Chelsea’s 2020/21 Player of the Year: What’s next for Mason Mount?
2. Improvement
Before diving into the numbers, we must determine what Mount is good at when it comes to shots and goals. The youngster has got a mean whip on his right foot, allowing him to bend shots from long range. He generates enough power to beat the goalkeeper, although that hasn’t always worked well due to his slightly lagging composure. He is fairly good from set pieces and even scored a wonderful free kick last season, which begs the question—why hasn’t he taken more? More on that later.
Presently, the focus turns to how and where Mount takes his shots from generally. The England international has a decent return this season of nine goals across all competitions, but is still quite wasteful. He has taken 100 shots across all competitions for Chelsea this season, from which nine have gone in—a nine percent conversion rate that is only marginally better than Timo Werner.
Wyscout recorded 89 shots which Mount has taken this season for Chelsea, a slight variation from the previous data. However, it proved to be useful when filtering out his shots based on the position on the pitch. The Pride of London sat through all 89 of those shots before dividing them into three categories—shots from outside the box, shots from inside the box and shots from 12 yards or around the penalty area.
As it turns out, only 14 of those 89 shots Mount took were inside the “golden zone,” or the 12-yard area from where the probability of scoring is likely to be the highest. Unquestionably, those shots yielded the best return. Five of his nine goals this season have come from that zone, including one penalty. To that end, he should be making more runs deep into the box when the Blues are attacking. That is sometimes limited by the team’s build-up, nevertheless, a tally of 14 shots all season from the danger zone is something that he needs to work on.
Looking further upward, Mount has taken 30 shots from inside the opposition box, but most of them were low probability strikes from difficult angles, or which were hit the first time as the ball fell to him on the rebound. He did score twice from those positions, with one particular strike against Liverpool likely to be heralded as one of Chelsea’s goals of the season.
Furthermore, the youngster took most of his shots from outside the box (45 out of 89). However, not a lot of them were of good quality. A lot of those were snapshots that were taken quickly, without first setting himself up. A few of them hit the defenders who had crowded him out on the edge of the area, and some of them naturally went off target. Overall, Mount scored twice from distance this season—against West Bromwich Albion and Morecambe—but his tally suggests he should’ve either done better or chosen an alternative option more frequently.
Mount’s expected goals (xG) numbers also paint a similar picture. Thus far during the current campaign, he is averaging 0.08 xG per shot on target, which is only the ninth-best in the squad. In comparison, Tammy Abraham and Kai Havertz have averaged around 0.18 xG per shot, while Christian Pulisic stands at 0.13. It shows that, despite taking a high number of shots, the youngster rarely takes good ones.
What can he do to improve then?