Serie A is shooting from range more than ever, but only one team is doing it better than the rest. We look at how Inter’s are turning low xG efforts into a potent weapon.
Football is too rich in bizarre events to be “solved” like certain other sports, but the moneyball approach of recent years has had a real consequence across practically all of world football: shots from distance are inefficient and produce low-xG opportunities, much like crosses against an organised defence. It’s just like long two pointers in basketball: those mid-range shots, far from the rim, that are still worth two points.
That holds true, of course, until a team comes along with the efficiency, and above all the quality, to defy it. And that team, in the Italian league at least, is Inter.
In this context, Christian Chivu’s Inter are neither the team that shoots the most in the whole of Serie A, nor the one that shoots from furthest out (they are fifth, with 5.00 open-play shots from outside the box per game). But they have established themselves, by a distance, as the best team in the entire league at shooting from range.
Need a more concrete comparison? The team that shot the most from distance in the whole of the 2025/26 campaign was Juventus, who from beyond 22 metres produced 3.78 xG with 5 goals from 136 shots, while Inter scored 6 goals from 3.46 xG and 108 shots, 28 fewer than Juventus. If we shorten the distance slightly, to those beyond 19 metres, the gap widens: Juventus ended last season with 6.76 xG and only 6 goals from 188 shots, while Inter scored twice as many goals from 6.32 xG and 166 shots.
Nor do they look out of place next to Europe’s best attacks. Bayern Munich, a team that scored 122 goals in the Bundesliga, scored 17 from the same spots as Inter, but from 8.03 npxG and with 21 more shots. The second-highest scoring team in Europe last season, Barcelona, got 12 goals from 7.96 xG and 213 shots: a testament to how, for Flick’s side, the long shot was a volume tool for trying to break down more closed-up games.
Across Europe’s Top Five leagues last year, xG-busting Aston Villa profited from this tactic more than any other team, with 15 goals outside the area. This represented 28% of their league goals, the highest across the divisions.
The fact that Inter are the team with the second lowest average shot distance - and were last season too - in Serie A points to knowing when to try their luck from range. Like with Chris Paul in the NBA, a player so good at an inefficient skill that he turns it into an efficient one, Inter also have the personnel with the quality to make it count.
Of course, having a player like Hakan Calhanoglu helps. In 2025/26, the Turkish midfielder scored 5 of Inter’s 12 goals from beyond 22 metres, at an average of 0.03 npxG per shot. What’s more, all 5 of his goals were of very high difficulty, as shown by his 1.26 npxG, with the standout being his goal against Roma: a shot worth 0.03 xG from almost 35 metres out.
Calhanoglu’s goals-per-shot ratio is 0.12, and the Turkey international on his own scored practically as many goals as the entire Juventus team did from range last season.
With players like that, it seems easy to maintain rates like these, but in reality he is not the only secret behind Inter’s dominance from outside the box. Piotr Zielinski established himself last year, partly because of Calhanoglu’s absences through injury, as one of the most prolific attacking weapons in Inter’s midfield.
And his shot map is even more extreme than that of the former Milan midfielder, with 22 shots, 1.03 npxG produced and 5 goals scored. One of them was decisive, coming in the last minute of the Serie A showdown against Juventus, which finished 3-2 thanks precisely to the Pole’s goal.
And it’s impossible to talk about Inter and attacking contribution without mentioning Federico Dimarco, who has had an incredible season and done his bit for Inter’s overperformance (or perhaps it’s better to call it simply performance) from distance. 21 shots, 0.81 xG and 2 goals: not even such incredible numbers, were it not for the fact that we’re talking about a wing-back, who normally shouldn’t have either this volume of shooting or the central positions that allow him to shoot with this frequency and quality. The Dimarco–Zielinski–Calhanoglu trio thus contributed to 10 of the 12 open play goals Inter scored from distance in 2025/26.
The trend doesn’t seem to have changed this year either. In these first 5 league matches, Inter have shot more than the Serie A average, though not so much that you could say they overuse this fundamental tool; their efficiency, however, is once again the best in all of Serie A.
The league’s current joint leaders are Frosinone and Como, both with 6.10 shots per 90 minutes, but their return is still below Inter’s: 2 goals from 2.47 xG, while Inter have already got 3 goals from 2 xG. Only Lazio and Fiorentina have scored more than Inter’s 3 goals from outside the box.
Will Fiorentina be this year’s Bologna? They’re already well on the way. In any case, anyone who wants to dethrone Inter at the top of the league will also have to think about how to neutralise their battery of shooters, the unexpected weapon when the game is broken and you need a goal.
We’ve seen it this year too, such as Carlos Augusto’s goal from almost 30 metres that sparked Inter’s comeback at home against Udinese. Como, Roma and anyone else who fancies a go: consider yourselves warned, the Scudetto will also be decided by screamers.
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