Magnificent Mahrez?

Central to Leicester City's rise from almost-certain relegation in the 2014/15 Premier League season, to almost-certain title winners in the 2015/16 Premier League season, has been Riyad Mahrez. Not only is that a shocking sentence to have composed, it's also shocking just how much impact Mahrez has actually had. With 16 goals and 11 assists in the league this season, he has been a revelation.

And just to continue with that 'shocking' theme, he was plucked from the relative obscurity of Le Havre in France's Ligue 2 for a mere £400,000. For that amount, you could probably buy Cristiano Ronaldo's big toe. I extracted some data from www.whoscored.com (sadly not about Ronaldo's toe), to see just how his contribution measured up to some of Europe's leading lights in the Attacking Midfield positions.

For this visualisation I've only looked at Assists and Goals, because there's a whole myriad of different ways to measure, I didn't want to get too bogged down in that just yet, despite how interesting it may be. One pick that I didn't bring through was that of the 32 players I selected, Mahrez ranks 26th for average passes per game. So despite seeing less of the ball than his contemporaries, he seems to do an awful lot more with it.

But I digress, and to the viz - I'll let you judge for yourself who it reflects well and badly upon...