🇸🇳| Iliman is on my mind: Ndiaye vs MGW
Ben Meakin pores over the data to find out whether Iliman Ndiaye is having a better season than Morgan Gibbs-White did last year.
Words: Ben Meakin
One thing I heard a lot of United fans say this summer – and even while last season was still going on – was man, we are going to miss Morgan Gibbs-White next season. The Wolves loanee was snapped up by [lip curls] Nottingham Forest for over £40m just a few weeks after his final act in a Blades shirt, and while you can certainly question whether that constitutes value for money for Forest, you can’t debate that he is a superb player who was far, far too good for the Championship last season.
At the time, I half-wondered if our own Iliman Ndiaye might be able to step into those shoes. Ndiaye had a fine debut season (he made a brief substitute cameo at Leicester the year before, but to all intents and purposes, 2021/22 was his first proper season of professional football), although he only featured in 30 league games and completed 90 minutes just twice.
It was reasonable to expect that Ndiaye would be better in season two, especially given a full preseason (contract negotiations meant that he was not involved with the first team until mid-September in the previous campaign). However, for him to improve to a level where he could realistically replace Gibbs-White, who was undoubtedly one of the best players in the Championship last year, was a big ask. Right?
Well, apparently not. Barely fourteen months after making his first senior start, Iliman Ndiaye is off to the World Cup with Senegal and is one of the top scorers in the Championship. He’s been red-hot this season, leading to plenty of Blades fans – me included – positing that he might actually be playing better than Gibbs-White was last year.
I won’t pretend to have a definitive answer – football is a sport that invites debate, and my intention here is not to shut that down. However, I’ll attempt to find an answer, using the data available via the excellent FBRef.com, of whether Ndiaye is currently better than Gibbs-White was last season.
A couple of quick caveats: I’m comparing half a season of Ndiaye vs a full season of Gibbs-White. It’s possible that Ndiaye’s numbers at the end of the season look very different to how they do right now. All the same, half a season is a decent sample size. The two are also playing in slightly different positions: Ndiaye has played further forward this season than Gibbs-White did last, and that could impact how they stack up statistically.
Let’s start with the big stuff – the things that actually win matches.
Goals
Morgan Gibbs-White scored 11 league goals last season – Iliman Ndiaye is up to 9 already. With Gibbs-White playing almost 3,000 minutes, he ended up averaging a goal every 261 minutes – basically a goal every three full games that he played.
This is where Ndiaye has a clear edge. “The Senegalese star boy” (as I have absolutely never referred to him out loud) is currently netting a goal every 187 minutes played, which is essentially a goal every other game. That’s impressive! It’s also not such an insane level of performance where it feels like it could be an unsustainable flash in the pan. If Ndiaye continues to score at this rate (and stays available) for the rest of the season, he’ll finish on something like 23-24 goals.
Barring some kind of disaster, Ndiaye is a virtual certainty to outscore Morgan Gibbs-White’s 2021/22 campaign. There are a few other things that make me extremely confident in that, which I’ll get to in a moment, but for the meantime, this is Round 1 to Ndiaye.
Goals verdict: NDiaye
Creating
There were times last season where Morgan Gibbs-White put the team on his back and carried us through games. He wasn’t a player that simply punished lesser teams; whenever we needed a moment of inspiration, he was usually the one that provided it.
So far, Gibbs-White was much more of a creator than Ndiaye. He racked up nine assists – Ndiaye has two so far – and has far superior expected numbers. The Wolves loanee averaged 0.32 Expected Assists (xA) per 90 last season: for context, no player in this year’s Championship can match that. He was a chance-creation phenomenon. Ndiaye comes in at a comparatively pedestrian 0.09 xA.
The pair have very similar shot creation numbers, both averaging around 3.5 shots created per 90 minutes played. Gibbs-White’s xA numbers tell the true story though, as not all shots are created equal: he was creating far, far better chances for his team-mates than Ndiaye has done so far.
Ndiaye is a slightly better dribbler, with a 53.3% success rate vs 42.7% for Gibbs-White, but there’s no contest when it comes to who is the more productive creator.
Creativity verdict: Gibbs-White, by a lot
Shooting
Broadly speaking, there isn’t much difference between the two when it comes to the actual act of kicking the football towards the goal. Ndiaye is hitting the target with 36.6% of his shots so far this season; Gibbs-White did so at 35.6%. Call it even – there are only a few shots in it either way.
Gibbs-White also shot more frequently than Ndiaye currently does, although again, it’s close – around 0.3 more shots per 90 minutes, which is basically one more shot than Ndiaye every three games.
However, Ndiaye tends to shoot from a lot closer to goal than Gibbs-White did – exactly 4 yards nearer, on average. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s the difference between a penalty (which is generally scored) and a shot from near the edge of the box (which is generally not). To that end, we should probably give Gibbs-White credit for hitting the target at as high a rate as he actually did.
So what about the quality of those shots? The nearer to goal the better (think of this as a shorthand answer to the question of “why do people keep talking about Expected Goals”). Even my two year old understands this when she picks the ball up with her hands and carefully places it on the goal line before wellying it into the net.
Even though we’re talking about two players who are very skilled at creating their own shots, there are several outside factors involved in getting a high-quality shot. Better teams will generally create better shots (at the time of writing, the two teams who have created the most Opta-defined “Big Chances” in the Championship this season are Burnley and us). Gibbs-White played in a struggling team for half the season and an on-fire team for the other half. It balanced out as a top-six team, which is what Ndiaye is playing for this season.
So they both have good team-mates who, in theory, will be able to create good opportunities for them. What does that look like in practice? Ndiaye’s Expected Goals (xG) per 90 minutes played this season is 0.33, just a notch behind Gibbs-White’s 0.35. But, as we’ve seen, Gibbs-White shoots more – so let’s boil it down to the average xG of each player’s shot. Gibbs-White took 87 shots last season and had an xG of 11, which comes out as 0.12xG per shot. Ndiaye this season has 6.1xG from just 41 shots – 0.15xG per shot.
It’s close; it may even look minimal to the point of meaningless. But a rough way of thinking about this is that if it took Morgan Gibbs-White eight shots for every goal he scored, it would take Ndiaye less than seven based on the quality of shots each player takes.
If Ndiaye was to finish his chances at exactly the rate that xG suggests, that extra tick of quality per shot would be worth around 2-3 extra goals per season vs the quality of Gibbs-White’s shots. And football is a low-scoring sport – goals are important! Those 2-3 goals could be the difference between draws and wins that pushes a team from a playoff place to an automatic spot.
Shooting verdict: Ndiaye (just)
Defensive work
Gibbs-White was far from a lazy player – one of the reasons he endeared himself to so many fans was his obvious commitment to the cause. If anything, that just makes Ndiaye’s defensive numbers even more impressive, as he’s currently tracking to finish way ahead of Gibbs-White in several metrics – and in others, he’s already overtaken him.
Ndiaye leads the way in combined tackles and interceptions – despite only playing half as many minutes up to this point. He’s put in more blocks (note: “blocks” on FBRef include blocked passes as well as blocked shots), and won more tackles in his defensive third and middle third of the pitch. That is… impressive for someone who’s largely played up front. For what it’s worth, Gibbs-White won the ball in the final third nine times last season, to Ndiaye’s five this season – so he’s on pace to overtake that too.
Defensive work verdict: Ndiaye
Availability
Availability is an asset: if ever there was a season to appreciate that, it’s this one with United’s litany of injuries. One of the main concerns with Ndiaye last season was his inability to complete 90 minutes: he only did it twice and averaged 61 minutes per appearance. It was his first full season of professional football, and it was a common sight to see him running out of gas – and being substituted – around the hour mark.
He also had a spell out of the team, starting just two times in a 12-game stretch from February to April. Clearly, if he was going to have a bigger second season, we needed more minutes out of him.
Gibbs-White on the other hand averaged 85 minutes per start. He too missed around two months of the season, due to injury, although as a result of various COVID-related call-offs, it only amounted to five missed games.
This season, Ndiaye has taken a huge step forward in terms of his fitness. He has started 19 of United’s 21 matches so far this season, and averaged 84 minutes per start, with nine completed 90 minutes. Credit to him – and to United’s maligned conditioning team – for that improvement over the summer.
So it’s dead even on availability in terms of minutes on the pitch – but what about how involved each player is? Touches are a reasonable measure of this, tracking how many different times a player touches the ball in a game (note: a “touch” in this case is not literally how many times a player touches the ball, eg, while dribbling. For example, receiving a pass, then dribbling, then passing all counts as one “touch”).
Gibbs-White was the master of this: a player constantly able to get on the ball, particularly near the opposition’s goal. He had almost 1,900 touches last season, averaging at least one touch of the ball every 90 seconds or so. Best of all, over 1,000 of those touches came in the opposition’s final third: the area of the pitch where our matchwinner could do damage. I can’t underline enough how impressive that is for a player who also worked hard to get involved in the rest of the pitch.
Ndiaye’s involvement lags behind a bit here, averaging a touch every 2 minutes. Some of that can be put down to his role as more of an out-and-out striker, and I can see why Paul Heckingbottom would try to move him a little deeper at times to try and increase the involvement of this season’s star player. At the same time, I think there’s even more of a case for leaving him further forward: only 48% of Ndiaye’s touches are coming in the final third, compared to 53% of Gibbs-White’s.
Availability verdict: Gibbs-White
Team Success
I’ve saved this for last purposefully because it’s the one stat here that I would argue is most affected by outside factors. But in simple terms, how did United perform last season when Morgan Gibbs-White was off the pitch, vs when he was on it? And how does Iliman Ndiaye stack up this campaign on the same metric?
FBRef’s +/– stat tracks the number of goals scored and goals conceded while a player was on the pitch, per 90 minutes played by that player. With Gibbs-White in the team last year, we outscored the opposition by 0.63 goals per 90 minutes that he played.
Ndiaye, however, has an even more impressive +/–. Even with United’s recent defensive frailties, we have been outscoring opponents by a remarkable 0.86 goals per 90 minutes when he’s on the field of play.
The expected goal numbers on this are pretty much dead even: we average about 0.55xG higher per 90 minutes than the opponents when each player is on the pitch. But Ndiaye being “worth” almost a full goal to us every 90 minutes gives him the edge here. And that’s borne out in the points per match that United have claimed from games in which each player appeared: we’ve picked up 1.81 points per match in games featuring Ndiaye this season, compared to 1.61 points per match in Gibbs-White games last campaign.
Once again, that may not sound like a lot – but over a full season, it’s the difference between 83 points (Ndiaye) and 74 (Gibbs-White).
Team success verdict: Ndiaye
Overall Verdict
It’s close enough that I can plump up a cushion and sit comfortably on the fence. Which one has a greater market value, this year’s Ndiaye or last year’s Gibbs-White? Well, Forest “kindly” gave us an indication of that in the summer, and I probably would still say that Gibbs-White’s phenomenal chance creation numbers would have more teams flashing the cash.
However, by the end of this season, Iliman Ndiaye will have played at a World Cup (probably), outscored Gibbs-White (almost certainly), and fired his side to promotion (possibly?). Who knows, we might even tie him down to a new contract. He’s looking like being a better goalscorer, a bigger contributor defensively, and a more skilful dribbler. The team is even performing better with him on the pitch than when we had Gibbs-White last season.
Like I said, it’s close. However, I’d side with Ndiaye overall when it comes to who is better. What can I say? Iliman is on my mind.
Ben Meakin is the creator and co-host of BladesPod, a Sheffield United podcast. You can follow him on Twitter and find BladesPod wherever you get your podcasts.
Great synopsis Ben..... thank you.
It will be interesting to look back on the numbers as the season progresses.
In the meantime here's to plenty more appearances, goals, assists and points.
UTB
Thanks for the analysis, Ben – a great article.
I did wonder how we’d fare without Gibbs-White, not only for his skill and ‘footballing brain’ but because he seemed to lift the spirits of the whole team and the supporters when he was on the field. Games he didn’t feature in seemed a bit sadder somehow. (I mean, look at the glee on those young boys’ faces in the first picture!).
But Ndiaye has most certainly stepped up to the plate (goalmouth?) and as your article shows, is surpassing Gibbs-White in almost every section. I hope, hope, hope we’ll be able to hold on to him and offer a contract. For one so young, he has great balance and strength (that solo goal against Blackburn is a marvellous example); but more than anything he always has a smile on his face and just seems genuinely to enjoy playing football!
At the start of the season I might have joined you on that fence, but now I’m not really missing Gibbs-White that much . . .
Sue.