Examining the Sustainability of Ramiro Enrique’s Scoring Explosion

Since Orlando City’s 5-0 thumping of D.C. United back on July 6, Ramiro Enrique has tapped into a red-hot vein of form. He’s got four goals in four games, matching his scoring output from the entirety of the 2023 season, and doing so in four matches and 245 minutes, as compared to 30 matches and 1,019 minutes last year. That brings us to the big question: is this sort of output sustainable?

We’ll start by looking at the expected goals on each of his four tallies. While xG isn’t a perfect statistic, it provides a fairly good measure of how good a chance is. To get a clearer picture, we’ll also take a look at each goal to help gauge how difficult the chance is.

Against D.C. United, Enrique latched onto a flicked-on header from a corner kick and used a header of his own to score the Lions’ fifth and final goal of the night. That strike had an xG of 0.1. In truth, that number seems a bit low to me, as once Enrique’s in front of his defender, he has the whole net to aim at, and the ball comes in at a great height for him to get his head on it. He makes no mistake and sticks it into the side netting, where the goalkeeper has no hope of reaching it.

Against the New England Revolution, the Argentine again scored from a corner, sneaking in front of goalkeeper Aljaz Ivacic and flicking the ball past him before he could collect Cesar Araujo’s header. His second goal of the season had an xG of 0.4. That number seems more reasonable to me. Once he does the hard work of losing his marker and getting across Ivacic, the goalkeeper is helpless to stop any ball that isn’t coming straight at him, and it’s a good finish.

Against Nashville, he collected a pass from Ivan Angulo a few yards outside of the six-yard box and blasted it off the crossbar and in. The tight angle from which he scored means the xG of 0.04 isn’t too surprising. Once again, Enrique managed to lose his defender and got himself into a really nice area of open space. The finish is outstanding, but it wouldn’t have been surprising to see a save or shot off target from this angle.

His fourth goal of the year had elements of skill and luck, as he redirected Martin Ojeda’s shot against NYCFC. The effort from Ojeda took a deflection off Enrique that caught the goalkeeper leaning the wrong way and had enough pace to carry it into the net, for an xG of 0.11. Again, I’m surprised the number is as high as it is. That’s probably due to the deflection happening in the box and leaving Matt Freese next to no time to react. While it was a clever touch to redirect it, there was also a good deal of luck involved.

Those totals add up to 0.65. In other words, Enrique would be estimated to score 0.65 goals off those chances (or one, rounding up, as there are no fractions of goals), and he instead bagged four. There are a couple ways you can view that. The optimist would say that he’s simply a good finisher and has been making the most of the chances that have come his way, even when they aren’t very good ones. The pessimist would say that him converting low percentage chances at this rate isn’t sustainable, and he’s due to regress back to the mean soon.

We can also look at the bigger picture of his statistics up to this point in the year. Across 11 games and 483 minutes, Enrique has taken 18 shots, put nine of them on target, and scored from four of those. He’s also got a season xG of 3.52, which is pretty much in line with his goal total of four, although he’s slightly outperforming it. That isn’t a bad thing though, as the best strikers score difficult chances too, not just the easy ones. Cristian Arango, Christian Benteke, and Denis Bouanga are the top three scorers in the league, and Bouanga is the only one not outperforming his xG (17.68 xG compared to 16 goals).

In my opinion, the truth of Enrique’s case lies somewhere in between. He’s put 50% of his shots on target this year, which is a great number, and getting the ball on frame is half the battle in this sport, so that’s an encouraging place to start. Each of his first three goals in 2024 came as a result of getting into space in a dangerous area and making no mistake with his finish once the ball arrived. Against D.C., he did well to get in front of his defender. In New England, he snuck in from the blind side of the defense. And against Nashville, he found space in the box and stayed onside until Angulo was able to find him. That sort of movement and ability to get yourself into dangerous areas is something that can be replicated, even if finishing low-percentage chances like the strikes against Nashville and NYCFC probably isn’t.

If Enrique continues being clever with his movement and finding dangerous spaces, Orlando’s offense has begun to look fluid enough that his teammates will find ways to get him the ball. As long as he keeps getting shots on frame and his finishing stays sharp, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that he’ll grab some more goals this year. It probably won’t be at the rate he’s done so in July, but if nothing else, he should be able to provide some extra firepower to an OCSC attack that has woken up in recent weeks. Keep your fingers crossed, folks. Vamos Orlando!