Rangers' reliance on James Tavernier and Alfredo Morelos forensically analysed

In the current season, Rangers have, so far, scored 50 non-penalty goals from 27 games, an average of 1.85 per game.

Penalties are regularly excluded from goalscoring discussions as they are deemed to be a specialist skillset and as such do not give any great indications of a player's overall goalscoring ability.

When you add in penalties to the figures above, that total over the four seasons increases to 294 goals. Of that, Alfredo Morelos (53 goals and 14 assists) and James Tavernier (35 goals and 40 assists) have been directly involved in 142 of those goals, where it’s scoring or assisting. 48% of Rangers league goals involved one of the two players, which shows they have consistently been Rangers' best-attacking threats throughout this near four-year spell.

This season shows no sign of these numbers slowing down, with Alfredo Morelos leading the league with 11 goals and James Tavernier the lead creator with 11 assists, a full four ahead of his nearest challenger. If you combine both goals and assists together to form the Scoring Contribution metric, Morelos again comes out at the top of all players in the SPFL contributing 16 for this season with Tavernier not far behind in third with 14.

Both Tavernier and Morelos are undoubtedly key members of the Rangers first team and have been throughout but at what point does this remarkable level of consistency become an overreliance on these two players?

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Alfredo Morelos has been on another one of his hot streaks recently, scoring 10 goals in the 13 games he has featured in under Giovanni van Bronckhorst. On Sunday against Dundee United, however, he was limited to just two attempts at goal by the hosts with only one forcing the goalkeeper into a save. 

As you can see from the table above, Morelos’ 11 league goals to date have come from an xG 14 so he is continuing to get himself into good goalscoring situations and it is conceivable that this scoring run may continue for another few games at least.

In general terms though, it is clearly unrealistic to expect one player to consistently shoulder the burden of goalscoring and when games such as Sunday do appear, having other players in the team who are capable of finding the back of the net is a must.

Kemar Roofe has played the fewest minutes of the six attackers listed above and has contributed just three non-penalty goals in that time in addition to three successful league penalties. With Scott Arfield in a similar situation to Kemar Roofe in terms of fitness and ability to find space in and around the box, if Rangers are able to successfully manage both players' fitness in the closing weeks of the season this could be critical in removing that over-reliance on Alfredo Morelos’ goals.

Whilst Joe Aribo has scored seven non-penalty goals so far this season, his xG stands at around half of that at 3.71 which would suggest that he has scored some difficult chances (such as his stunning goal at Tynecastle) but is not regularly putting himself into areas which give him the opportunity to take consistent high-quality shots. Despite his team-high goal conversion rate of 16%, the expectation is that his goalscoring form will regress back to the mean. 

It’s a similar story with Ryan Kent, a player whose output is often criticised and his numbers stand out here for the wrong reasons. Kent has only scored two league goals so far this season from a paltry xG of 2.81. His goal conversion stands at just 4% this season which again suggests that unless he puts himself into better goalscoring situations, his goalscoring return will not increase dramatically.

The scatter graph above shows a combination of non-penalty goals and Expected Goals so far this season for each member of the Rangers squad with more than 600 league minutes under their belt. Players who find themselves in the top right quadrant are not only scoring regular goals but are consistently covering chances of high quality.

In just over 900 minutes he has already scored six goals from 39 shots giving him the second-highest conversion rate in the team with 15%. As I wrote in a pre-season Sakala profile for Rangers Review, Sakala is the type of player who appears to be ill-suited to certain domestic challenges Rangers may face however it’s inarguable that he provided an impetus and different dimension to Rangers play on Sunday against Dundee Utd as he amassed an xG of 0.44 from just over half an hour on the pitch. Right away it’s noticeable that with the limited minutes Fashion Sakala has had on the pitch, his output has actually been very good and that the Zambian has perhaps been unfortunate not to have played more regularly than he has.

As mentioned above, James Tavernier has assisted 11 goals from 25 league appearances so far this season. Tavernier created 10 goals in his first 12 league appearances of the season meaning that just one assist has come in his last 13 games.

Tavernier currently has six open play assists for this season with the other five coming from a set-piece delivery. It’s clear to see how much of Rangers' creative play come through Tavernier whether it’s in open play or from set-piece delivery. No other Rangers player has managed more than five assists in total for Rangers this season so far with Morelos (5) and Ryan Kent (4) rounding out the top three. When you consider that Rangers are scoring 20% fewer open play goals than they did last season, it’s clear to see that the overreliance on Tavernier to consistently create is having a significant impact on Rangers' chance quality.

Joe Aribo has predominantly played as a number ten under Van Bronckhorst but also played deeper as a central midfielder for large parts of this season which would understandably have an impact on his ability to create chances, particularly in the tactical system employed previously by Steven Gerrard. With just three assists to date this season, this is another contribution that could improve even if he has probably been a little unfortunate not to have another couple of assists from an Expected Assists tally of  4.8.

Part of this disparity can be put down to Aribo creating quality chances but being let down either by poor decision making or poor finishing by his teammates. In Rangers' 1-1 draw with Hearts in October - a game in which Rangers completely dominated but were unable to put to bed prior to Hearts last gasp equaliser -  Aribo contributed three high-quality shot assists for a total of 0.73xA but three poor finishes from Morelos resulted in no goals and therefore no assists.

The scatter graph above illustrates the gap in chance creation with Tavernier way out in front of his teammates in the top right quadrant showing that he is regularly contributing not only a high volume of assists but combining this with consistently creating quality chances. 

The loss of Borna Barisic (seven assists in 20/21) and Ianis Hagi (10 assists in 20/21) as creative forces this season have not been adequately replaced for Rangers with Hagi making zero assists before his injury and Borna Barisic contributing just three. As well as both players having less than stellar seasons, there are of course tactical reasons why they may not be as active in the final third of the pitch. Borna Barisic has been asked to play a slightly deeper full-back role than previous, with van Bronckhorst preferring the Croatian to play more of a supporting role in the teams' left-hand side build up.

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This has obviously stunted his attacking contribution significantly whereas, for large parts of van Bronckhorst’s time at the club, Ianis Hagi was played as a right-winger which does not appear to align with his skillset. Last season Hagi was predominantly played as a right-sided number 10 and was able to utilise his close control and eye for a pass to great effect in key central areas of the pitch.

Regardless of both of these tactical tweaks and the debated merits of both, the point remains that their creative contribution has not been picked up by other members of the team.

This bar chart shows each players combined expected goals and expected assists per 90 minutes on the pitch and from this, it’s clear to see which players are consistently creating and taking high-quality chances when they are presented. 

The 1-1 draws against Dundee Utd last Sunday and against Hearts at Ibrox in October stand out as being ‘freak’ results where Rangers should and could have won by at least two clear goals as they dominated and were able to limit the opposition to just one or two chances per game. As mentioned above, Rangers had several chances to put the game to bed against Hearts prior to the late equaliser by Craig Halkett and on Sunday Rangers were also guilty of missing a number of gilt-edged opportunities to get the victory over the line. 

With the current tactical set-up favouring Ryan Jack and John Lundstram as central midfielders and a front four which will always contain Alfredo Morelos, Ryan Kent and Joe Aribo, the onus should be on Aribo and Kent to consistently increase their attacking output and ensure Rangers' season does not end in huge disappointment.

Given their respective contributions and outputs mentioned in this article, it appears clear that Fashion Sakala should be seriously considered as the ‘fourth’ attacker more often than he has been given his relative success both in creating chances for his teammates and putting the ball in the back of the net.