We’re just over a quarter of the way through the Premier League season. Forest would not have expected to only have 9 points from those opening 10 games, and perhaps they would’ve expected to have had some better final output numbers from Morgan Gibbs-White too.
So far this season, Gibbs-White has scored 1 goal (a penalty), and directly created another 3 with assists. This doesn’t feel like a lot, especially considering the results that Forest have had - but in reality it’s a fairly decent return, and probably just below where we’d be reasonably happy to have him.
Extrapolating 1 goal and 3 assists after 10 games over an entire season gives just under 4 goals & 12 assists - that’s 16 goal contributions. That’s below the 19 he got last season in the league, but above the 15 he achieved in the 2 seasons previous.
There’s reason to be optimistic though - Gibbs-White has been a notoriously slow starter since joining Forest. He’s never got more than 2 goals and assists combined in the opening 10 games of the season in a Forest shirt. Early this season, he’s already doubled his best tally.
Consider as well that Forest are significantly underperforming their expected goals tally (even after the Man City game), that only Pascal Groß has created more chances, and that nobody has created more big chances than Gibbs-White and Groß. These can be seen as positive signs.
Let’s dig a bit deeper though into the areas on the pitch that Gibbs-White is getting involved in, how that differs to last season’s stretch of goalscoring, and how he compares to other players across the continent.
Gibbs-White’s Action Areas
In Gibbs-White’s final 9 Premier League games last season, he scored 8 goals and assisted 2. It was a key stretch of form that essentially kept Forest in the league. This was a run of scoring from Gibbs-White he’d never really shown in his career - those 8 goals matched his Premier League total from the previous 13 months.
The only game during that stretch where Gibbs-White didn’t register a shot attempt was the game at Stamford Bridge where he came on at half-time, assisted Forest’s 3rd goal, and then picked up a very bad injury that kept him out of the Europa League semi final. He played just 20 minutes in that game.
In all the others, he managed at least one shot attempt, and only in one of those games did he not take a strike at goal from inside the box. Gibbs-White became Forest’s main danger in the box.