Looking Around the League: Guirassy & Boniface Take the Bundesliga By Storm

Bayer Leverkusen and Stuttgart are still going strong at the top of the table, with both sides claiming comfortable victories over the weekend. Leverkusen piled on the misery for FC Köln in the Rhine Derby, putting three past a Köln side that is propping up the rest of the Bundesliga, seven games into the season.

While expected goal difference suggests that Bayern Munich are still out in front as the best team in the Bundesliga (and The Analyst still makes them heavy favorites to win the title), Bayer Leverkusen and Stuttgart are way ahead of the closest competitor, Borussia Dortmund, right now.

Results

Borussia Mönchengladbach 2-2 Mainz

Augsburg 1-2 SV Darmstadt

Borussia Dortmund 4-2 Union Berlin

RB Leipzig 0-0 VfL Bochum

VfB Stuttgart 3-1 Wolfsburg

Werder Bremen 2-3 Hoffenheim

Leverkusen 3-0 FC Köln

Bayern Munich 3-0 Freiburg

Eintracht Frankfurt 2-0 FC Heidenheim

League Table

The Race for the Torjägerkanone

With Harry Kane joining Bayern Munich this summer, I think quite a few of us had already written off the possibility that anyone other than Kane would finish the season as the Bundesliga’s top goalscorer, but some unexpected contenders have arrived early on in the campaign.

Harry Kane has so far scored 8 goals this season, contributing 4 assists as well, a very impressive tally that amounts to 1.35 G+A(-PK)/90. That puts him just one goal ahead of Bayer Leverkusen’s Victor Boniface and Wolfsburg’s Jonas Wind. Having joined Leverkusen this summer, the 22-year-old Nigerian striker, Victor Boniface, has hit the ground running, scoring 7 goals and adding 2 assists in just under 600 minutes, or 1.21 G+A(-PK)/90 (Wind is just below at 1.2). If this was the three frontrunners for the Torjägerkanone, it would be a perfectly admirable race. Those numbers are all very impressive. And yet, there is someone else that is way out in front of all three.

Serhou Guirassy, the 27-year-old French-Guinean that is leading the line for Stuttgart, has already scored 13 goals this season, adding an assist too, putting up a whopping 1.92 G+A(-PK)/90. Guirassy’s performances so far this season are particularly astonishing because there was very little in his past that suggested he was capable of this, and while this does appear to be an overperformance, he is also putting up 1.24 npxG+xAG/90, which is still superstar numbers!

Guirassy added to his tally over the weekend, with a 15-minute hattrick against Wolfsburg, to give Stuttgart all three points in a 3-1 win.

I don’t know how long Guirassy can keep this up, but he’s already five goals ahead of Harry Kane and six ahead of Boniface (the underlying numbers suggest Wind is likely to fall away from these three eventually). Even if he regresses to his underlying numbers, he is only just behind Boniface (1.26 /90) and ahead of Kane (1.08 /90). I hope he keeps it up!

Your Thoughts?

Do you think Guirassy and Stuttgart can keep this up? What do you make of Victor Boniface and Jonas Wind?