Analysing Rúben Neves’ penchant for long shots with the Event Lab

Rúben Neves likes a shot from range.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Wolves midfielder, his shot map tells you just how fond of them he is. It’s as if the penalty area is a high-end nightclub and his shots keep turning up in trainers, left waiting outside the place everyone wants to be in.

But Neves is not just like any other player with a penchant for a potshot. In Europe’s top five men’s leagues last season, he had the most open-play shots from 25 yards or further, with 31. None were scored. It was the same the year before, 37 shots and no goal, and then the year before that he was joint-first with 48. And still no goals.

That 116 and nought rate both looks pretty wasteful and a little puzzling as to why it keeps happening. Yes, Neves has become a little more restrained over time. The pure number of them went down from 48 to 31, so too did their figure as a share of his total attacking touches in the 25-35 metres from goal range. In 2018/19 long shots took up a remarkable 28% of those touches; in 2020/21, this rate was all the way down to 16%.

Yet this is still far more than his contemporaries, particularly in the Premier League. Last season, the next-highest rate was 13% (Thomas Partey) and you only had to go down to fourth on the list to halve Neves’ figure (Rhian Brewster, at 8%). 

You might think that the Portuguese’s long-range shooting takes away from his opportunities to try and split defences with his passes, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. 24% of his attacking touches in this range are attempted passes that go five or more metres towards goal. It’s a rate comparable to central midfielders like Jorginho and team-mate João Moutinho.

However, because of his long-shooting, there’s another metric where Neves gets put amongst much more attack-minded company. If you take the percentage of his touches in the 25-35 yard range that are passes aimed backwards, sideways, or only barely towards goal (49%), he’s alongside Kevin De Bruyne, Giovani Lo Celso, Tanguy Ndombele. These are attack-minded midfielders. Moutinho (60%) on the other hand is around the rate of Fred, Douglas Luiz, and not that much more adventurous than Rodri.

The question around Neves’ long-shooting is which of these two statistics would see a boost if the midfielder took fewer attempts. Just because a player shoots less doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll replace those actions with something impactful. Maybe the midfielder takes these punts because he thinks the team needs a jolt out of passing sideways until they lose the ball. 

If Neves were to shoot less from range, would his output look more like Moutinho, with high rates of ‘safe’ passing 25-35 yards from goal, or would his swashbuckling nature lead to a boost in progressive pass attempts? 

Handily, we might actually have the answer to that. Remember that 2018/19 season where around 28 per cent of Neves’ touches in this area were shots? And how in 2020/21 this rate had dropped to 16 per cent? Those touches have to go somewhere. 

With the caveat that the surrounding team-mates and system may have changed, it turns out that they got split pretty evenly. Neves’ rate of both safer and more adventurous passes went up by nearly five percentage points each between those two years.

There’s no guarantee that if the midfielder decreased his long-range shooting again that the same would happen, but it does seem like a pretty good assumption to use as a starting point. What’s more, his more adventurous passes last season were being completed at a higher rate than in 2018/19 as well.

Rúben Neves likes a shot from range. But maybe his teams would benefit if he continued to switch that focus elsewhere.

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This article was written with the help of Twenty3’s new Event Lab to easily create custom statistics from Wyscout event data and compare players side by side. If you’d like to make the most of the Event Lab and the Analytics Toolbox at your club, don’t hesitate to request a demo here.