Stoke Score More August Goals Than Andrew Cole

Hugely amusing tweet* doing the rounds, yesterday.

All great fun in the world of football bants and also an excellent case study in how to use "stats" to purvey a misleading impression that's likely to get picked up, circulated and no doubt recycled in September when the Premier League's fixture computer love affair with the Potters pitches them to the foot of the table.

So let's do a bit of due diligence .

Cole played 44 games to reach his 25 goals, playing, as he did in the 42 game, Premier League era, when they sometimes managed to cram six games in during the opening month.

Stoke scored their 23 goals in 28 matches.

So even this simple addition of context floors the deliberately provocative tweet.

Cole scored 0.57 Premier League goals/game in August, which is eclipsed by Stoke's 0.82 August goals/game.

The comeback would probably be "one is a team of 11 to 14 players".

But 1 of those 14 is a goal keepers, and keepers, with the exception of Stoke City ones, generally don't score.

Four or five are defenders who don't score a lot, which limits the fair comparison to Stoke players, from the August months of the Premier League era, who played in a similarly advanced role to Cole's position at Newcastle, Manchester United, Blackburn, Fulham, Manchester City and Portsmouth.

Designated Stoke forwards scored 13 of their 23 goals, so their scoring rate falls below Cole's 0.57 goals per game to 0.46 goals per game.

Stoke played an average of two out and out strikers over their Premier League existence, so we'll half that rate to 0.23 goals per game.

This puts Cole well back in the lead, allowing the rip to be taken out of the Potters again....?

However, we haven't considered the goal environments.

Stoke played against a batch of sides in August who conceded an average of 1,35 goals per game, as did Cole a decade earlier.

No change, there.

Cole's teams scored an average of 1.80 goals per game, meaning he played for sides who had a lot of attacking intent.

His 0.57 goals per game was around 30% of the baseline figure for his team.

The homogenised Premier League Stoke striker scored 22% of the 1.06 goals per game Stoke have averaged in the Premier League.

Those strikers included Dave Kitson, Mama Sidibe (legend), Ricky Fuller (legend), James Beattie, Kenwyne Jones and Peter Crouch.

Bottom line, Andrew Cole scored a higher proportion of goals for his club than did this mismatch of ageing, journeymen footballers did in their defensively structured, mid table team........in one particular month.

Ha ha.

*NOT