How to Read a Shot Map: A Beginner's Guide

A shot map plots every shot in a match (or a season) onto a diagram of the pitch, positioned exactly where the shot was taken from. It looks like a scatter of dots at first, but once you know what each visual element represents, it becomes one of the quickest ways to understand how a match actually played out.

The three things every shot map encodes

Position — where the dot sits on the pitch tells you where the shot was taken from. Dots clustered inside the six-yard box represent high-quality chances; dots scattered around the edge of the penalty area or further out represent longer, lower-percentage efforts.

Size — the size of each dot usually represents its xG value. Bigger dots are higher-quality chances; tiny dots are speculative efforts unlikely to trouble the goalkeeper.

Colour or fill — most shot maps distinguish goals from non-goals, typically with a solid, filled marker for a goal and a hollow or muted marker for everything else (blocked, saved, or off target). This is deliberate: colour alone shouldn't be the only way to tell them apart, since not every reader distinguishes colour the same way — a filled-vs-hollow distinction reads clearly either way.

Reading a match from its shot map

Once you know the encoding, a few patterns jump out immediately:

• A team with several large dots and few goals has generated good chances but finished them poorly — often a sign of bad luck or a keeper having an excellent game, rather than a poor underlying performance.
• A team with many small dots has been shooting from range rather than working the ball into dangerous areas — usually a sign they're struggling to break down a well-organised defence. Volume of shots without quality is a weak signal on its own.
• A single large, filled dot inside the six-yard box is often the moment that decided the match — and it's worth checking whether the rest of the map shows a team that deserved that chance or one that scored against the run of play.

What it won't tell you

A shot map only shows shots — it says nothing about buildup play, defensive shape, or possession patterns that never produced an attempt on goal. Two teams can have near-identical shot maps and have arrived at them in completely different ways. It's a lens on the end product of an attack, not the attack itself — pair it with a full match stats view for the complete picture.