Arka Gdynia vs Zagłębie Lubin: Form Lies, xG Doesn't

Zagłębie Lubin arrive in Gdynia on April 7th riding three wins from their last five. Impressive, until you look at their expected goals figure: 0.8 xG per game over that same stretch. Three wins built largely on defensive solidity and opponents' wastefulness, not clinical attacking football. The narrative around Zagłębie's resurgent form doesn't survive contact with the numbers — and in the Arka Gdynia vs Zagłębie Lubin fixture, that gap between perception and reality matters enormously.

This Ekstraklasa match sits at the intersection of two very different statistical profiles. One team generates chances and can't stay consistent. The other wins games without really deserving to. Something has to give.

You can dig into the full match statistics yourself, but here's what the data is actually telling us.

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Zagłębie Lubin's Wins Are Smokescreens

Three wins from five sounds like momentum. 0.8 xG per game sounds like a team surviving on borrowed time.

Zagłębie's attacking output in recent weeks is, frankly, threadbare. Their shot average sits at 10.6 per game — below Arka's 12.0 — and they're converting those attempts into just 3.4 shots on target per match. That's not a clinical team. That's a team that's had fortune side with them.

The wins over Wisła Płock and Lechia Gdańsk were both 2-0 scorelines, which look comfortable in the table. But against opponents currently occupying the bottom half of the Ekstraklasa, you'd expect a well-organized side to keep clean sheets. The result flatters the performance.

The Away Problem Nobody Is Talking About

Zagłębie's away form adds another layer of concern. Their losses to Motor Lublin and Lech Poznań — both 0-1 defeats — came on the road. Away from home, this team drops to an average possession of 37.4%, essentially inviting pressure and sitting deep.

That's a deliberate setup. And against an Arka Gdynia side that generates 1.4 xG per game at home, parking the bus in Gdynia carries real risk. The Zagłębie Lubin stats & profile shows a team built for counter-attacking efficiency — but their underlying numbers suggest they're not efficient enough to make that trade-off work consistently.

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Arka Gdynia's Home Fortress Is Real — But Fragile

Here's the popular narrative: Arka Gdynia are unbeaten in their last five home matches. That's true. Here's the complication: two of those five were draws — including a 0-0 against Widzew Łódź — and their 3-0 demolition of Wisła Płock came against the division's worst defensive side.

Strip that Wisła result out, and Arka's home performances look considerably more modest. Still unbeaten, yes. But a team generating 12.0 shots per game and 4.6 on target should be winning more convincingly than their results suggest.

The xG figure of 1.4 per game is the important number. It's solid. It's not spectacular. It says Arka are creating decent half-chances consistently, rather than carving teams open. Against a Zagłębie side that concedes compactly, decent half-chances might not be enough.

The Possession Paradox

Arka average 49.4% possession over their last five — effectively 50/50. For a home side that should theoretically be dictating terms, that's a quiet alarm bell.

They're not a team that dominates the ball and suffocates opponents. They're a team that plays direct, uses the width — evidenced by their 20.2 throw-ins per game, highest of the two sides — and relies on transitional moments. That suits them against high lines. Against Zagłębie's deep defensive block, the transitions dry up.

Check the Arka Gdynia stats & profile and you'll see a side built on energy and set-piece delivery more than sustained pressure. Their 4.8 corners per game backs that up — use the flanks, win corners, manufacture moments. It's a legitimate approach. Whether it's enough here is a genuine question.

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The Head-to-Head Record Is Messier Than It Looks

Five previous meetings between these sides. Every single one has produced at least two goals. That's the cleanest trend in this dataset, and it's the one that holds across completely different contexts — different seasons, different managers, different league positions.

Five from five over 1.5 goals. The aggregate across those games is 24 goals in 5 matches. That's not a blip — that's a fixture characteristic.

But here's the contrarian read: the most recent meeting was a 4-0 Zagłębie demolition in September 2025. That result is an outlier in both scoreline and in what it suggests about the head-to-head pattern. If anything, it tells you Zagłębie are capable of a ruthless performance when Arka are disorganized — but also that Arka's current home form (unbeaten in five) represents a meaningfully different version of the team.

The September 2025 Caveat

That 4-0 result deserves scrutiny before it gets used as evidence of Zagłębie's superiority. It was played at Zagłębie's ground. Arka's defensive structure has tightened considerably since — their last five home results include three clean sheets. Context matters in football statistics. Don't let one outlier scoreline do too much work.

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Corners, Fouls, and the Set-Piece Arms Race

One of the more underreported angles in this Ekstraklasa fixture is the corner data — specifically Zagłębie's away corner numbers.

Zagłębie have been involved in 8+ total corners in each of their last four away matches. That's a sustained trend across a meaningful sample. The market sits at 7.5, and the data from four consecutive away games clears that threshold. Today's AI-powered analysis flagged this as a moderate-confidence trend, and the reasoning checks out.

Arka generate 4.8 corners per game themselves, predominantly from their wide attacking play. Add in the fact that Zagłębie concede corners at volume when forced back — which, given their 37.4% possession away from home, they routinely are — and the conditions for a corner-heavy game are present.

The Foul Factor

Both teams commit fouls at a meaningful rate. Arka average 14.8 fouls per game; Zagłębie 13.2. Neither is particularly disciplined, but the combined 28 fouls per game creates fertile ground for dead-ball situations.

Zagłębie's slightly higher yellow card average — 1.8 per game to Arka's 1.4 — suggests they're prepared to be physical in disrupting transitions. That physicality feeds into the set-piece economy of this fixture. Fouls on the edge of the box, contested headers, second balls — this one won't be a technical masterclass.

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The Numbers That Matter Most

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The story of Arka Gdynia vs Zagłębie Lubin on April 7th is simpler than the noise around it: one team generates chances and plays at home; the other wins games without particularly deserving to on the underlying data. The head-to-head history screams goals. The xG gap screams home advantage. Neither screams certainty — but the data, at least, has an opinion.