We know all goal kicking is one of the things that can decide a game of rugby. We’ve all seen games where a goal kicker gets 20 points and wins man of the match despite sometimes doing basically nothing else in the game. But how much do goal kickers really matter and is their value somewhat inflated?

20 points is obviously a hell of a lot in a game of rugby. But what it doesn’t factor in is that if you take that goal kicker off the pitch you don’t lose 20 points. There would be someone else to take those kicks. So how many points have they actually gained over the player who would take their place? This is something from fantasy sports known as VORP or Value Over Replacement Player. And by looking at the data we can start to speculate on how many points kickers are worth.

In the premiership over the last 3 years each team kicks about 2.8 penalties a game and 2.8 conversions a game, which is surprisingly even. By looking at kicking data we can see the accuracy of conversions is 75% and accuracy from penalties 82%. And of course we know that conversions are worth 2 points and penalties are worth 3 points. This means that the average premiership kicker over the last 3 seasons has been worth around 11.1 points per game.

So this means that by looking at an individual player’s accuracy on conversions and penalties we can project how many points per game they are worth over the average premiership kicker.

The table below looks at a player’s conversion accuracy, penalty accuracy and the expected points added per game over an average kicker where every kicker has had at least 20 conversion attempts and 20 penalty attempts in the last 3 years.

Player Con Acc Pen Acc Pts Above Avg Daniel Biggar 77.78% 100.00% 1.627 Sonatane Takulau 73.17% 97.14% 1.129 Gareth Steenson 85.98% 87.04% 1.008 Duncan Weir 85.11% 86.84% 0.943 AJ MacGinty 75.27% 93.15% 0.914 Billy Twelvetrees 80.20% 85.19% 0.528 Callum Sheedy 68.97% 92.59% 0.512 Rhys Priestland 77.61% 86.11% 0.459 Jimmy Gopperth 75.00% 87.69% 0.444 Joel Hodgson 62.86% 95.45% 0.406 Stephen Myler 78.95% 83.87% 0.347 Ian Madigan 80.00% 82.14% 0.263 Thomas Bell 64.00% 92.59% 0.232 Toby Flood 78.26% 82.93% 0.230 Billy Burns 75.00% 84.00% 0.136 Tim Swiel 75.00% 84.00% 0.136 Greig Laidlaw 90.48% 72.73% 0.068 George Ford 77.48% 80.95% 0.021 Owen Farrell 72.57% 84.21% 0.016 Nick Evans 72.73% 83.87% -0.003 Freddie Burns 75.00% 81.72% -0.055 Lima Sopoaga 83.33% 73.91% -0.236 Marcus Smith 75.86% 77.92% -0.323 Owen Williams 70.00% 76.67% -0.758 Danny Cipriani 65.85% 78.26% -0.859 Chris Pennell 72.00% 72.73% -0.974 Alex Lozowski 60.94% 78.21% -1.141 Ryan Mills 72.41% 70.37% -1.147 Faf de Klerk 62.07% 76.92% -1.184

The first thing we need to highlight is the obvious flaws in the data. One is the sample size. Dan Biggar kicking with 100% accuracy on penalties is clearly not sustainable given his conversion percentage and we even saw at the world cup him miss a kick inside the 22 in front of the posts. That doesn’t mean it’s not remarkable though.

Another flaw is we don’t know the positions of all the kicks when it relates to individual players. Guys like Daly are long kick specialists which obviously have a lower success rate than kicks from 30 metres out. And every kicker will have a different range and some teams will also be more willing to kick penalties in harder positions than others.

And I’m sure in many fans minds, any table that has Faf de Klerk bottom of it is inherently flawed.

But what it does show that a kicker has to be superb to even be worth more than 1 point per game above average. Even a guy who has 90% conversion and penalty success would only be worth 1.6 points per game all things being equal.

Now 1 point per game over a season is not insignificant. Looking at the relationship between points difference and league points it would equate to about 2.4 league points. That could be the difference between a team making the play-offs and not.

But we can also that most goal kickers are still pretty close to average given a big enough sample size. Owen Farrell and George Ford coming out as both basically average in this I thought was quite fascinating.

Obviously guys like Biggar, Steenson and MacGinty are useful. But unfortunately it’s still hard to fully know the significance of this. Because we can’t yet quantify how many points a game each player can bring through other means but it might be something we can investigate in the future.

So it is difficult to make accurate conclusions from what is a very base look into the data however I do think currently the value of kickers might be somewhat overvalued especially when most fans and pundits look at the sport in single game samples. But in terms of sustained success their value might be overstated. Especially when teams probably kick penalties far more than they should rather than attempting to score tries, although that’s an argument for another day.

By Benjamin Sutton