that non-penalty goals is a bit of a dodgy stat. Bit of a disservice to regular penalty winners.
you could put Marinovic on pens, bring a good diver into the squad and he'd be the top goalscorer in the league. Removing penalties is necessary
Discounting penalties from goalscoring stats is the dumbest shark cos they count exactly the same as any other goal and a player has to earn the right to take them.
I'm not talking about winning them, I'm talking about taking them. Like I said, you get others to win them and stick my grandma on pens, she'll be right up the golden boot table
If you're not the one winning a penalty, you're literally scoring a goal any player on the field will put into the back of the net nine times out of ten. Winning the penalty is the hard part
If you earn the right among the playing group to take the penalties then you deserve all the plaudits for putting them away. Non-pen goals is a joke of a stat.
Non-penalty goals is easily a superior measure of someone's goalscoring than total goals (and non-penalty goals plus assists to then get someone's total scoring contribution).
Penalties are converted at an 80% clip and only one person on a team gets to take them. They inflate tallies purely on the basis that someone is the penalty taker, and could have gone to four or five others on any given team.
While there is undoubtedly some skill involved in slotting a penalty, the vast difference in what a penalty opportunity looks like vs open play/other set pieces make them distorting when trying to assess talent.
