Leicester City: Ademola Lookman vs Ayoze Perez

It took until deadline day, but Leicester City finally addressed the winger position by signing Ademola Lookman. How does the 23-year-old fit into Brendan Rodgers’ system and how successful is this acquisition from a Foxes perspective?

After struggling in his initial Premier League season, playing for Everton back in 2016/17, Lookman ventured into Europe and followed the footsteps of other English talents — most notably wingers — by applying his trade in the German Bundesliga. It was originally as a loan, but his deal with RB Leipzig became permanent in 2019, after enduring a good year with the club (and a further two mismatch years at Everton). Now, the German-side have allowed him to leave on loan for the second time in two seasons — with Leicester City following Fulham in securing his services.

It’s easy to simply dissect the basic numbers for Lookman’s season with Fulham and suggest that he performed to a fairly standard level. Four goals and four assists in 34 games (2,747 minutes) isn’t overly productive. Throughout his career, Lookman has been a goal-scoring winger over a creative one, with him ending only a single season (2018-19) with more assists than goals. Yet, despite this notion of leaning towards finishing chances instead of scoring them — albeit providing minimal numbers in both metrics, Lookman was one of the Premier League’s best creators last season.

A good measurement for creativity is “shot-creating actions” (SCA) which essentially asses the two actions prior to a shot and accredits them with being impactful in the creation of the shot. This can vary from a tackle, to a dribble, although it’s often just a pass. Lookman finished the season with 115 shot-creating actions, which placed him as the 9th best in the league — only Jack Grealish outperformed him from clubs outside the “Top Six”.

Managing to create this many chances, in a side that scored the second-fewest goals in the league, is fairly impressive. It is however worth noting that across the overall season, Lookman only underperformed his expected assists (xA) by 1.2 — as he would’ve expected to receive 5.2 assists with the chances he created and only managed four, which shows that despite creating a lot of shots for his side, his lack of assists weren’t solely due to the poor finishing of the Fulham forwards, and perhaps down to the “bad” (or difficult to convert) shooting chances he created as well.