We Are Here for the Danny Welbeck Renaissance

A 33-year-old Danny Welbeck is enjoying some of the best goalscoring form of his career. You’d have to be pretty mean-spirited not be pleased for the Brighton forward.

Everyone likes Danny Welbeck, right?

Well, however you feel about him, we can surely all agree it would be pretty harsh to begrudge him the positive start he has made to 2024-25.

With the opener in Brighton’s 2-2 draw with Wolves on Saturday, Welbeck scored in a third consecutive Premier League game for only the third time in his entire career, and for the first time in more than a decade. He previously scored in three league games in a row in January 2014 with Manchester United and November 2010 with Sunderland.

He is now joint fifth in the overall Premier League goalscoring charts for 2024-25, tied on six goals with Mohamed Salah and Nicolas Jackson, and behind only Erling Haaland (11), Bryan Mbeumo (8), Cole Palmer (7) and Chris Wood (7).

This isn’t the norm for Welbeck, though. Goals haven’t often flowed anything like as freely.

With six this term, he has already equalled his highest total of Premier League goals in any season since he left Man Utd in 2014. He is only three off his best (nine in 2011-12 and 2013-14), and just nine games into the 2024-25 season, is just four goals away from the uncharted territory that is double figures for Premier League goals.

Jonathan Manuel / Data Analyst

That isn’t a slight on his ability, though he will surely be disappointed not to have scored more throughout his career. His game has always been about much more than goals; he has spent much of his career playing out wide or off another striker rather than as the main man through the middle. This season he has spent every second he has been on the pitch playing as a centre-forward.

Welbeck’s career has been governed all too much by terrible luck with injuries. It’s impossible to say with absolute certainty that he would have made it at either United or Arsenal were it not for the countless and relentless injuries, but with his recent form he is showing everyone the player he can be when fully fit. He is yet to miss a game through injury in 2024 – the first year since 2014 that he has done so – and a run of uninterrupted games is providing the foundations for him to flourish.

There was a recent scare when he was stretchered off against Newcastle while receiving oxygen, and anyone who has watched him over the years would have understandably been fearing the worst.

But this version of Welbeck is made of stronger stuff. Despite being unable to “feel his legs” due to being “hit on a nerve” according to manager Fabian Hürzeler, Welbeck was back in the starting lineup just seven days later to face Wolves on Saturday, and was once again on the scoresheet.

It meant he kept up his record of having started every Premier League game so far this season, and he has been on the pitch for 79% of Brighton’s total game time (including injury time at the end of both halves). He has never before managed more than 52% in any individual season in his career to date.

There’s of course plenty of time for him to miss a chunk of the season and trend back towards 50% of the minutes he could play, but the signs so far in 2024-25 are overwhelmingly positive.

He has completed the full 90 minutes in three of Brighton’s nine games so far this season, having done so only four times over the whole of 2023-24, seven times in 2022-23 and eight times in 2021-22.

Having been stung so many times before, he won’t be making any assumptions about remaining fit, but he may well be starting to feel optimistic about his chances of staying fit for a full campaign for the first time in a decade. The last time he did that was 2013-14, but back then he was only a bit-part player for United and his (much younger) body wouldn’t have been under anything like the same strain.

Now 33 – and turning 34 in less than a month – Welbeck is providing much more than goals for his 31-year-old manager. Hürzeler spoke last month about how Welbeck has been “a role model on and off the pitch” to his teammates. “What surprised me was how much Danny takes care of [everyone] and how he protects them, how he helps them, how he supports them,” the Brighton manager said.

“I think that’s not normal and something we should appreciate within this club,” he continued. “Having a player who is not only taking care of his own ego, because in the end in football there are a lot of egos but it’s not just about scoring and making assists.”

For the youngest permanent manager in Premier League history, having a model professional to drive standards in training and beyond has proved invaluable.

On the pitch, Welbeck has been more single-minded in his approach to scoring goals under Hürzeler. He is averaging fewer touches of the ball for every shot he attempts (11.2) than in any other season in his career, and this season, he ranks 11th of all Premier League players to have played at least 300 minutes. This is a new development for a player who until last season was spending at least some of his time away from the centre-forward position.

His 24% shot conversion rate is his best in any season in which he has played at least 200 minutes, while his big-chance conversion rate of 57.1% is his best since 2013-14, when he was at United.

There are a few reasons for this. He is being more selective with when to attempt shots, with his 3.0 shots per 90 around the average for his Premier League career. His 0.54 xG per 90 is the highest he’s managed in any season and his open-play shots are coming closer to goal (average shot distance of 11.2m) than in any season since he moved to Brighton. He is getting into better positions before deciding to shoot this season, and that is naturally leading to more goals.

And on top of all that, as well as forging better chances, he is also finishing more confidently. His overperformance compared to his expected goals total this season of +1.5 is his best rate in any season aside from 2013-14 (+1.7). He has never been known for his finishing, but so far this term he has been far more effective in front of goal.

There’s a long way to go this season, and history tells us that perhaps we shouldn’t expect Welbeck’s form to continue for much longer.

But even with only a few more goals, Welbeck can make this the best goalscoring campaign of his career. And his numbers so far in 2024-25 suggest a focus on finishing off chances that should make his current purple patch a little more sustainable.

When he does finally make it to 10 Premier League goals in a season, who could be anything other than delighted for him?

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