Pascal Gross's top five stats

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A look at the German's best numbers in an Albion shirt.

Liam Tharme

Albion Analytics

2024-08-02T06:00+01:00

Pascal Gross departed on Thursday for Borussia Dortmund. 📷 by Paul Hazlewood.

Pascal Gross departs Albion as nothing less than a club legend, and a defining player in the club’s Premier League era.

He was, after all, the club's first signing after promotion, joining under Chris Hughton in summer 2017. The rest, as the saying goes, is history, but thankfully detailed data records mean seven seasons of Gross can be condensed into his five best stats.

Longevity and versatility

Only Lewis Dunk (241) has made more Premier League appearances for Albion than Gross (228). It speaks to his quality that he was a central part of Hughton, Graham Potter and Roberto De Zerbi’s teams, initially a No.10 under Hughton before becoming an everything player under Potter and De Zerbi. All in, Gross played at least 600 minutes (over 6.5 full matches worth) in eight different positions in the Premier League.

Unsurprisingly, De Zerbi once said he was “lucky to have him”. Gross scored 12 and assisted 21 times under De Zerbi in 85 appearances, continuing the trend of scoring and assisting double-digits: 10 goals and 20 assists under Potter (109 appearances); 10 goals, 11 assists with Hughton as head coach (66 appearances).

Assist king

Since the start of 2018-19, Gross ranks ninth in the Premier League assist list, with 37. He is clear at the top if you remove players currently at a ‘Big Six’ club (Jarrod Bowen of West Ham, with 30, is second). That return is phenomenal enough anyway — removing the 30 Premier League goals that Gross has, his 45 assists mean he has directly set up almost 16% of Albion's Premier League goals — but actually undervalues his true chance creation.

In terms of expected assists, a measurement of the chance quality from Gross’s pass, he ranks fifth in the past six seasons. Players at bigger clubs have mostly seen their chances finished more clinically. He bows out ranking inside the top 65 Premier League players all-time for assists, while only ten players currently in the league have more than him. Mesut Ozil (54) is the only German above him in that.

Set-piece specialist

With the exception of a Cruyff turn, the biggest trademark of Gross’s game was his set-pieces. In the past six seasons, his 221 Premier League chances created from set-pieces is second only to James Ward-Prowse (251), though the West Ham midfielder played almost 4,000 more minutes than him. Gross directly assisted ten goals from corners, and his cross accuracy (31.1%) was over 8% above the Premier League average.

The simplest way of capturing this is looking at who he set up goals for. 23 of his 45 assists were for headed goals, while Lewis Dunk (eight, all headers, including three times in 2023-24) was the top-scorer from Gross assists.

Take his first assist for Albion, a cross for a Tomer Hemed header against West Brom in August 2017. Compare that to his final assist, a cross for a Lewis Dunk header against Everton in February 2024. They were at opposite ends of the Amex, one was with his left foot, one with his right foot.

Big moments player

Gross made a habit of stepping up in big moments. There were headers against Manchester United in 2017-18 and Newcastle in 2018-19 which kept Brighton up. Ten of his 30 Premier League goals were match-winners, as were seven of his assists. All in, there are 17 games and 34 points which can be directly attributed to Gross.

Since 2018-19, Gross created 112 chances in the final 15 minutes of games, the most by any player in the Premier League, and set-up eight goals.

Team player

If those four previous stat sections have focused on Gross’s individual impact, then it would be unfair to not acknowledge just how much he improved the team as a whole, due to his versatility, technical ability and capacity to play what the game needed.

With Gross starting in the Premier League, Brighton record a five per cent higher win rate than when he is not in the starting XI (30.5% versus 25.4%). As one might expect, they score more with him (1.3 versus 1.0 goals) and concede fewer, take 2.4 more shots and average 4.3% more possession, with a higher pass accuracy in the final-third.

Gross was involved in 990 shot-ending sequences and 76 goals in the past six seasons, the most for an Albion player in either metric. In addition to the 75 goals he scored or assisted, there were a further 21 goals where he played a role purely in the build-up.

Vielen Dank, Pascal.