totalling 3,202 outfield player-seasons and 932 goalkeeper-seasons. Using restricted maximum likelihood (REML) random-effects metaanalysis, we find that between-player heterogeneity accounts for 6.753-29.945% of total variance in finishing overperformance (average I² ≈ 21%) and 7.690-34.344% in shot-stopping (average I² ≈ 25%). Skill is detectable but modest. A complementary persistence regression shows that part of this overperformance carries over to the next season, both for outfield players (Ø = 0.110, p

Keywords: Expected Goals; Football; Meta-Analysis; Performance; Skill (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C23 J24 L83 Z20 Z21 Z22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:umiodp:340032

DOI: 10.17879/60948663147

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