More reasons for changes up front for Spurs

As we all know, last season us at Spurs were in desperate need of a striker, as Adebayor wasn’t up to perform as well as he did last season and Jermain with his injuries.

So one would assume that we were simply in a dry spell in terms of the quality of our forwards, no? What you probably don’t know is that Spurs’ strikers over the past couple of decades have actually become increasingly worse in terms of amount of goals scored per game.

I’ve taken the liberty of doing all the calculations to work out the amount of games per goal of every forward since the 50s, and then divided the forwards into individual decades. From the graph above we can see that the amount of games per goal scored is steadily increasing, except for the anomaly in the 70s. This shows that the games to goals ratio of our strikers in the last 50 years have, unfortunately, gone upwards.

Then, we can look at the most time efficient strikers in each decade and compare them in the same way. In the 50s, Bobby Smith had a ratio of 1:1.5, meaning that he would score 1 goal every 1.5 games; whilst in the last decade, Berbatov was the best with the ratio of 1:2.2, meaning every 2.2 games he would score.

This, to me, is rather worrying as it seems the strikers we are buying are scoring less and less since the days of Bobby and Greavesy, and also becoming less and less time efficient. I believe that there is a substantial reason for this in the fact that our last two owners, Lord Sugar and Levy, were and are both well known for the tightness of their purse strings, especially when it came/comes to necessities and filling holes.

Another point of note is that Gareth Bale’s game per goal ratio for just league goals last season was 1:1.6, meaning that he is among some of the best ever Spurs forwards since the 50s. We must keep him.

This is, therefore, a problem that has to be combated this summer with the purchase of at least two new 20-goals-a-season strikers, or else we could find ourselves suddenly out of the pecking order and out of the running for Champions League places yet again.

Please let me know about what you think of this strangely foreboding analysis of Tottenham’s potential future, and of any questions you may have about the statistics, in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!