So, what does the data tell us about Scamacca? A quick glance at his dashboard suggests he is a clinical and frequent shooter with limited ball-carrying ability and creativity, basically the opposite of Michail Antonio. The most eye-catching metrics are those related to his finishing, an art that he seems to have mastered, despite being just 23. Even at the surface level, it’s easy to understand why Moyes would want him, a 6’5” striker with laser-like accuracy and a ceiling so high that even his head wouldn’t touch it, but a deeper dive into the underlying numbers paints a clearer picture of the striker that some have dubbed the signing of the summer.
The most obvious place to start when assessing Scamacca at a more granular level is his finishing, a facet of his game that can genuinely be considered elite. 16 goals in 25 league starts (0.63 per 90) last season is impressive, even more so when you realise that only one of those goals came from the penalty spot and that Scamacca’s contributions accounted for almost a quarter (24.2%) of Sassuolo’s entire Serie A goal haul. Sure, players hit good spells of form and systems can bring the best out of players, but all the data suggests that West Ham’s new striker is and will continue to be an elite finisher – 49.3% of his 2.9 shots per 90 hit the target last season (1.4 shots on target per 90), while more than a fifth of them hit the back of the net (21.3%). These numbers put Scamacca in very good company, with a better conversion rate than both Kylian Mbappé (20%) and Dušan Vlahović (21.2%), and only marginally less than Ballon D’or favourite, Karim Benzema (21.2%). Now, this is not to say that Scamacca is on their level, but in the context of West Ham, he represents a marked improvement on their most clinical attacker, Jarrod Bowen, who had a respectable but still inferior goal conversion rate of 15%.
Of course, when signing such free-scoring strikers, there is always a risk that their club is attempting to cash in on a purple patch, but these metrics, and Scamacca’s xG overperformance in the last two seasons, suggest that he is a genuine outlier rather than a man in form. The fact that Scamacca had a more impressive goal return than Antonio (0.63 per > 0.28 per 90) despite 37.9% of his shots coming from outside the box (compared to 21.1% of Antonio’s) will surely excite West Ham fans too, who have often joked (and sometimes complained) about Antonio’s inability to score from more than 18 yards out. If you haven’t seen it already and you want to get an idea of what the best version of Scamacca looks like, go and watch his goal against Milan – fire.
Another thing that you can’t help but notice when watching Scamacca play, aside from him regularly trying to score from 30 yards out, is how freakishly tall he is. Standing at 6’5”, it is entirely unsurprising that only 13 attackers won more aerial duels than him in Europe’s top five leagues last season, five of whom are either his height or taller (Zlatan Ibrahimović, Kalifa Coulibaly, Erling Haaland, Sasa Kalajdžić, Milan Đurić). A striker that wins 55.7% of their aerial duels would be an asset to any manager, but under David Moyes, who is already blessed with the set-piece delivery of Bowen and Aaron Cresswell, they become a serious weapon. West Ham were lethal from set-pieces last season, scoring an impressive 14 set-piece goals (the 5th highest number in the Premier League), and with the arrival of two aerially dominant players in Nayef Aguerd and Scamacca, you can expect them to maintain this threat in 2022-23.
One interesting quirk of Scamacca’s game is that, for someone so tall, he doesn’t spend that much time in the box, with just 5.9% of his ball receptions coming in the penalty area last season. “For a big man”, Scamacca is unusually happy to receive the ball in deeper, central areas, a product of Alessio Dionisi’s possession-based tactics at Sassuolo that sought to dominate the flanks in the opposition half. Scamacca’s role in this system, aside from scoring screamers, would be to drop deep, receive the ball, and then play passes in behind to onrushing teammates. Whilst he does take the occasional duff touch, he played this role excellently in Italy, and if he can bring this skillset to the Premier League then it is easy to see how he might be able to bring the best out of the likes of Bowen and Antonio in transition. It’s unclear whether Moyes plans to use Scamacca and Antonio as a pair, but if he does then they could become a lethal duo; a system where Scamacca plays balls into the left channel from deep for Antonio to chase down and float the ball into the box would be, at the very least, good fun.
For all his strengths, there are still areas of Scamacca’s game that Moyes will hope to improve, most notably his shot creation, which is in turn linked to his decision-making in the final third. His expected assist return of just 0.05 per 90 saw him rank in the bottom 20% of attackers in Europe’s top five leagues last season and is considerably worse than Antonio’s 0.14. The gulf in creativity between the two is even starker when you look at actual assists, with Antonio creating eight goals (0.22 per 90) for his teammates in the Premier League in 2021-22, whilst Scamacca failed to record a single assist. If the Italian is to replace Antonio in the starting eleven, then the responsibility for shot creation might fall on the shoulders of Pablo Fornals and Vladimír Coufal instead, but if Scamacca improves his decision-making then his productivity could see an uptick too. The shot maps above show how frequently he likes to take low percentage shots from outside the box, if Moyes can coach this habit out of him and get him to pass more often in these situations, then we might see that assist return start to creep up.
