Is Hanson the BWSL's most underrated attacker?
It's all in the details
Aston Villa’s two wins in the nine games since the turn of the new year is a stark reminder of just how unforgiving the Barclays Women’s Super League is – yet one player has thrived.
With 12 goals this season, Kirsty Hanson is the only player among the top 10 scorers in the Barclays Women’s Super League playing for a team in the bottom half of the table.
Most notably, though, she is second only to Khadija “Bunny” Shaw, whose performances this season have been lauded as some of the division’s best in recent memory.
Amid the utter chaos of losing 4-3 to holders Chelsea and 7-3 to fifth-placed Tottenham, the 28-year-old bagged impressive braces to add to the best goalscoring tally of her career.
Having been inducted into the Barclays WSL’s ‘under the radar’ XI and nominated for Player of the Month in January and March, do the underlying numbers behind her most prolific season yet deserve even further recognition as one of the best strikers in the division?
The BWSL’s surprise package?
Expected goals (xG) has been used in past editions to measure how productive players have been in front of goal, and it’s also useful to see whether their output is as forecast.
If a player’s goals match their xG, it means they are scoring the same number that should be scored from the quality of their shots on goal. Lead scorer Khadija Shaw, for example, has scored just 0.7 fewer than expected. Needless to say, the Jamaican has been truly ruthless.
But Hanson stands out for the opposite reason. She has scored 5.3 more goals than expected based on her xG. As shown above, it represents the largest difference in either direction among the 10 highest scorers in the BWSL this season.
The next highest at 3.6 more than expected is Tottenham’s Olivia Holdt, followed by Alyssa Thompson of Chelsea in third (+2.96) and then Japanese international Kiko Seike (+2.65).
On first glance, this would indicate that Hanson has, in fact, overperformed this campaign and has been one of its surprise packages. Some may wonder whether Hanson has been lucky.
The answer is a resounding ‘no’. While xG is often a powerful tool to see how well a forward is performing, it has its limitations. It condenses a range of factors down into one probability and, at the end of the day, is a measure of the shot quality based on historical data of others from the same position and what happened as a result.
Screamers from long range will typically generate a low xG since fewer goals are scored in such a way, yet that is what makes them – and often the players capable of them – so special.
Simply put, the position and likelihood of the shot going in sometimes aren’t enough to tell the whole story: factors such as build up play, off-the-ball movement, and dribbling aren’t recognised for how well the player executed them prior to the shot itself by xG.
Hanson has shone against tough opposition in each of those departments.
A complete forward cares not for xG
This season, Hanson has been Aston Villa’s main source of goals. Unsurprisingly then, she played a starring role in Aston Villa’s hectic 4-3 defeat to Chelsea as the anchor point for many of their attacking moves.
In the build up to Villa’s second, making it 3-2 just after the half-hour mark, Hanson, on the halfway line, deftly touched the ball back to attacking midfielder Lucia Kendall – spinning England international Lucy Bronze and sparking a quick attack towards an overload on the right.
The striker then had nearly 50 metres of ground to cover over 9 seconds in order to make herself a passing option just shy of the six yard box, generating 0.44 xG on the shot and slotting it calmly into the bottom left and past Lionesses number one Hannah Hampton.
What her total xG can’t measure was the sheer industry on show during and after her sprint up the field, almost getting completely tangled in the hosts’ net once she fired home.
Her second was a showcase of pure instinct as she was quickest to react inside the penalty area, side-footing Lynn Wilms’ cushioned pass home on the half-volley with her first touch.
That shot amassed a mere 0.08 xG, but Hanson was accurate enough to be able to pick out the bottom left once again, with two defenders quickly across to try and block the effort on goal.
It says quite a lot about her finishing ability to convert chances that have a far less chance of hitting the back of the net, something that total xG can’t account for.
Hanson’s first at home to Tottenham was also measured at 0.08 xG, but by no means does it imply she doesn’t merit her 12 goals when it contributes so little to her total xG this season.
Her chance of scoring here being so low, due to her shooting from a tight angle to the left of goal, the defender bearing down from behind and almost making the block, and the goalkeeper striding off of her line to reduce the space further, makes her doing so all the more impressive.
She managed to keep the shot low and find the net regardless, having timed her run well to catch the Spurs defence too high, outpaced Clare Hunt with the ball at her feet, and isolated Lize Kop with no defensive players in front to block the shot.Hanson has been very dangerous with the ball at her feet, with her 19 ball carries ending in a shot and 6 ending in a goal the highest in the BWSL, double the number of dribbles ending in goals registered by the 6 players tied in second place.
All three examples showcase hallmarks of the complete forward, a player who is given more freedom across the forward line than a typical striker. They are expected to drop deep and create space in behind, hold the ball up until the right pass emerges, move confidently with the ball at their feet, in addition to making off-the-shoulder runs in behind the defence.
This means that they often find themselves wide of goal or deeper than the most typical scoring positions and needing to recover their starting place high up the field, and have to deal with being afforded little space by the defence as the focal point of most attacks.
Though she has managed just 1 assist to add to her 12 goals, the Scot’s 0.24 big chances created per game place her comfortably in the top third of Barclays WSL players in 2025/26.
Considering that Hanson has been able to achieve all of this and convert several chances she wasn’t expected to, being responsible for 56% of Villa’s goals this season merits huge credit.
A trusted source of goals
But these aren’t the only numbers behind Hanson’s ‘give it to her and she’ll score’ kind of role within Natalia Arroyo’s side. She is converting her chances at quite a high rate indeed.
Among the top 10 BWSL players with the highest number of shots, Hanson emerges as the most clinical by dispatching 21.43% – just over one fifth – of her 56 attempts on goal this campaign.Needless to say, maintaining a high conversion rate over a larger total number of shots is more significant than a smaller total – 12 goals from 56 shots means more than scoring 1 out of 5, as the player’s rate remains fairly consistent despite having over 10 times more attempts.
It’s why Shaw’s rate of 16.52% is so remarkable: she is the 9th most accurate striker in the BWSL despite having 45 more shots than Alessia Russo, who has the second highest total shots.
Comparing Hanson’s conversion rate against the upper quartile of players with the most shots, anywhere from 23.25 to Shaw’s 115, she ranks 2nd only to Manchester City’s Kerolin, who has scored 9 goals from 29 shots on goal – though still 27 less than the former United forward.
It’s worth noting that Shaw’s number of shots alone skews this way of grouping her peers, though it remains a useful method to assess how accurate Hanson’s shooting is against those with a similar number of shots across a vast set of players.
How clinical Hanson has been this season puts into perspective the difference between her cumulative xG and actual output. The overperformance is rather impressive.
The larger circles in the above graph highlight shots of higher xG, chances that she was expected to put away, with the pink circles indicating those that ended in a goal.
There are fewer white circles than there are pink circles of a similar size inside the penalty area, indicating that Hanson’s shots with the highest xG have usually beaten the goalkeeper.
Some of the smallest circles on the graph represent goals that were far less likely to go in according to xG. In short, Hanson has made a mockery of her 5.3 expected goals.
Conclusion
Kirsty Hanson has enjoyed her highest goal tally so far and her talent – in competing for the Golden Boot among the best attackers in the country – has not gone unnoticed. Yet it is easier for feats such as that to be passed over during tough spells like Aston Villa’s this year.
Nonetheless, it is a record that the great Rachel Daly MBE, who won the Golden Boot with 22 goals in the 2022/23 season and still represents the Midlands club, would be proud of.
Hanson, in contract at the club until 2027, can only hope that her goals will play a part in bigger and better things for Villa next season, or perhaps at another club further up the BWSL.
Word credit: Oliver Whitemore
