Aston Villa have specific type of goal issue Unai Emery must fix – here’s why
Scoring goals would go a long way to fixing Aston Villa’s problems at the moment.
Indeed, Unai Emery‘s side haven’t scored more than a single goal in an individual game of football in any of their last seven outings in all competitions.
As a result, Aston Villa‘s performances and results have nosedived significantly over the last few weeks, compounded by two back-to-back dismal defeats at the hands of Wolves and Chelsea respectively.
Chelsea are now just three points behind Villa in fifth, and with Man United, Liverpool and Man City all still to play this season, dropping out of the Champions League entirely looks a real possibility for the Villa Park outfit.
Why Aston Villa have to work on scoring headed goals
With Aston Villa being the only top five team in the Premier League this season to have scored less than 50 goals, sharpening their cutting edge has to be a major priority moving forward.
Morgan Rogers and Ollie Watkins are the joint-top scorers with eight goals each this term, and only 26 of their 39 goals scored this season have come from open play.
However, there is a very specific kind of goal that Emery’s Villa side simply aren’t scoring anywhere near enough of this year: headers.
As detailed by Sofascore, only bottom-placed side Wolves (three) have scored fewer headed goals in the Premier League this season than Aston Villa’s four.
With some clear height and aerial ability in the side such as Watkins, Tammy Abraham, Tyrone Mings and Pau Torres, Villa should be doing considerably better than that.
Villa are registering a crossing accuracy of 22 per cent in the league this season, which certainly isn’t helping their cause in this regard either.
Therefore, this is a clear aspect of Villa’s attack that must be addressed, ideally before the end of the season, but certainly and perhaps more likely, in the summer.
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How Villa’s headed goals this season compare to previous years
Such an issue scoring goals from the air wasn’t present in Aston Villa teams of recent seasons, however.
Villa bagged 10 headed goals last term, as they also did in the 2023-24 campaign too.
In fact, the last time a Villans side registered fewer headed goals scored than four in a single Premier League season was in 2019-20, where Dean Smith’s team registered just three.
Abraham certainly is a centre-forward that can score plenty of goals with his head, so putting more crosses and accurate ones into the box should be a main focus area at Bodymoor Heath over the summer.
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