When the nominations for the PFA player of the year came out, many raised an eyebrow for the announcement of Liverpool’s Philippe Coutinho for the coveted prize. Although he is quality, people did question his stats and performances this season, he did hit a purple patch during the second half of the season but he had not shown consistency and more importantly, Liverpool have had a poor season so far.
In fact there were a few glaring omissions from the list, while Mesut Ozil might not have played as many games as Coutinho, he certainly could have been in the running for the prize, we took a look and compared both the players using Squawka.com. To be fair to Ozil, we only looked at those stats which were on an average per game and not at total numbers as Coutinho would have raced ahead thanks to his greater number of appearances this season.
Coutinho vs. Ozil: Who is more impressive?
While Ozil has played almost half the games that Coutinho has featured it, there is no doubt that he has been good in quite a few games and that he is slowly but surely recovering from his knee injury which nearly curtailed his entire season.
Ozil isn’t the most prolific in front of goal but he does have more accuracy, Ozil averages roughly 1.44 shots on goal per game while Coutinho from Liverpool averages 2.77 shots on goal per game. Ozil though is on another level when it comes to successful passes per game. The German provides nearly 50 successful passes per game while the creative Coutinho only provides 35 successful passes per game.
Even in terms of key passes it is the German who scores more than Coutinho. Ozil averages 2.37 key passes per game while Coutinho averages only 1.37 key passes per game, so the German tops this stat as well.
If assists is a barometer then Ozil wins once again with 0.31 assists per game to Coutinho’s 0.13. The only stat that Coutinho wins when compared to Ozil is the successful take ons with 3 successes per game compared to Ozil’s 2.44.
It seems that Coutinho was entered into the list just to make up the numbers of to ensure that they paid attention to the weeks just before the nominees were named, no doubt Coutinho is a good player and has been great for Liverpool but that has only been in bits and patches this season and if Coutinho was included into the list for his performances than maybe Ozil should have been as well.