Patrik Schick has scored in every matchday: how goalscorer streaks move the anytime scorer market

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Six matchdays, six goals. Patrik Schick's 76th-minute winner against Freiburg on Sunday, tapped in from Ibrahim Maza's cutback, made him the first Leverkusen player to score in each of a season's first six Bundesliga rounds. Dimitar Berbatov (2005/06) and Stefan Kießling (2009/10) both stopped at five.

"Of course [the record] makes me proud," Schick said afterwards. “I'm lucky that I keep scoring and I will continue like that. Let's see where I stop!”

The anytime goalscorer market will have its own view on where he stops. With Hoffenheim next in the league, the question for bettors is how much of his price is Schick, and how much is the streak.
 

Six for six: how the run was built

It started in defeat. Schick scored on the opening day as Leverkusen lost 3-2 at Elversberg, then added a goal and an assist in the 4-0 win over Union Berlin. At Augsburg he came off the bench and rescued a 2-2 draw with a late equaliser in just 27 minutes on the pitch.

He opened the scoring in a 2-0 win over RB Leipzig, needed only nine minutes to score in a 4-3 thriller at Mainz, and on Sunday set up Maza's equaliser before scoring the winner himself.

Six goals put him joint top of the scoring chart with Werder Bremen's Niclas Füllkrug. At 30, it is the best start of his Bundesliga career, and he is already the club's highest-scoring non-German player in Bundesliga history. His personal best of 24 league goals, set in 2021/22, is still some way off.
 

Freiburg was the real test

Sunday was the hardest assignment of the run. Freiburg arrived at the BayArena top of the table with a club-record 13 points and the joint-best defence in the league. Leverkusen were 3/4 favourites, and Sky Bet had Schick at evens to score anytime.

He had to work for it. Schick played the full 90 minutes and had five shots, more than anyone else on the pitch. He headed a free kick against the post, only for the flag to go up for offside, and blazed a big chance over around the hour mark before Maza beat three defenders and squared for him.

Leverkusen won the expected-goals count 1.39 to 0.81 and handed Freiburg their first defeat of the season. For anyone holding an anytime ticket, though, the afternoon turned on one chance out of five. That is the nature of the market: it pays out on a single moment, and a striker can play well for 75 minutes and still lose you the bet.
 

The numbers under the streak

The run is not built on a handful of lucky touches. According to FotMob, Schick has taken 23 shots in six league games, 10 of them on target, worth 4.03 expected goals. None of his goals has come from the penalty spot.

That is about 0.84 xG per 90 minutes, the output of a striker who keeps getting into the right places. It also means six goals from roughly four expected, so his finishing is running about two goals ahead of his chances.

Some of that is quality: his shots on target were worth 5.02 on FotMob's post-shot model, a sign of good placement. But Schick used the word "lucky" himself, and conversion is the part of a striker's game that swings most from month to month. Last season he scored 16 in 28 Bundesliga games, an excellent return, but not one a week.
 

Where the streak fits into the price

A bookmaker's anytime price starts with expected minutes, the player's share of his team's chances, penalty duties and the strength of the opponent. It then moves as money comes in.

Evens implies a 50% chance before the bookmaker's margin. Going into Sunday, around 80 minutes at Schick's season rate gave him roughly 0.7 expected goals, which works out at about a 50% chance of scoring at least once. In other words, evens was close to what his numbers said.

The streak itself is not one of those inputs. Last week's goal does not make this week's more likely, unless it reflects something real such as more minutes, more shots or a bigger role. What a streak changes is demand. Popular players attract money, and a price can shorten simply because enough people want to back him.

Esports bettors know the pattern well. League of Legends' World Championship moves into its Swiss stage in the United States on Friday, and anyone comparing League of Legends Betting Sites this week will see the same pull towards teams on long winning runs, even though a single patch change can reshuffle the pecking order. German football has a foot in that world, too: Schalke played in the game's top European league until selling its place for a reported €26.5m in 2021.
 

Six in a row is rarer, but not that rare

Streaks look remarkable because we only notice them once they have happened. If a striker has a 50% chance of scoring in any given game, six in a row is a 1-in-64 shot. Spread that across 18 first-choice centre-forwards and, on those simplified numbers, somebody would manage it in about one season in four.

The Bundesliga's benchmark is Robert Lewandowski, who scored on each of the first 11 matchdays of 2019/20. Schick is now past halfway.

None of that takes anything away from his form. It simply means the goal count is the noisiest part of the picture. The minutes, the shots and his role in a side that has now scored in 18 straight Bundesliga games are what carry over into the next match.
 

Hoffenheim next: minutes matter more than momentum

The next chance comes at Hoffenheim on Sunday 25 October (15:30 CET), three days after a Europa League trip to OFI Crete.

That is where the minutes question comes in. In Poznań last week, Schick was only meant to play a short spell. "The plan before the match was that I would only play for maybe 30 minutes," he said. Martin Terrier's injury meant he played almost an hour and scored twice, and Carles Martínez made five changes for the Freiburg game, bringing Schick back into the side. Another Thursday-Sunday week makes rotation likely again.

For the anytime market, a start is worth more than a streak. A striker who plays 60 minutes gets fewer chances than one who plays 90, and the team sheet an hour before kick-off can change his true chance of scoring more than six straight goals.
 

Back the player, check the price

Schick's run is real, and the numbers say it is not a fluke. But the anytime market already knows about the streak, and the more people back him, the less room there is in the price.

The run will end at some point, and that will not mean his form has gone. The useful question each weekend is simple: is the price following the evidence, or the streak?