I am writing this article before Arsenal and our Premier League rivals like Man City and Leicester City kick off for the first matches of the new year, so the numbers in the statistics I am using to compare our assist king Mesut Ozil with other players doing well in the same position will have changed by tonight.
But unless Kevin De Bruyne manages something out of this world, the Man City star will still be a very distant second to our German international in the creative stats. As it stands Ozil’s tally of 16 assists is double the amount of his nearest rival.
It is not just the assists Ozil provides either, because he has produced more key passes and created more chances than anyone else in the division as well, as you can see from the creative chart on the Squawka.com website.
Ozil has also made almost twice the number of successful passes that De Bruyne has made and his accuracy is the highest of all the players on the chart. I have also done a little stat comparison between Ozil, De Bruyne, Silva and Mahrez and once again the German blows them all out of the water in almost every category. Even his shooting accuracy is the joint best.
So is the Arsenal star really twice as good as his nearest EPL rivals?