Mauro Icardi's Quest for the Perfect Shot
Or: Why Thomas Tuchel should start him against Borussia Dortmund
Before we get into the soccer, let’s go through all of the other stuff. It would be unfair to you if I did not do that.
Born in Argentina, Mauro Icardi signed with Barcelona at the age of 15. However, he came into his pro phase right as Barcelona were in their tiki taka golden years, so he was loaned out to Sampdoria in 2011. At Samp, he linked up with Maxi Lopez, a fellow Argentine striker who became something of a big-brother figure for young Mauro. Icardi played well enough in Italy that the deal was eventually made permanent. He then kept playing well enough in Italy that he was eventually purchased by Inter Milan in the summer of 2013.
In December of 2013, Lopez and his wife, Wanda Nara, got a divorce. Some five months later, Wanda remarried, and she remarried ... Mauro Icardi. (Please feel free to further scrutinize that timeline on your own time.) The April 2014 match between Lopez’s Sampdoria and Icardi’s Inter became known as “The Wanda Derby”. Lopez refused to shake Icardi’s hand before the match, and then during the match Lopez missed a penalty en route to a Samp loss. In April of 2016, the two met again -- with Lopez now playing for Torino -- and, well, here’s how The Daily Mail described it: “Mauro Icardi and Maxi Lopez feud continues as latter refuses to shake Inter Milan star's hand... and grabs his own crotch instead!”
All along, Icardi never stopped scoring goals and was made Inter captain in 2015 at the age of 22. Then, a year later, Icardi did the following, which I wrote about last year:
Back in 2016, Icardi released an autobiography — “autobiographies from people under the age of 25” is my favorite form of nonfiction — that recounted a confrontation with Inter’s ultras, the club’s most boisterous, vociferous, and often openly political fans. “I am ready to face them one by one,” Icardi wrote. “How many are there? 50, 100, 200? OK, record my message and let him listen: I'll bring 100 criminals from Argentina who'll kill them where they stand, then we'll see.” The ultras responded to the book by releasing a message that said: “You're not a man... You're not a Captain... You are just a vile piece of shit.” Icardi was fined and forced to remove the comments from his book!
Icardi eventually regained the captaincy (?) but then lost it again right around this time last year when his wife, who is now also his agent (?), made critical public comments about Inter. Soon after that, Icardi posted a Mark Twain quote on Instagram -- except he put the quotes around “Mark Twain” and not the actual quote. I haven’t thought about the ethics of attribution or Mark Twain the same ever since.
Anyway, Inter hired Antonio Conte as their new manager this past summer. Former midfielder Andrea Pirlo once said of Conte: “He is obsessed with victory, so when he loses, he becomes a demon. You daren’t speak to him.” Shockingly, the demon and the drama king were not simpatico, and Icardi joined Paris Saint-Germain in September.
As his performance with PSG has shown, Icardi’s off-field antics have essentially zero connection with how he performs on the field. You probably shouldn’t be using the phrase “no nonsense” so long as you’re even standing on the same planet as Mauro Icardi, but there’s really no better way to describe how he plays. He scores goals, and that’s it.
Per the site Understat, here are all the shots Icardi took with Inter in domestic play from 2014-15 through last season. The bigger the circle, the better the chance: green are goals, red are misses, yellow hit the post, purple was blocked, and blue was saved.
There’s only one shot from outside the width of the penalty area, and while there’s a smattering of long range attempts and wide-box shots, most of them come from inside the penalty area and inside the width of the six-yard box. That’s some really nice shot selection, but it looks like a Carmelo Anthony shot map compared to what Icardi has done with PSG:
One thing you may notice: Icardi hasn’t taken a single shot from outside the penalty area this season. As more optimal ways of playing emerge across all sports, they still come with theoretical caveats -- passing is more efficient than running, but it can only be so efficient if the defense thinks you’re gonna run from time to time. Same goes for three-is-worth-more-than-two in the NBA -- you need to have a big man inside the arc to open up the space for all those threes. And so while the Houston Rockets are successfully pushing back against those limits of strategic efficiency by playing no one taller than 6-foot-7, Icardi’s doing his own version of it by asking, “What if I never took a bad shot?”
It’s working for him, too. Per FBRef, Icardi is averaging an absurd 0.28 non-penalty expected goals per shot. The average in Europe for all non-penalty shots is right around 0.11 xG. Not only that; Icardi is wildly outpacing all the other players at his position. No other strikers who have played at least 50 percent of the available minutes are above 0.21, which means that Icardi’s average shot is seven percentage points better than anyone else at his position. Across the Big Five leagues, only Kylian Mbappe, Robert Lewandowski, Josip Illicic, and Sergio Aguero are scoring more non-penalty goals per 90 minutes.
The glaring caveat, of course, is that Icardi is playing for a team that is exponentially better than anyone else in their league. But part of the reason that they’re so far ahead -- 12 points beyond second with a game in hand, a plus-51 goal differential that’s 36 goals better than next best -- is that they have Icardi. Plus, he’s kept it up in the Champions League, too. In fact, hix xG-per-shot in Europe this season is even better; it’s 0.38! He’s second behind Mbappe in non-penalty goals per 90, one spot ahead of Dortmund’s sensational Erling Braut Haaland.
And yet, Icardi didn’t even get off the bench during PSG’s 2-1 first-leg loss at Haaland’s Dortmund. He’s played the 11th-most minutes among PSG players across all competitions, so he’s kind of right on the edge of being officially first-choice. Icardi doesn’t really do anything else beyond scoring; he created fewer than one chance per game for his teammates, and he’s not involved in buildup play. We’ve seen this before with possession-forward managers like Thomas Tuchel; they’ll tend to fight against using out-and-out-strikers, no matter who they are. The Spanish and German national teams struggled with this even when they were at their peaks, and Pep Guardiola has never met a world-class goal-scorer who he didn’t toy with dropping from his starting lineup.
Icardi hasn’t started a match for PSG since mid-February, but PSG have been significantly better with him on the field than off of it. As an impartial observer with nothing on the line, I’d love to see Icardi play in front of Neymar, Mbappe, and Angel di Maria against Dortmund. If you’re gonna have the backing of a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, why not throw all the big guns out there? While Tuchel’s unpredictable pass-and-movement machine does seem to require players who can involved up, down, and across the field, Icardi doesn’t really do that. But goal-scoring is extra-valuable in a knockout competition, and well, that’s all Icardi does.