Birmingham City are currently in 19th place on the 2021-22 EFL Championship points table. So it is safe to say that the team is not having a good campaign and are stuck in lower mid-table mediocrity. One Birmingham player who is having his best season in years is Irishman Scott Hogan. In this piece, we will be covering the 29-year-old striker’s performances for the Blues.
Seen above is the performance of Scott Hogan relative to the rest of the league. He has netted 10 goals for the Blues so far this campaign. His scoring rate is 0.42 goals per game, putting him in the upper quintile. He is also outperforming his xG output of 0.34 goals per game. One area where he has to improve is taking more shots, as he is taking only 1.64 shots per game. However, he does manage to generate an xG per shot value of 0.205, and he shoots 46.15% of his shots on target. Hogan attempts 1.7 dribbles per game and has a completion rate of 61%. 
Given above is the shot map of Scott Hogan this season. All of his 10 goals this campaign have come from inside the box. He has taken only two shots from outside the box all season. However, he has missed quite a few big chances, which had an xG value of 0.35 or greater. So he should have scored an extra three or four goals by now. Hogan has taken 43 shots this season, which gives him a very good conversion rate of 4.3 shots per goal scored.
Seen in the above visual are the xT timeline, xT map, and pass sonar of Scott Hogan. He is not the primary threat creator for Birmingham City. Instead, he relies on his teammates to create threats to finish off chances. Only on a few occasions does Hogan go over the xT value of 0.5. When he does create a threat, it is in and around the penalty box on the right wing. Perhaps, this explains why his left sideways passes produce more threat than his forward passes, as seen on the left of the visual.
Scott Hogan has hit double figures in goals for the first time since the 2016-17 season when he was playing with Brentford. So, the reason Birmingham are in the lower mid-table position could be put down to the team’s defense, as they have conceded 58 times so far. Hogan would welcome support from teammates in goalscoring.
