IANIS HAGI has been in Scotland for over a year now but it remains difficult to pin down exactly what to make of the Romanian playmaker. For every stellar performance where he has bent a game to his will, such as his memorable display against Braga in last season’s Europa League, another seems to follow swiftly afterwards where he achieves next to nothing.

The precocious midfielder is just that: a player who occasionally shows flashes of his brilliance but fails to consistently churn out match-winning moments. When Hagi is on form there are few players in Scotland capable of keeping up with his speed of thought or technical prowess – we just haven’t seen enough of that side of him.

Before we go any further, we should point out that the 22-year-old is currently enjoying a fine campaign as his Rangers side motor their way to the club’s first top-flight title in a decade. Hagi has nine league assists to his name this term and the highest rate of any Premiership player in this regard, successfully laying on a goal 0.42 times per 90 minutes played.

The Romania internationalist also tops the league’s secondary assist – an ‘assist assist’, if you like – charts, providing 0.18 per game, and averages more deep completions (passes completed in the opponent’s box) per 90 minutes than any other player in the league.

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The numbers Hagi is posting are impressive but when we dig into the detail, we can learn more about the types of chances he is creating and so gain a clearer understanding of where he can improve. We’ll start with Expected Assists (xA).

This stat works in much the same way Expected Goals (xG) does; instead of counting how many times a player teed up a team-mate for a goal (which would give us an assist tally), xA calculates the likelihood of any given pass resulting in a goal and adds these figures up. It’s a handy metric as it tells us both the quality and quantity of chances created by a player, regardless of if the ball actually went in the back of the net.

Hagi ranks fairly highly in the league in terms of his xA. He averages 0.22 per 90 – the seventh-highest figure of any Premiership player – but what this demonstrates is that his assist tally this season isn’t representative of the chances he as created. His assist rate is nearly double his xA, implying that quite a few of Hagi’s assists this season are perhaps the result of lethal finishing on behalf of his team-mates as opposed to the midfielder laying it on a plate for them.

That doesn’t go the whole way to explaining the discrepancy, though. A closer examination is required, and we get just that by taking a gander at the number of shot assists Hagi produces per game. That is, passes that lead to a shot.

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Hagi fashions high-quality chances on a regular basis (relative to the rest of the league) yet lags behind many players in terms of the number of shots he sets up per game. He might well be seventh in the division for xA per 90, but he is all the way down in 18th for shot assists, averaging just 1.33 per match.

What this tells us is that the problem isn’t with the quality of chances he’s creating – it’s their volume. Compared to the other creative players in this league, he’s directly setting up chances for his team-mates rather sluggishly. But when they do arrive, they tend to be high-quality and result in goals.

The simple solution here would be to instruct Hagi to look for more chances to lay the ball off to team-mates as this is clearly an area where he excels. He should be lurking in dangerous areas, waiting patiently for the ball before picking the opponent’s defence with a well-timed through ball. The trends say as much. But when we look at Hagi’s season on a game-by-game basis, there is a deeper concern at play.

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The graphic above details Hagi’s rolling xA from game to game, and there are a few things that jump out immediately. There is an initial jolt when we see that Hagi’s xA has been gradually tailing off as the season has progressed, followed by another when we realise that he has only outperformed his average on six occasions this season. Put simply: the numbers are skewed.

Hagi’s average xA (0.22) is masked by his remarkable performances in certain games: in September, against Dundee United (xA=0.37), Lincoln Red Imps (0.42) and Hibs (0.81); the following month, versus Ross County (0.35) or Livingston (0.86); and against the Staggies once again when they met last month (0.32).

All of these are games that Rangers ought to have won fairly comfortable anyway and could prompt accusations that Hagi is a flat-track bully of sorts. Against smaller sides, where he is given time on the ball against inferior players, he often sparkles. But in bigger games, when the stakes are raised, he can struggle to replicate his level of performance.

In his three appearances in the groups stages of this season’s Europa League – he started both games against Lech Poznan and the match against Standard Liege in Belgium – Hagi’s xA plummeted to about 0.06, a drop-off of over two-thirds to his season average. In the 2-0 win over Celtic at Ibrox at the turn of the year, Hagi played 50 minutes. His exertions resulted in an xA of diddly-squat.

This is the contradiction at the heart of Hagi’s performances this season. On the one hand, the numbers he’s producing over the course of the campaign are impressive and he deserves his fair share of credit. Most of the players in the Premiership would kill to be playing such an important role as the Romanian is in what is an historic season for his club.

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But yet, there is always that feeling that we could be seeing more from Hagi, and the stats bear that out. He’s doing well but he could be doing even better, as is often the case with players of his age. The encouraging thing for Steven Gerrard is that even now, with little consistency to his game, Hagi remains one of the most creative players in Scotland. If he can increase his shot assists, knuckle down and play wit more consistency, then he has a wonderful chance of fulfilling his potential.

The sky is the limit. He’s unlikely to ever leave the same indelible mark his dad left on the sport but if Hagi can develop in the right fashion then it won’t be long until the big-money offers start pouring in from down south.