Take away pens and DCL has scored about 3 open play goals since fans returned to football stadiums. A nonsense argument that doesn’t go on his favour at all.
The Covid season has very much proven to be the outlier in DCL’s career. He’s now 27, pretty much the same age as those other strikers, and his career record is 1 in 4. He’s missed a hatful of great chances this season so the “it’s the style of play’s fault” thing holds no water whatsoever.
It's so weird to me that people don't see this. Here are the actual numbers in the league seasons since fans returned to stadia:
Season | Minutes Played | Total Goals | Penalty Goals | Non-Penalty Goals | Minutes per Goal | Minutes per non-Penalty Goal |
2021-22 | 1286 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 257 | 429 |
2022-23 | 1176 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 588 | 1176 |
2023-24 | 1595 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 532 | 532 |
Total | 4057 | 10 | 3 | 7 | 406 | 580 |
These incredibly dire numbers are from whoscored, by the way. As a point of comparison, in total Oumar Niasse played 1303 league minutes for Everton, scoring 8 goals, none from penalties, giving him a goal every 163 minutes. (Omar's assist and key passes numbers are all better in this regard, too). Cenk Tosun, whose assist and key pass numbers are all also superior to Dom's, played a total of 2381 league minutes for Everton, scoring 9 goals, none from penalties, meaning a goal every 265 minutes.
(And yes, penalties all count and all that, but they are team goals and not an individual accomplishment, and unless the penalty taker is over 90 percent or under 70 percent on scoring them, you'd expect any professional to be able to score those goals all the same.)
The sad part is that even if you add in the prior two seasons where he got to double digits and cut off everything before that, Dom is now at 9594 minutes played and 39 goals scored, which is 246 minutes per goal, and taking the penalties out, we're now at 266.5 minutes per goal. And if you only count those two seasons (when he didn't take penalties), Dom scored 29 goals in 5537 minutes, or a goal every 191 minutes (but at the same time created practically nothing for others, worse than any other stretch in his career in this regard).
So basically both Oumar Niasse and Cenk Tosun both scored and created chances more frequently than Dom does, even if you include Dom playing under Carlo, and Oumar scored more frequently over the course of his Everton career than Dom scored during his best two seasons. This is not a good record for a striker, at all.