Sharing the load

This week our statistician looks at Arsenal's scorers in the Premier League this season.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain became the 14th different goalscorer for Arsenal in the Premier League this season when he netted a brace against Crystal Palace at the weekend.

That's already more than in the whole of last season, when 12 players found the net in the league - and there are still 14 matches remaining.

That means more than half (58.3 per cent) of the players who have appeared for Arsenal in the league this season have contributed at least one goal. That's currently the highest proportion of goalscorers for any team in the Premier League.

Arsène Wenger has selected 24 different players in the league this season, though three of those made just one substitute appearance each. The 14 goalscorers have scored 47 goals between them, at an average of 3.36 each. Olivier Giroud leads the way with 10.

Discounting defenders and goalkeepers, Tomas Rosicky is the only player who has started at least one game this season without netting in the league for Arsenal, though he did of course score a vital goal to knock Tottenham out of the FA Cup last month.

Including all competitions, Arsenal have actually had 17 different scorers - Rosicky in the FA Cup, Thomas Eisfeld in the Capital One Cup and Kieran Gibbs in the Champions League. That compares to 18 in all competitions last season.

On average Arsenal have 13.55 different scorers per Premier League season. The highest was 18 in 2009/10 and the lowest just six in 1993/94, which is also the Club's overall league record for low goalscorers, including the pre-Premier League era.

However, diversity of goalscorers doesn't necessarily mean more goals. Arsenal's highest-scoring Premier League campaign was 2004/05, when they racked up 87 goals, but that year they had just 13 scorers. Then in 2008/09, for example, the 16 goalscorers contributed 68 goals between them.

Last season it took just 12 players to score a total of 72 goals, while two years earlier 17 players accumulated the same total between them, showing there has been little correlation between the number of goalscorers and total goals per season down the years.

There's also nothing to suggest that more goalscorers leads to a higher chance of winning the league. In Arsenal's three Premier League title-winning seasons they had 13, 13 and 12 different scorers respectively.

In their 834 total Premier League games to date, 98 different players have scored at least once for Arsenal - that's 59.4 per cent of all players who have represented the Club in the competition. They have notched a total of 1,421 between them at an average of 14.5 each.

Two players reached Premier League centuries (Thierry Henry 175 and Ian Wright 104) while 17 players have scored just once.

Expanding it to look at all competitions, 482 of the 819 all-time players for the first team (58.9 per cent) celebrated at least one goal for the Club.

Oxlade-Chamberlain's brace on Sunday came from midfield, which has been the source of more than half of Arsenal's goals in the league this season.

With Arsenal's fluid formation, it can be difficult to pigeon-hole players into specific positional categories. But if you count the likes of Santi Cazorla, Mesut Ozil and Serge Gnabry as midfielders, this area of the pitch has contributed 24 goals, compared to 20 from the forwards (Olivier Giroud, Theo Walcott, Nicklas Bendtner and Lukas Podolski) and three from the defenders (Per Mertesacker and Bacary Sagna).

The high number of different scorers means there has also been an impressive variety of goals for Arsenal this term. There have been 19 (40 per cent) scored with the left foot, 19 with the right and nine headed efforts. Five of the goals (11 per cent) were scored from outside the area.

Finally, Oxlade-Chamberlain is the seventh different Arsenal player to score a Premier League brace this season (more than any other club).

Stats correct as at February 4, 2014. With thanks to Opta