I looked at the stats to see if Newcastle-linked Bryan Mbeumo is the real deal - but he isn't Brentford's best

Monday night’s mid-table match at Craven Cottage isn’t necessarily the Premier League’s most glamorous – but it is a game which will feature one of the most freakishly in-form forwards in the top flight. Bryan Mbeumo seems to be unstoppable right now, and is certainly on the best form of his top-flight career to date. So can he possibly keep it up?

The Cameroonian is generating a steady stream of headlines and drawing plenty of praise, not least because his seemingly endless slew of goals has seen the gossip columnists repeatedly link him with a move to richer and more starry sides like Liverpool and Newcastle United. He has already hit the back of the net eight times in the league, just one less than he managed in each of the last two seasons. Only Erling Haaland has scored more often.

Alongside him, Yoane Wissa has also been quietly exceptional as well, even if the spotlight has spent a little less time on him. Injury caused him to miss three recent matches, which may have made his own scoring streak a little less noticeable to the casual observer, but he has already scored five times despite making just five starts. He is one of just three players in the Premier League with more than 90 minutes of football under their belt to have scored at the rate of better than a goal every game, the other two being Haaland and Jhon Durán.

That’s 13 of Brentford’s 18 goals from the first nine games coming from just two players who scored just 21 between them last season. Depending on your point of view, that remarkable record is either an emphatic rebuke to anybody concerned that the Bees would struggle to score enough following the departure of Ivan Toney – or a statistical anomaly that is unlikely to be maintained.

Mbeumo, currently joint second in the Premier League scoring charts, has been quite exceptional so far – but based on his stats, he has either taken an extraordinary leap forward over the summer, or is simply on a hot streak that he can’t keep up.

For starters, Mbeumo has been a relatively mediocre finisher since entering the league four seasons ago, scoring 22 league goals over his first three campaigns from a combined xG of 28.7. That’s not disastrous for a player primarily used as a winger, by any means, but neither is it particularly impressive.

Since the start of the summer, however, his finishing has been extraordinary – eight goals from 3.8xG, or six from 2.2 if you take a pair of penalties away. Even Lionel Messi at his very best never scored goals at such an incredibly high rate over statistical expectations, or even came especially close over the course of an entire season.

That alone suggests that he will struggle to maintain his current scoring rate, but it’s also hard to find signs of improvement or other changes to his game which offer up as a reason for his incredible results. He isn’t taking more shots on (or fewer), and isn’t getting any more touches in the penalty area, for instance, than he has over the last couple of seasons – and the only noticeable difference in his positioning and the way that he is being used by Thomas Frank is that he isn’t hitting the byline any more, which perhaps means that he spends more time in areas with better shooting angles.

Wissa, on the other hand, actually has better credentials for keeping his form up, even if scoring at a rate of better than a goal a game is hard for even the best to maintain. The strongest indicator that Wissa is the real deal rather than another player on a short-term hot streak is that over the same three seasons that Mbeumo comfortably undershot his xG, Wissa persistently exceeded his, scoring 26 league goals from 19.4xG. That’s the kind of ratio of goals to chances that the very best Premier League strikers put up.

If anything, his scoring five goals from 3.9xG thus far is expected and predictable, especially when you note that he’s increased his number of shots on target per game and is getting quite a few more touches in the penalty area – much of which is a product of playing as the lone number nine more often. This is the form and performance of a leading man stepping up from a supporting role which may have hidden just how good he really is.

With Toney around, Wissa was either the substitute, the injury cover, or the player awkwardly crowbarred into a wider or deeper role in service of the undisputed star of the side – despite which, he maintained an exceptionally healthy goalscoring rate and broader statistical output. Now that the 28-year-old is free from Toney’s shadow, he is playing like a first-class striker in his own rate, and the raw data suggests a player more than capable of managing a 20- or even 30-goal season. Without many people really noticing, he has been one of the most consistently accurate finishers in the league over the last few years.

All of which renders it rather ironic that Mbeumo is getting all the praise and plaudits now and finds himself being touted as the leading light of Brentford’s Post-Toney era – and the player being touted around the various top teams by the rumourmongers. Toney may be gone, but Wissa still seems to be stuck playing second fiddle.

Not that Mbeumo isn’t a very fine player. While his form in front of goal is highly unlikely to prove sustainable, he is still an excellent creative asset to his team and anyone concerned by the absence of assists so far this season probably shouldn’t be – he has served up 2.46 expected goals’ worth of chances for his team-mates, only to see them all missed. Mbeumo has never been a truly great goalscorer, necessarily, but chipped in more than enough creativity along the way to make him a first-rate winger regardless.

In any case, one should scarcely criticise Mbeumo for scoring goals. The dry stats may suggest that he can’t possibly keep this form going, but he has been hitting the back of the net with confidence and regularity just when Brentford needed someone to step up and fill Toney’s boots. Last season, it didn’t look like they had that man. Even if Mbeumo can only be that man for a short while, he is doing a fine job of it.

But it’s Wissa who looks set to be the player who keeps the goals coming - and perhaps keeps Brentford in the top flight - for the next couple of seasons. It’s Wissa who the data suggests will keep scoring week in, week out. Wissa who is setting a statistical benchmark in front of goal that only Haaland can claim to clear. And Wissa who deserves his fair share of the headlines at last - and who Fulham should perhaps be most worried about when Brentford visit on Monday evening.