Month: August 2018

Newcastle United are moored between optimism and pessimism. On the pitch there’s an OK enough squad, marshalled by an organiser of high repute in Rafael Benítez, a manager who has been embraced by supporters in a way no Newcastle gaffer has been for a long time. A 10th placed finish last season right after achieving promotion? Not too shabby. Off the pitch, though, is the ever-lurking Mike Ashley. An owner who is seen as the impediment to all that brewing positivity. Despite the reasons to be cheerful, there's always some tension boiling under the surface at St James' Park. Last season was a decent old job for a newly promoted side, even if it won't win any awards for entertainment value. Come against Benítez’ boys and you’ll be faced with a deep/mid, compact 4-4-1-1 / 4-4-2. Other formations are sprinkled in on occasion, yet the principles remain the same. A gigantic wall blocking the way. Only engaging with any real intensity as the ball spreads out wide, edges closer to their goal or enters into a danger area. Sometimes the height of the press adjusts situationally. There’s an almost hypnotic aspect to watching that shape move back and forth, from side to side.  It’s likely that the impression most neutrals have of Newcastle in their mind is of this defensively astute team, with an impotent long ball attack. Yet their numbers don’t reflect this dichotomy.  They ranked 11th in overall non-penalty expected goal difference last year, but came out 14th in non-pen xG conceded and 9th in non-pen xG created. If anything they were roughly equal on both sides of the ball in expectation. A dynamic that was obscured in actuality, as they underperformed their xG by about 7 goals - the largest such negative margin in the league - and overpeformed by a similarly large margin in defence. There was no single obvious stylistic weakness in their defensive game. In most regards - counter attacking shots conceded, in the clear shots conceded, conceding shots after losing the ball in their own half etc etc - they were midtable or around there. The classic recipe of being generally so-so and ending up, well, midtable. On the other end the surface numbers would suggest an unhealthy attack; their average shot distance is the furthest from goal in the league, and they complete the fourth fewest passes into the opposition box. This was mostly due to the weakness of their possession game. On possessions that featured 10 or more passes, Newcastle again had the poorest shot distance in the Premier League, as well as close to the worst xG created. This is evidently not where they make their money offensively. Given their defensive plan, you can probably imagine their main mode of attacking play: directness is the name of the game. They're one of the fastest teams in the league and play amongst the most long balls. This is how they make hay, how they end up grading out as a solid attack. They accumulated the fourth highest xG total from open play possessions that featured 5 or fewer passes.   All of this this worked in the aggregate. But it wasn’t the smoothest ride. They dipped hard for a long period. Looking impotent on the attacking end and increasingly leaky in defence. A relegation-level stretch. For all of Benítez’s coaching chops, it's still a tad worrying at times, watching them barely even get out of their own half in some matches. Absorbing attack after attack.  10th is no bad place to be of course, especially not for a promoted side. But to stay there you've gotta keep up with the Joneses. The talent level of your squad needs to be improving as every other team does the same around you. This summer's truncated transfer window shuts imminently and Newcastle's work to accomplish this has been...tumultuous. The most curious development has been at the striker position. No player broke the 10 goal mark in the league for them last season. Ayoze Perez, despite being functionally an attacking midfielder/striker mix, got the closest with eight goals in 2497 minutes. Dwight Gayle managed six, Joselu just four. That, plus the aforementioned underperformance on xG (whether you consider it a candidate for regression or otherwise), would suggest reinforcements are needed. Their main response to this thus far is to make a rarely-seen loan swap deal with West Bromwich Albion, bringing in Salomón Rondón and sending Dwight Gayle the other way. The Venezuelan notched an iffy seven goals in just shy of 3000 minutes last season, with some equally ugly underlying production. Theoretically he provides a real threat from set pieces (although Newcastle were already doing quite well in that department by xG) and in the air, taking the 3rd most headed shots in the league. Yet, even if you price in that he will have a few more opportunities in the north east than he did in 17/18 on a now relegated West Brom side, it isn't exactly lifting their attacking ceiling. Nor is there any upside here with a 28 year old we're quite familiar with already. Elsewhere they've rescued Ki-Sung-yueng from Swansea on a free, Yoshinori Mutō as further forward depth, Fabian Schär at centre-back, goalkeeper Martin Dúbravka (who they had on loan last season), and Kenedy back in for a second loan season. On the outs, amongst many released players, are midfielder Mikel Merino, Chancel Mbemba and Aleksandar Mitrović. The last of those being particularly odd as the Serb may have been a solution for their goalscoring issues. Now he's at newly-promoted Fulham and directly competing against them in the league table. The incomings are all solid enough, but they're not really moving things forward. Newcastle are essentially replacing outgoing players at their positions - even if it isn’t exactly like-for-like - and re-upping some loans. There's not much improvement or diversification. The squad is in largely the same place it was previously, right when they need to be stacking more talent on top. Ostensibly this is because Ashley doesn't want to do much more. Of course this may not even end up as a concern at all. Being roughly the same level as you were previously when you comfortably avoided relegation and broke into the top half isn't disastrous on its face. Yet when you're in the mix with those 'could fall into a relegation battle' teams (and several of those are stronger this year), that risk is always there. The more existential fear is how clearly miffed Benítez is about the whole situation. It seems every other day there's a new headline about how he and Ashley are clashing over buying players. This story from the Guardian features these almost parodically portentous quotes:

Rafael Benítez’s tenure as Newcastle’s manager looks to be reaching a pivotal moment after he claimed “everything” is wrong behind the scenes at St James’ Park. "When things are not going well off the pitch you can see a reflection on the pitch,” Benítez said after Wednesday’s 4-0 friendly defeat at Braga in northern Portugal. Pressed as to whether he was referring to recruitment at a club showing a profit on summer dealing, he replied: “Everything – I’m really worried.” asked if there was money to spend or any deals were close he said: “I have no idea. The fans have to be concerned, we are concerned. I’m really worried.”

Evidently he is worried. This is the running fear if you're a Newcastle supporter. At best this is Benítez - potentially harmfully - pulling some public power plays on transfers. At worst it's actively driving out the manager and arguably the most positive aspect the club has had in yonks. In any reasonable scenario, the club will likely be fine next season. Avoiding relegation and finishing somewhere around 10th again is well within grasp. Beyond that though lies a minefield of possibilities that we can't anticipate.  

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.

Smear enough Vaseline on the lens and the 7th best team in the EPL performed more or less to expectation last season. But viewed under natural light and in Full HD, the cracks in the foundation of Farhad Moshiri's Everton makeover were laid bare. After a Summer of eye-wateringly expensive mediocrity, the fixture list did for Koeman before he'd even pointed Calvert-Lewin to the corner flag and told him to start chasing long balls on the first day back at training. In the first five games: Man City, Chelsea, Man Utd away, Tottenham at home. Out of the Europa League only days before suffering a 5-2 defeat at home to an Arsenal team that would go on to win only 3 points away in 2018. Already much of the squad was traipsing round the pitch with the plausible deniability of men whose manager had stopped shaving and started sleeping on a mound of bibs in his office. The 'relegation' word was mentioned for the first time since Rooney's first Everton stint. And just like that, everybody lost their damn minds. Enter Sam Allardyce. It would be easy to list things that were bad about Allardyce's tenure, and we're going to, but one thing strikes me as unfair: while the shot differential did collapse, the style of football was really no different to anything seen under Koeman for the previous 12 months. Everton have been the longest of long-ball teams in Europe for a long time - both Koeman and Allardyce (and indeed Unsworth in his brief stint between them) were producing the longest average passes to enter the final third in the Premier League last season. Let's not pretend Allardyce was somehow polluting Everton's previously liquid football. Outside of that though, wow. From the day he joined:

• Everton were 17th in expected goal difference in the league.
• Nobody shot fewer times.
• Only two teams passed into the box less.
• Only three teams achieved less xG from set pieces but none of them spent £45 million on Gylfi Sigurðsson.

And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same: the team finished in the margin of error of seventh place. I don't really believe Everton were ever at risk of relegation, or even finishing in the bottom half, so I don't think Allardyce should be credited with a great escape given the squad he had. But Big Sam did the job, and it's probably for the best that we all forget about it and move on. Along with Allardyce, Steve Walsh was out - neither a director of football nor a particularly good head scout - replaced by the highly-regarded Marcel Brands. This time around Everton were going to do things right, filling the vacant Director of Football role first, allowing them to lead the manager search. Finally, the team could set out a long term plan and hire a manager to fit within that - Brands spoke of wanting to exploit the academy more, alongside hints from Moshiri that he might end his debauchery in the transfer market. If Everton wanted to be more moderate in the transfer market, it's a shame Brands didn't have the time to watch any Eredivisie games during his stint as -- *checks notes* -- Sporting Director of PSV Eindhoven, otherwise he might have cast an eye over top-scorer Alireza Jahanbakhsh before his £17 million move to Brighton. As it was, Brands flexed his newfound authority and hired the guy Moshiri told him to, Marco Silva, and then splurged £40 million on Silva's favourite player from his former club. Now, it's not for me to say that Everton went and hired another Director of Football and forgot to give them any actual responsibilities or authority again, but it sure seems like that's what happened. Despite winning his first game in charge 22-0, it would be easy to write off Silva as a relegated EPL manager with a big philosophy in the style of third-best-manager-at-the-World-Cup Roberto Martinez. But after two seasons of Koeman and Allardyce's hoofball, Silva is a step forwards, if not the return to the school of science some might desire. There's been a hole in the centre of the field for Everton for the last couple of years - there are no passing central midfielders and the workaround to date has been long balls into the final third. Silva isn't going to completely fill this hole with scintillating passing moves through the middle. We can expect fewer long balls (as long as the players don't revert to type), but in pre-season and Silva's previous teams, he's looked to progress the ball out wide. In defence, this has revealed (most notably against Rennes) the other hole in the team - when Everton face counters down the flank, rightback Seamus Coleman is ahead of the ball, midfielder Idrissa Gueye is off like a headless chicken as usual, and his partner Morgan Schneiderlin isn't overly bothered about filling in. Against the likes of Phil Jagielka, it feels like we'll see balls flashing across the face of goal on the break pretty regularly, although late transfer window addition Yerry Mina may be the front-foot kind of defender we need in these situations. In attack, Silva's teams have often been some of the crossiest in their leagues: while at Sporting, more than 60% of his team's box entries were via crosses. For all his plucky-underdog performances at Estoril, Hull and Watford, Silva is going to be facing more deep blocks in the EPL with Everton. I'm not inspired by the thought of watching crosses getting knocked into a crowded box over and over again, followed up by Gylfi with the worst completion rate on corner deliveries of any player taking 50 or more the EPL last year. The hope therefore is that a fit Theo Walcott, who looked very lively on his return from an ankle injury against Valencia, and record-signing Richarlison can do some magic to unlock things. Right-footed left-winger Richarlison should indeed offer a different avenue of attack - he doesn't really have much in the way of passing numbers at all, but he's busy, combative and pacy. Nicking balls all over the pitch and bursting from deep, only Jack Wilshere and Eden Hazard were fouled more than the young Brazilian last season. In the final third, he almost profiles like a wider, less creative Dele Alli, finding the right positions outside the box to make dangerous runs towards goal. I'm intrigued how it'll work out - in his first couple of pre-season games you can often see him crowding the spaces Cenk Tosun already occupies, but it's early days. If Richarlison is a rough diamond, this is what interests me most of all about Silva - it's been about 5 years since any player at Everton looked like they were progressing on the training field. From the comments of his previous players, Silva sounds like a manager willing to devote time to the squad as individuals. Given that Everton have done a terrible job at shifting the dead weight in the squad over the Summer, the hope is now becomes that it's possible that better man-management might somehow convince the likes of Schneiderlin that a continued career in football is both possible and desirable. If not, then with the transfer window slammer going through his stretches in preparation for his biannual duty, it's worrying that they've not shifted more of the yours-for-a-fiver walking dead in the squad. Rooney's contract is off the books which was probably priority number one, and Ashley Williams and Kevin Mirallas have gone out on loan. The makeup of the squad remains hilarious: With the majority declining (and some with not much declining left to do before they hit the rocks), none of the youth has really set the world alight. Tom Davies - the Scouse Hector Bellerin - runs a lot but produces little. Calvert-Lewin showed brief glimpses of talent while being given some of the most thankless tasks in the squad. Only Ademola Lookman felt genuinely exciting, but the rumours of a permanent move to Leipzig persist. Losing him would feel like a failure of either the new regime's ambition or ability to inspire, but it's possible that he, like me, just wants to inhabit the alternate Rangnickverse where Everton hired him and not Martinez in 2013. Elsewere in transferville, Everton solved the Leighton Baines succession problem with the once-promising and now actually 25 Lucas Digne. Baines has been a tremendous servant to the club through the not-quite-golden-era-but-you'd-probably-have-it-back Moyes period and beyond. Nobody in the Premier League has been a more reliable crosser into the box over the years, but Baines' game has been by no means old-fashioned. Before Everton had billionaires in charge, I often felt that the team should have cashed in on him, and in his 11 years at the club the academy has tried and tried and tried again to dethrone him: Patrick Boyle, Jake Bidwell, Brandan Galloway, Luke Garbutt, even Jonjoe Kenny, Harry Charsley and Tyias Browning a couple of times. But like Baines himself - several times voted Most Likely To Retire And Become An A&R Man For A Small Indie Label You Probably Haven't Heard Of by his teammates - the traditional warmer sound of vinyl always prevailed over these new fangled options. Whether Digne is first choice immediately is unclear, but if he can't budge 33-year-old Baines then he truly has squandered the brief glimpses of talent he has showed over the years from a succession of Champions League benches. So, whither seventh? This season's outlook comes down to whether you believe there's enough latent quality and potential in the existing squad to guarantee the top half. Last season descended into panic, when patience and optimism were needed - Everton are still building a stadium, still financially secure, and in the wake of Stan Kroenke's buyout at Arsenal it's possible that the power behind the throne could be even more willing to push on. It all leaves Everton still up around the ceiling of squad quality outside the European places, and betting markets seem to agree. But it's fair to say our skies are increasingly crowded, and there's smart recruitment going on all over the place. I suspect the floor of quality in the league is higher this season as well, outside of Cardiff - although even then, Championship deep blocks and long balls haven't performed the worst in the last couple of seasons with everybody believing they can press way up the pitch. It's hard for me to believe that losing Lukaku and adding a year to the legs of the likes of Jagielka sent the squad from 7th to 17th best team in England last season. And so this season demands something of an act of faith: to ignore last year's numbers for intangible reasons, and to believe that now a young, long-term manager can give the club the sense of progress that's been lacking since Martinez's first tilt at the top 4. It's a lot to ask of Silva and of fans' credulity. But, after enduring Allardyce, asking for hope, even irrational hope, seems like a step in the right direction.  

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.   Header image courtesy of the Press Association

Three consecutive seasons in the Premier League is a significant achievement for Eddie Howe and his Bournemouth team. They are still a comparatively small club; their stadium is significantly smaller than any other in the division and their wage outlay is consistently among the lowest in the league. It’s also impressive that their run in the division has been achieved without defaulting to an ultra defensive style of football, a trait so common in their direct peers, and they have managed to be fairly consistent for points with 42, 46 and 44. However, last season’s haul of 44 points concealed what was a grinding season, characterised by just four wins in the first half and boosted by a further two wins in their last two games of the season which landed them right at their par. They scarcely dallied with relegation, but for long spells didn’t perform particularly well. This team may have found a way to stay clear of real trouble so far but they remain within range; a down season could see them right in the midst of a relegation battle. Their 2017-18 metrics represent a warning in that direction too with only a mid-season run seeing them approach par:

Metrics

Via xG, Bournemouth ranked 16th in the Premier League last season which landed them somewhere between now Championship sides West Brom and Stoke. The difference being their actual goal difference of -16 was two ahead of expectation while their now departed rivals landed themselves ten and 13 goals behind theirs. This isn’t definitively scathing towards Bournemouth’s capabilities, but improvement towards a stronger base would be the best way to contribute towards ensuring future safety. The thing is, for now, though admirably non-defensive, Bournemouth’s style likely contributes heavily to their inadequate metrics. For example take their defence: It’s really easy to complete passes close to Bournemouth’s goal. Why might that be? ...because Bournemouth’s volume of defensive activity in the band ahead of the box is well below league average. Teams can get through Bournemouth's midfield and enact play in the deepest zones. As such Bournemouth put in an above average volume of last ditch defending, but ahead of that their midfield was porous. This chart also tells us more about the way Bournemouth deploy their defensive resources higher up the pitch. Joshua King, Callum Wilson and Jermain Defoe all ranked in the top 25 for the division for volume of opposition half pressure events--which we can see represented in the red segments ahead of the halfway line. It's just what takes place in between doesn't quite pass muster. Bournemouth can attack looking like an above average Premier League team, but scarcely look anything but below average at the back. While King moved his position out of the centre somewhat and understandably saw his goal totals reduce having come down from his 2016-17 finishing bender (but that's another story...), Wilson and Defoe tended to operate as the main striker, and saw genuine congruence in their metrics. Wilson slightly edged expected numbers while Defoe edged reality. It's curious that Bournemouth felt the need to back up Wilson with such a similar type in Defoe (or vice versa) for while they may have a willingness to run and press, each of their overall game involvement on the ball is severely limited. This means when you're up against it against a decent side and struggling to retain the ball, having a guy complete fewer than ten passes is far from optimal. Defoe, who turns 36 in October, retains another two years on his contract and after featuring most heavily before Christmas, while Bournemouth struggled, suffered an injury and only saw sporadic minutes thereafter. Failure to add an alternative goalscorer this window may well prove to be an oversight. One thing that changed last season was Bournemouth’s commitment to their formation. In their first two seasons in the Premier League, Eddie Howe kept fairly strictly to a back four, while varying the set-up ahead of that. During 2017-18 he implemented--at times-- the fashionable three centre back base. The typical Bournemouth 4-4-2/4-4-1-1 still won out as the most reliable choice, especially at home, while the three centre backs were fairly often wheeled out for games against the top six. However, it’s tough to see an outright pattern in the way the team chopped and changed between formations, and the reality of their underlying metrics suggests that these apparently erratic choices did not create any greater stability, for all that results turned out broadly the same as before. There are positives too. It was clear on a number of occasions last season that work had been done on attacking set pieces plays from which they had some success. Also in Lewis Cook and Jordon Ibe they have one young player who has significant potential and another who perhaps started to finally realise some of his own.

Transfers/Squad

Over the years, Bournemouth have had a curious reluctance to shop expansively and dive into the non-British based market. They started last season with only Ryan Fraser (who is Scottish and came through at Aberdeen), and their two reserve goalkeepers Artur Boruc (who first played on these shores in 2005 for Celtic) and Adam Federici (Australian, joined Wolves in 2003) as part of their over-21 first team squad that weren’t technically homegrown. Prior to this summer the only player they had signed in recent seasons without either a British passport or extensive links to the country was Lys Mousset, a talented attacker, who is still just 22 years old, but has failed to really nail down a regular first team slot since arriving from Le Havre in summer 2016. This general trend looked to be continuing when the highly touted young Welshman David Brooks joined from Sheffield United for around £10million this summer, but was surprisingly abandoned ahead of the signing of 25 year old Spanish full back David Rico for a similar fee from CD Leganés. The jury’s out as to whether Rico specifically has the quality to thrive in the Premier League but it is to be hoped that Bournemouth can be a little braver with their recruitment as time goes by and understand that there’s a whole world of players out there who may well be able to improve them, and not just to limit themselves to a majority of intra-league moves. There is also now talk of a move for Colombian midfielder Jefferson Lerma again possibly arriving from Spain and this time Levante. This move appears logical stylistically, as with Bournemouth often being quite open, a defensively stout midfielder could be the key to shoring things up. Again whether he has the quality to succeed in the Premier League remains to be seen--the reported £25million is a significant fee, and he might also want to chill out a bit; 16 bookings last season was quite some going. So we have seen a slight move away from their traditional strategy. It’s possible that the dynamic of the squad has been helped by a lack of language barriers, or that it perceived as a benefit to keep a culturally tighter knit group, but the modern Premier League is plenty wealthy enough to enact methods of overcoming any concerns in this direction, and the pros more than likely outweigh any cons. The squad is an interesting blend of ages that probably tends a little too far towards the older side, so it's enouraging that the new players have been 25 and under:

Projection

In the "battle of the 14" that makes up the rest of the Premier League, bookmakers place Bournemouth almost dead centre, while Sporting Index's spread's place them within a win of seven teams ranging from 11th to 18th. Although a wide range, that's probably a fair representation of potential outcomes for the south coast side. It's tough to imagine them being anything different to what we have seen before, and having stayed up three times in a row, it will be hard to convince them that they might need to do anything different. Last season's metrics were a significant warning though. It is always a risk if you are one of the weaker teams in the league, for sometimes a handful of results don't fall your way and you find your season looking like West Brom's and wondering how you got into the mess you're in. Bournemouth have started slowly in the past before rallying in mid season but with the wider perception that this season's Premier League could be slightly better, with Fulham and Wolves coming up and looking solid bets to stay up, the battle at the bottom may just need a little extra to avoid being sucked in. That's not to be unnecessarily negative, and the stability in management and the team may well ameliorate against some of the potential downside, but we have yet to see a solid Bournemouth in this league--they will always ship goals. If that's inevitable, then they might need to hope that Jordon Ibe kicks on from a promising 2017-18 and their goalscorers can hit a warm streak. The deal remains the same: survival first, then hope for more.  

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.

In 2015–16 season West Ham finished in 7th place in their final season at Upton Park. That year was supposed to be the launching pad for the team to bridge the gap between themselves and England's top six clubs. The reality is that Dimitri Payet’s brilliance and that seasons' general above average finishing were exceptions to the norm and West Ham quickly returned to the below average Premier League side  they'd been over the last few seasons. Last season,  troubles meant that everyone’s favorite guitar playing uncle Slaven Bilic was sacked, and the hiring of David Moyes was met by large swaths of skepticism. West Ham salvaged their season and stayed up, but things never really turned around under Moyes. Performances didn’t really improve and fan unrest stayed high.

The good news is that there’s excitement concerning West Ham’s 2018–19 season, and the hope for something better. In Manuel Pellegrini, West Ham have hired their most acclaimed manager in roughly forever and a substantial upgrade over what Moyes brought to the squad. Compared to the 2017 transfer window, 2018 has been more sensible in terms of identifying talents and how they could fit under Pellegrini. There's still some issues with how the talent fits together, but the optimism is definitely back within West Ham supporters.

Metrics

For all the talk during the season about the sky falling, it might come as a surprise that West Ham actually finished in 13th place and a full nine points clear of relegation and 18th place Swansea. Of course, that sugarcoats just what happened with West Ham when it came to their underlying performance. Simply put, West Ham were terrible last season from a statistical standpoint. Only Swansea had a worse shot ratio than West Ham’s 39.1%, and West Ham’s expected goal difference was only better than Swansea, Huddersfield and Stoke. It was the perfect storm of not being able to generate shots and conceding them at will.

In theory, David Moyes should have improved West Ham on the defensive side of the ball, but that never actually happened. In the 11 games under Bilic to start the season, West Ham gave up around 14.5 shots per game on an average shot quality of near 12%. That’s a recipe for disaster, but those numbers didn't move enough in the positive direction under Moyes with West Ham giving up nearly 16 shots per game on an average shot quality of around 10%. If you’re going to concede a lot of shots, you better be damn near the top in being able to suppress the shot quality on average so that it's not a complete horror show, but West Ham didn’t quite do that and it’s why they continued to let in a boatload of goals.

Style of Play

Under Moyes, West Ham played a back three/five in part to try and compensate for some of the deficiencies they had in midfield. West Ham had problems with being able to have vertical passing to bypass the opposition, so they had to use the wide areas and potential combination play to progress up the field. There would also be a number of occasions where the spacing between the players would look quite off and it made it even harder than it perhaps should have been for West Ham to create anything during possession. For the entirety of the season, West Ham were another one of these PL teams that crossed the ball a lot (6th highest percentage of penalty box entries coming via crosses) that couldn't actually connect on them (last in cross completion percentage). Another problem for West was that they tried playing a wingback system with Pablo Zabaleta at age 33. At one point in his career Zabaleta had the athletic capabilities to perform the duties of a modern day wingback, but at his advanced age, it just meant that he couldn't create separation from his marker and far too many potential attacks died as a result. This created an imbalance where West Ham were considerably more potent from the left side than the right with the combination of Manuel Lanzini and Arthur Masuaku.

The saving grace with West Ham going forward was that shifting Mark Arnautovic to a more central role coincided with some of the best football we’ve seen from him. It was a smart idea because Arnautovic can perform the duties of a striker in 2018. When West Ham were able to get the ball up field, he’s strong enough to be an outlet for long passes into the final third and shield the ball to setup the next move. The move to striker also made better use of his speed because he can attack space in behind the opposition to get into dangerous shooting opportunities instead of trying to create as an inverted winger off the dribble.

Defensively, West Ham defended in a manner that you would've expected from them, a low block with very little sustained pressure on the ball higher up the pitch. Only Brighton and Crystal Palace had their average location of defensive events closer to goal than West Ham. Defending in a low block isn't a bad thing if done properly, because it negates pass opportunities into the middle and forces the opposition to stay out in the wide areas which are more inefficient in terms of creating opportunities. As a low block defense, the goal is either forcing the opposition to cross from deep or forcing the opposition to settle for low quality shots. But as the shot suppression and quality numbers references early show, that wasn't the case with West Ham. The low block simply didn't accomplish it's goals. Additionally, they were 13th in allowing passes completed within 20 meters of goal. West Ham gave up prime real estate to opponents without much of a fight.

Personnel + Transfers

A major problem for West Ham since coming back to the Premier League in 2012 is that their halfhearted approach to squad building led to almost never selling high on players. Since Carlos Tevez left for Manchester City in July 2009, they’ve only been able to sell two players for £20 million or more: Dimitri Payet to Marseille and Andre Ayew to Swansea in the 2017 and 2018 January windows respectively. If you're a properly run club that's not part of the elite, you're hopefully hitting on a few young players, turning that into profits in player sales and continuing that cycle in the near future as part of a certain niche in the football chain.

Despite that, West Ham haven't been afraid to throw money around to solve problems (even if those problems are of their own making). Compared to last season, this season's business seems more thought out. Issa Diop at his price is a good bet at the center back position and while his age makes him risky, and there are questions about his ability on the ball, finding a good and potentially great defender at a young age is hard to do. Spending lots of money on Felipe Anderson is a high risk move, but the reward is grand if it turns out that what we saw from Anderson in 14-15 and 17-18 is more representative of his true talent level. At 25, he’s young enough that if he hits and performs like one of the better attacking players in the league, there’ll still be re-sale value in a couple of years. Lukasz Fabianski, Ryan Federicks and Jack Wilshere were all sensible moves given their respective price tags, though the idea of heavily relying on Jack Wilshere with his injury past is...unsettling.

The only really questionable move is getting Andriy Yarmolenko. He’s turning 29 in October and unless he is close to awesome immediately, it could be the case that West Ham end up having overpaid for a player at the wrong end of the aging curve and won’t be able to move him on unless they’re willing to take a substantial loss. Yarlmolenko is a talented player, but he’s not quite good enough to feel comfortable spending an ample amount of money at his age. Cheikhou Kouyaté is the only major player departing from West Ham, and while he had his uses, his departure shouldn't have much of a noticeable impact on the squad.

2018–19 Projection

From a sheer talent perspective, West Ham might be the most talented team not in the top 6, which is progress considering that there was no way one could make this argument 12 months ago. They might’ve found their next star in Felipe Anderson, Issa Diop might turn out to be a hit right away and if healthy (which is a big if), Jack Wilshere should be a fine enough midfielder and an upgrade over who they’ve had at that position over the years. All of this is good, and it’s hard to remember the last time in which West Ham had a number of moves that at least made some modicum of sense.

And yet, the squad still has obvious major holes. It's hard to see how they’ll be able to cobble up a midfield good enough to amplify their attacking talent, which is a pity in some ways. If they had not done the Yarmolenko deal and had instead used that money to shore up the midfield areas, especially with Manuel Lanzini being out until some time in 2019, the pieces would fit in a cleaner way and West Ham might have seemed like a fun side with serious potential. As it stands, it looks more like a fun team to play on FIFA than one that might seriously contend to finish seventh this season.

The best thing that can be said about West Ham in 2018–19 is that the amount of talent collected this summer and the addition of Manuel Pellegrini gives them a good chance to avoid the pain visited upon them last season, though just how much better they’ll be compared to that low bar is anyone's guess.

 

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Cardiff City. A preview which exists because it must.   So, Cardiff City… Yes, Cardiff. Cardiff City is definitely a team that plays football and that will play 38 Premier League matches this season, which is why we’re here today. The Bluebirds were a grim-but-successful performer in the Championship last season, which bodes somewhat well for their 2019-2020 Championship campaign. Yes, but what about this season? I thought the above largely covered their outlook, but since you insist, I’ll spell it out. Cardiff had a very specific idea of what it wanted to do in the Championship last year, which it successfully implemented. Neil Warnock’s team was difficult to break down defensively while lumping it forward to score just enough goals. It worked. Cardiff had the joint-best defence and scored the sixth most goals, good for the second-best goal difference in the league. Cardiff finished second and were automatically promoted. As I said, mission accomplished. As for the numbers, they completed 59.4 per cent of passes and retained 45.4 per cent of possession over the course of the season. These aren’t inherent failings so much as byproducts of what the team was trying to do. Moreover, while The Bluebirds out-shot their opponents, they were not particularly efficient at turning shots into goals. Of the 24 teams in the Championship, Cardiff was 14th in terms of the percentage of their shots on target that were scored. Couldn’t this work in the Premier League? It’s…not impossible? In fairness to Warnock and Cardiff, the moral valence attached to this kind of football is unfair. Being defensively resolute and scoring enough goals is absolutely a valid strategy, and it’s worked for teams trying to escape relegation. This is a team with a clear idea of what it wants to do and a willingness to stay the course. Cardiff is apparently trying to do what it did last year with the same squad, but against much tougher opposition. At a bare minimum, the case for their survival requires you to believe that Cardiff’s defence will be effective against mid-table teams with genuine attacking talents and the already sketchy goal situation won’t get ugly against interesting defensive sides like Burnley or Newcastle. Results against top-six sides would be bonuses. More to the point, either the attack or defence holding up against tougher competition will likely not be enough. While they were a defensive side, Cardiff succeeded in balancing those facets last year. Crucially, Warnock rarely had to revisit this balance. Cardiff recorded points in 36 of 46 matches (27 wins, 9 draws, 10 losses). They only came from behind to record points six times. Cardiff largely managed to sit back and avoid chasing games. The Bluebirds spent one matchday — the season’s first — outside of the promotion spots last season, and only three other weeks out of the top three in the Championship. To Cardiff’s credit, this was a remarkably smooth promotion campaign. A Premier League campaign — even one that doesn’t lead to relegation — cannot be expected to offer such favourable circumstances. So what happens when Cardiff falls behind? [Gulp] This is why it’s not enough for either Cardiff’s attack or defence to make the leap to the Premier League. If the team just can’t score, it may have to sacrifice some of its defensive solidity to generate goals, at which point it ceases to be good at anything. Conversely, if more defensive work is needed against Premier League sides, the attack could go from adequate to dire in a hurry. The balance of attack and defence needn’t be a zero-sum game — that’s why tactics exist — but Warnock will have to answer tougher questions this season. To his credit, he seems less likely than some managers to overreact to bad results or game states. Staying the course may not, however, remain a wholly viable option. In that respect, the margins for Cardiff are particularly unforgiving. But what if the players improve? That would definitely help! Transposing the Championship’s runner-up into the Premier League would be a less daunting prospect if 18 players on its squad were just, like, 15 percent better this year. I’m being facetious here, but that’s roughly what would be needed to alter the team’s outlook. A non-negligible, squad-wide improvement would take Cardiff from “emphatically relegation-threatened Huddersfield, but worse in just about every way” to “well, they’re navigating the relegation battle.” That’d be a big and crucial leap. So will the players make that big and crucial leap? Some of them might improve? This is not, to be fair, a team entirely devoid of talent. Midfielder Calum Paterson, who led the team with ten goals last season, is 23. Junior Hoilett and Aron Gunarsson are better than when they were last seen in the Premier League. Striker Kenneth Zohore, despite only producing a double-digit goal tally once in his career (the 2016-17 Championship), is not wholly devoid of upside at 24. Sean Morrison is in his prime as a central defender, for whatever that’s worth. I don’t know if these players will come good this season, but they could conceivably prove to be at home in the nether regions of the Premier League. That, I should note, is not the same as saying the squad will make that big and crucial leap. Relegated teams regularly sell players at home in the lower half of the Premier League to teams that have lived to fight another year; their talents, while useful, are no guarantee of safety. The upside here is of a lesser variety than that offered by the other two promoted club. And we still haven’t reckoned with the bulk of Cardiff’s squad! Defensive anchor Sol Bamba, now 33, made 43 starts last season. Fellow defender Bruno Ecuele Manga, 30, was good for 35 starts. Fullback Lee Peltier made 27 starts at age 31. These are not the profiles of players you’d expect to find another gear this season. More broadly, Cardiff’s squad a week before the transfer deadline had an average of 28. Insofar as some players are late bloomers, maybe some of last year’s performances can be sustained. That and everyone staying healthy would count as a good outcome. Very little about Cardiff, however, profiles as a team with tremendous reserves of untapped potential. But I keep hearing about Neil Warnock's vaunted man management... Let's say it's real. I don't know that it is or how, exactly, we'd go about quantifying the Warnock Bounce, but let's just stipulate that he can get more out of these players than many other managers. That still leaves us with a tricky question: Why, if there's more potential for Warnock to unlock, didn't he do it last year? Managerial nous is not a panacea. Even if you’re good at it, there’s only so much you can get out of any player. This is not like a game where a good manager adds +10xp to each player at the start of every season. Cardiff got this far by performing near most of its players’ upper limits. It’s not a knock on Warnock to suggest that he’s unlikely to make a convincing Premier League team out of this bunch. Is help coming in the transfer market? Hardly. Cardiff’s two main acquisitions to date are 23-year-old winger Josh Murphy and 25-year-old attacking midfielder/forward Bobby Reid. Both came from Championship clubs for about £10 million. These are not inherently bad signings. If you believe in the Warnock Bounce, Murphy and Reid are exactly the kinds of players from whom you’d expect him to extract surplus value. Heck, they’re plausible signings even if you don’t fully buy the Warnock hype. But they’re just two players. While they add some more potential and excitement to a squad that needs it, they don’t do much to change its prospects. What, then, is the best-case scenario for Cardiff City? The best-case scenario for any team is winning the Premier League. If you think I’m dumb enough to leave that sentence out after Leicester City, I’m truly hurt. Come on… Okay, a survival season might look something like this. Cardiff opens the season with relatively competitive games against Bournemouth, Newcastle, and Huddersfield. Their defence could plausibly look okay against these teams. The finishing Gods smile on The Bluebirds and they amass six or seven points. (Teams only needed 34 for survival last year.) That hot start cushions the blow of then facing Arsenal and Chelsea. Basically, Cardiff avoids falling into a huge hole early in the season and can therefore largely stick to its guns instead of reinventing itself on the fly. Vincent Tan and his board resist the urge to do anything silly when the team inevitably loses a few games in a row. They also don’t make stupid buys in January. (To its credit, Cardiff has become far less dysfunctional in recent years, so you can almost see this part happening.) A couple other teams have disastrous season and Mark Hughes pulls a Mark Hughes; the gap between Cardiff and its rivals turns out to be smaller than anticipated. Everyone stays healthy. Some hot finishing gives The Bluebirds just enough goals to eke out survival. In this best-case scenario, they end up something like last year’s Huddersfield team: A putatively defensive side that actually conceded plenty of goals, rarely scored, and was wholly happy with the outcome. Will that happen? Probably not. Cardiff is probably going to get relegated. Just think of all the things that have to go perfectly, all the players who have to stay healthy, and all the players who have to improve for them to sneak into 18th. In all likelihood, some of these things will not happen. That will not constitute a personal failing on the part of Warnock or his players. They’ve done well to get this far, but probably don’t have much more to offer.     

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.

To say that the 2017–18 season was a rough one for Southampton would be putting it mildly. An intriguing managerial hire in Mauricio Pellegrino and the smart acquisition of Mario Lemina suggested a decent, if perhaps unspectacular, season. Instead, they had an even harder time scoring goals last season with only 22 goals coming from open play, a paltry return. All of that led to the eventual dismissal of Pellegrino in favor of Mark Hughes, who helped steer the club away from relegation by the end of the season.

So here we are this season, the first since perhaps 2014–15 where the expectations from the general public isn’t for Southampton to compete for a Europa League position. They’ve surprisingly kept hold of Lemina and most of their other core pieces, and have once again spent ample amounts of money in the hope of having a strong squad. On the other hand they handed Mark Hughes, a manager you much rather try and help you steer clear of relegation than build a competitive team, a three year contract.

Metrics

After years of consistency, 2017–18 was the first season where there was a real downturn in Southampton’s numbers. Over the past four seasons, despite the fact that Southampton had three different managers, they always had greater than a 50% share in both traditional shot metrics and expected goal models. For 2017–18, those numbers dipped into the 46–48% range. To put it another way, Southampton went from a team that performed at around the talent level of a Europa League side to one that performed like a middling PL side, which is not a great sign.

The only saving grace for Southampton last season was that hiring Mark Hughes gave them just enough of a managerial boost that they survived relegation, even though you can pick apart at the boost by pointing out that they only took 8 points out of the 8 matches while he was manager. In particular, what was eye opening was that the way Southampton stabilized under Mark Hughes in the short term was in a manner that is just about the antithesis of what Southampton and their fans have wanted the team to play over the years, even more so than what happened under Claude Puel when he got criticized for the style of play. Their play wasn’t easy on the high in the least and resulted in the club having to grind out results through low event matches.

Style of Play

One of the big theme under Mark Hughes was that Southampton had a hard time creating attacks during possession because their spacing was all over the place. Sometimes they would have too many players occupying midfield areas and no one helping connect the play up to the attack. This was especially prevalent when Mario Lemina wasn't playing, as he was more active in trying to get in between the opposition midfield and defense. In the final third, Southampton’s poor spacing came from constantly having no support for the man on the ball in wide areas. Southampton ranked in the top five in percentage of penalty box entries coming from crosses, and in the bottom five in cross completion %. They constantly depended on low quality crosses delivered without any flow or rhythm. When they weren’t crossing the ball, often you’d find a Southampton player in the wide areas with no one to support him in the half space. There would just be acres of space untended, and it would lead to them having to recycle the ball back and look for something else.

One thing Southampton did do well during possession was experiment with using Nathan Redmond in a role similar to how Leicester used Riyad Mahrez last season, an attacking wide player who’s positioned as a pseudo midfielder. Redmond has decent close control in tight space and an ability to create chances for others, and while he hasn’t turned into something more than a league average attacker, perhaps at a better team with some structure in attack he’d be more at home. It’s little sequences like this that hint at him still having room to grow into a good player.

Southampton’s overall attack ranked in the bottom half of the league under Mark Hughes, which isn’t good. What they did do well to make up a little bit for their deficiencies in possession was creating transition opportunities off of their low block. Their midfield had the collective passing ability to make that first pass that got the ball up to the likes of Dusan Tadic and Redmond so they could run at defenses.

For all the ills about Southampton's attack, what helped them maintain their Premier League status was that they performed rather well defensively. They were a team that were fine with giving up possession, even up until the halfway line and allowing the opposition backline to have the ball. They functioned as a team that would soak up as much pressure as possible in the hopes of reducing their opponent shot quality on average, sort of like an imitation of Burnley. Despite the high volume of shots, Southampton gave up an xG/shot of just under 9% from open play, which is a number you would gladly take in a trade off for not being a shot suppression side.

When Southampton were aggressive, it was in their own defensive third through trying to have a numbers advantage off the ball. They weren’t terribly concerned with trying to win the ball back in the opponent’s half, rather they were more content with just retreating back into their own half and setting up shop because they weren’t all that effective in winning the ball higher up the pitch. When the ball was lost in their own third, that was when you would see a greater urgency to regain possession. In the eight games under Mark Hughes, no team in the Premier League underwent more defensive actions in their own third, a stark cry from what happened under Mauricio Pellegrino when they were below league average.

Personnel + Transfers

For years, Southampton were a model club. They turned themselves into a top eight Premier League side in an incredibly quick time span. They were the club who found gems in Scotland (Virgil Van Dijk), Holland (Tadic) and Austria (Sadio Mane). They were the club that consistently outperformed what their wage bill would dictate and sold their key players at just around their peak value. Southampton weren’t perfect, but they largely ran their front office in a sensible manner, which is about all you could ask for from a club that doesn't have the resources to be part of the elite.

That’s not been the case over the past couple of years as Southampton’s hit rate on transfers has been on the decline. In particular, The 2016 summer window may have turned out to be something of a seminal moment for Southampton as they had three opportunities at finding high upside talent with Pierre-Emile Höjbjerg, Sofiane Boufal, and Redmond. All three of these moves were reasonable at the time, but in retrospect they haven’t come close to hitting a home run with any of those moves. Höjbjerg to this point has been around a league average midfielder, which given his fee makes it a fine enough move. Boufal and Redmond were attempts at trying to replicate the value that they got from Mane, but those have been misses to varying degrees. Boufal was someone whose talent was apparent at Lille but who now looks like a poor transfer, which is a major problem considering he’s one of the most expensive transfers in Southampton history. Redmond is someone who still intrigues but at age 24 he's more of an acquired taste than a dependable attacking stud.

Given their struggles in the 2016 summer window, along with the awful panic buy of Guido Carillo, that’s helped create a squad that has no one who tilts the scales in their favor, especially in the attacking end where they just have no dependable outlet. Maybe that changes with some of the players they acquired this window, with Jannik Vestergaard being an accomplished defender at Borussia Mönchengladbach and Mohamed Elyounoussi being another attempt at finding a young wide player who fills the void left by Mane. The only major player who left on a permanent deal was Tadic going to Ajax. At his apex from 2014–16, Tadic was one of the better players in the league but his performance declined noticeably the last two seasons. Maybe it’s age related decline or just not fitting well with previous managers, but he was still their best playmaker and someone who had a good awareness of connecting play during possession via his off-ball movement, and to this point they haven’t really gone and replaced him with someone else.

2018–19 Outlook

Even with the jumbled mess that has become the Premier League below the top six, it’s hard to come up with an argument that Southampton are going to be good for 2018–19. The grind it out football Southampton played in those final eight games probably isn't sustainable through an entire season, in part because teams managed by Mark Hughes previously haven't maintained this level of defensive solidity, and, generic as this may sound, it's genuinely a struggle to see where the goals will come from.

Given Southampton don’t have the greatest squad out there, this is where having a manager who could outperform Southampton’s current squad talent would come in handy but instead of betting on themselves to once again find that person, they settled on keeping Hughes on a three year contract. Hughes got a lot of goodwill from transitioning Stoke from a team that wasn’t fun to watch at the slightest to one that had a little bit more charm during open play, but outside of 2014–15, his Stoke teams routinely got dominated on the shot count in part because they were bad at generating shots. That was bad enough a few years ago, but given the influx of managerial talent at both the top and bottom ends of the table, it stands to reason that Hughes would rank well towards the bottom of the table in terms of coaching talents.

Southampton and their fans should brace themselves for another difficult year. Between the shaky marriage of squad talent and coaching, and deadwood clubs like Swansea, Stoke, West Brom getting replaced by Fulham and Wolves that are both stronger than average promoted sides, it wouldn’t be surprising if Southampton are barely holding their head above water by the time we hit the homestretch of the season.

 

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.

So, Watford. Having front-loaded their drama with the firing of Marco Silva early in the Premier League season, Watford plodded to the sort of 14th-place finish that makes all but the most dedicated fans of the Hornets forget how they got there. Worry not, dear reader, for I am here to tell you that Watford under Javi Gracia has been about as boringly competent as you feared. Let’s dig in, yes?  

Previously On…Watford FC

The 2017-18 version of Watford produced outcomes that were largely in line with its underlying numbers. The team generated 45.45 expected goals in the Premier League, good for 11th overall. On defence, The Hornets conceded 56.02 expected goals, the 16th best tally in the league. The real numbers in both categories — 41 non-penalty goals scored and 58 conceded — hint at a slight under-performance. Nothing in these numbers suggests Watford will continue to diverge from its expected goals going forward. When thinking about the style of play Watford might carry into this coming season, it’s worth focusing on what did and did not change with the appointment of Javi Gracia. The main constant is that Watford defended high up the pitch, especially for a team outside of the top-6, under both managers. The average distance from their own goal of Watford’s defensive actions did not change significantly or in a way that can be separated from happenstance after Gracia’s arrival. Under Silva, this manifested as a sort of eagerness that fans and neutrals can find endearing but usually gets teams of Watford’s size mugged. Without radically changing the team’s basic vision — it still worked relatively high up the pitch and more than the average team on the flanks — Gracia appears to have addressed the team’s susceptibility to being picked off on the counter. The team ultimately conceded fewer counter-attacking shots per 90 minutes (0.61) than the league average of 0.63. The team’s expected goal difference splits, which largely align with Silva’s January departure, also showed an improvement in the second half of the season. Shot suppression was the other notable quirk of Watford’s defence. The team managed to concede nearly 1.5 fewer shots per 90 minutes than the average Premier League side. Taken on its own, that looks good. But Watford only succeeded in conceding fewer low-quality shots than the average team. In all but the lowest value expected goal buckets, the defence was average at best. All of this added up to a team whose average shot conceded had a notably high expected goals value and that still conceded enough shots to allow slightly more expected goals than the average team. It’s an interesting finding, but it doesn’t suggest that Watford has unlocked some secret of the game. Taken as a whole, though, the evidence on offer suggests Javi Gracia was able to turn Watford into a mid-table defensive side without sacrificing its attack. Gracia’s preservation of Watford’s high-ish positioning, while fixing its susceptibility to counters, appears to have been consistent with his offensive vision. Under Marco Silva, Watford generated 2.38 high press shots per 90 minutes compared to a league average of 2.93. Under Gracia, Watford ramped up the high press shots to 3.21 against a league average of 2.95. Gracia’s version of Watford also improved to slightly above average on set piece expected goals. That latter change was less significant and may not mean anything in the long run, but it’s something to at least keep an eye on moving forward. The obvious temptation when discussing Watford’s attack is to focus on the now-departed Richarlison. This is understandable insofar as he accounted for about 20 percent of the team’s shots; the attack did often run through him. All of the Richarlison talk has served to obscure the development of Andre Gray, who produced an expected goals-per-90 average that was indistinguishable from his teammate’s. His expected goals assisted and per-shot numbers were also better. He likely has less upside than Richarlison in the long run, but he gives Gracia something interesting to work with. There are, in point of fact, a fair few interesting pieces to work with on Watford’s squad. Outside of the top six, Roberto Pereyra contributed the most of any player to expected goal buildup. Remaining teammates Tom Cleverley, Abdoulaye Doucouré and Etienne Capoue were all also in the top ten of that list. Cleverley was one of the better players outside of the top six in terms of successful passes in the final third. None of this screams “Shock Title Winner!” but you can see something functional being pieced together with this squad. They could, for instance, provide some service to another forward, but who could that be?  

Transfer Machinations

This is the bit where we talk a bit more about Richarlison, who has gone to Everton for £40 million. That economics of that transfer are now a concern for Toffees. Watford quadrupled its investment in a year, which is good business unless he turns into superstar. In terms of Watford’s coming season, though, it’s unclear how the Brazilian will be replaced. Richarlison registered a modest five goals and four assists in the Premier League last season while drastically underperforming his 12.05 expected goals. If you believe he’ll continue to have finishing problems that render his expected goals illusory, then his contribution is replaceable. Lots of not-very-good players chipped in five goals last season. It is not, however, clear why you’d believe Richarlison is doomed to underperform expected goals as he matures. The transfer fee negotiated by Watford and Everton suggests both clubs agreed Richarlison’s underlying numbers came closer to reflecting his true value. With Watford thus far on track to return last year’s squad, the loss of Richarlison’s potential could be an issue. Recall that the team mildly under-performed its expected goals, but by less than Richarlison’s 7-goal spread. His conversion issues were balanced out by things like Abdoulaye Doucouré scoring nearly twice as many goals as expected and assorted other low-quality chances turning into goals. Those things could happen again, but you wouldn’t bet on them. The prospect of Richarlison becoming as good as his underlying numbers in 2018-19 offered Watford a hedge against possible areas of decline and a source of upside if other things continued to go well. Without his contribution, the margins for Watford are narrower. To date, Watford has largely sat on the Richarlison windfall. If a rumoured  £15 million Cardiff bid for the decidedly washed up and exceedingly replaceable Troy Deeney actually materialized, Watford would do well to take the money. Most of their transfer moves have been the myriad loans and minor deals one can expect from a Pozzo operation. Nordin Amrabat has been dispatched to Saudi Arabia. Gerard Deulofeu, who was previously with the club on a loan has been signed to…run in a straight line or something, I guess? He over-performed his expected goals to tally one goal last season, while mainly taking low quality shots from distance or strange angles. In 2018, one can safely say Gerard Deulofeu is not the answer.  

So About This Coming Season

Javi Gracia’s defensive work with the club is real and encouraging. Over a full season, which would admittedly make for a long managerial tenure by Pozzo family standards, one imagines he could lead the team to something more solid than 16th in expected goals conceded. Most signs point to Watford being decent defensively. The team has more cushion to regress on last year’s mid-table offensive performance, which is probably for the best seeing as life without Richarlison and some fortuitous finishing could be messy. The team’s attack won’t look the same without him taking about 20 percent of the shots, but players like Andre Gray and Roberto Pereyra have upside and at least give Gracia some tactical options. Watford finished last season just ahead of parsimony’s very own Brighton and Hove Albion. Both teams amusingly had the same goal difference (so did chaotic West Ham, because life is funny.) The example of Brighton and Hove Albion is interesting insofar it suggests a team that scored and conceded slightly fewer goals than last year’s Watford could easily end up in roughly the same spot ultimately clear of relegation by a non-negligible margin, but not out of the woods until late in the season. Obviously underlying numbers vary and this year’s Premier League won’t shape up in exactly the same way, but it’s not the worst heuristic for thinking of the 2018-19 edition of Watford FC. The team’s upside is not high enough to expect big things or rule out relegation, but its downside risk is limited. Watford, in other words, could be a different proposition this year, and it might not change anything at all.     

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.

As the resident Portuguese writer, I was summoned to provide you with a Wolverhampton preview - one of two international teams in the Premier League this season, alongside Welsh side Cardiff City. And with that obvious joke out of the way we should get down to business. Especially since Wolves aren't playing around: they might just be the team to watch out for in the Premier League this season. They are the most powerful side to come out of the Championship in recent memory. It's not only their current player and managerial quality but also their project for the future - this is a side looking to get into Europe sooner rather than later and it'll be fascinating to watch how they adapt to the top tier.  

Style of Play

Ex-Porto and Valencia manager Nuno Espirito Santo set up his side in a 3-4-3, shifting from a 5-4-1 without the ball all the way to a 3-2-5 when creating offensively. Conor Coady was the key piece in the tactical set-up since Nuno converted the English midfielder to a ball-playing central center back role. All three defenders need ability on the ball, as Wolves try to consistently control matches, but Coady’s ability to act as almost a third midfielder was important. The midfield duo was primarily tasked with defensive work, making up for two very attacking wing-backs. They made the team difficult to break down through the center, constantly ready to win the ball back and verticalize with their passing – often towards space out wide. The wing-backs provided width in a very offensive role – often turning the side into a 3-2-5 on the opposition half. The front-trio always maintained a lot of mobility, with either two inside forwards – freely moving between the half-spaces and getting into finishing positions in the box – alongside a central striker acting as the focal point of the team, or just three mobile forwards. The former version is what we’re likely going to see more often in the Premier League since they added an extra striker in the summer. Their usage of a striker with good hold-up play, who can win duels and provide for his teammates ends up benefiting the rest of the attackers. Nuno is adamant in his quest against sterile possession so despite Wolves being a team who dominated most games on the ball, they’re always striving for verticality (having a great passer like Ruben Neves in midfield helps) and aren’t against overcoming opposition lines by going longer: either for the striker to hold on to or for the space in the channels. This makes them a pretty strong counter-attacking side as well, seeing as they’re very organized when dropping down to a 5-4-1 shape and have the wide personnel to quickly threaten space in behind the opposition. This ability to shape-shift is the most exciting thing about their Premier League prospects, since from a tactical stand-point they’ll be relatively comfortable both sitting deeper against stronger sides and controlling against a good portion of teams as well.  

What’s New

Starting with the outs, Benik Afobe was moved on to Stoke for a tiny profit after six goals last season, while center back Roderick Miranda went to Olympiakos on loan after being a rotational option in his position in the last campaign. But the big, unexpected, outgoing transfer was Barry Douglas’s move to Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds back down in the Championship. He led the team in assists with 14 and in accurate crosses per 90 with two, and was a key part of Wolves’ offensive set-up both from open play as well as from set-pieces, where he excels. They ended up making a small profit on the Scottish 28-year-old, but I’m not sure his replacement has helped justify his exit. Jonny Castro arrived on a season-long loan from Atletico, who had just acquired him for €7 million. Jonny is much better defensively than Douglas, as well as a better ball-carrier but hasn’t ever really played in a back-5 and doesn’t offer nearly as much punch in the final third. They’re different fullback types and the team will have to adapt. In other leftback news, talented 19-year-old left-back Ruben Vinagre, who got around 600’ on loan last season, has now been fully acquired from Monaco. He was an important piece for a Portugal side that just won the U19 Euro and will be the second man in his position at the club. Perhaps bringing in Jonny for just a season is an attempt to give Vinagre the starting spot sooner rather than later. He's a top prospect, but asking a player so young to develop that quickly is optimistic at best. Rui Patrício was brought in to upgrade the keeper position. Portugal’s best player in their run to win Euro 2016 and arguably the best goalkeeper outside the top five leagues, he was Sporting’s starter for 10 years and is still only 30. While what is demanded of a goalkeeper in a dominant team is different to what is asked of one in a less controlling side, he’s succeeded with a National Team that has a defensive mindset and just had a very David De Gea at United like season with Sporting, saving them often from their defensive woes – so he should be able to adjust to the change in circumstances without too much problem. Although he technically moved on a free, Sporting has filed an official complaint to FIFA, meaning Wolves could still have to eventually pay a to be determined transfer fee for him. In defese, Willy Boly’s deal was made permanent from FC Porto after a good campaign as the team’s left center back. While in midfield, 31-year-old João Moutinho was added from Monaco. He's a very technical, experienced midfielder who will partner will with Neves. Moutinho will perhaps have to be more proactive defensively than usual but he’s very good from a positional stand-point and will offer plenty of control on the ball. Romain Saiss will, therefore, be dropped from the position he played in last season. He was a center back for Morocco at the World Cup and he’ll probably compete with Ryan Bennett for the right center back spot, as well as provide midfield depth. That said, it's possible the team will bring in reinforcements for one or both positions. Their midfield seems particularly thin, as behind Moutinho and Neves and Saiss the next man up is 18 year old Morgan Gibbs-White. A potential loanee who come in to handle 1000 minutes or so would make sense to round out the unit. Further ahead, Diogo Jota’s deal was also made permanent for only €14 million which is huge. He’ll be in constant rotation for the inside forward spots, alongside the other Portuguese attackers Ivan Cavaleiro and Helder Costa. Brazilian striker Bonatini was also brought in permanently after 12 Championship goals last campaign, but he’ll have competition from Mexican international Raul Jimenez. On loan from Benfica, Jimenez is a good box focused striker who was never able to grab a hold onto the starting spot in Portugal but always produced coming off the bench – which is why his per 90 stats are so eye popping (2.2 open play key passes; 3.8 shots in the penalty area). It’ll be interesting to see if he still excels off the bench in England or if he’ll have a starting role. Regardless, both strikers offer the hold up play that the system requires to thrive.  

Season Projection

From a talent perspective, this Wolves team – in full force – is clearly a top 10 team. Patrício and Moutinho’s additions offer a step-up in both positions, while Neves and Jota are more than talented enough to play for top teams. Nuno is also a pretty adaptative manager, which bodes well for their ability to shape up differently (and effectively) against the top six and the rest of the teams. Looking at last seasons’ “best of the rest”, no team had Wolves’ ability to control matches and tear through opponents. While the difference in quality between them and their opponents is much smaller (if even existent) when compared to their Championship campaign, they’re systemically prepared to be grab a hold of the ball and be controlling. Whether that ends up being a good thing or not is yet to be seen – perhaps there’s an intrinsic reason why sides like Burnley and Allardyce’s Everton did so well –, but at least we’ll witness less of the pattern-less games we often watch between lower table teams. That said, the team is slim at the moment and the difference in quality between the starting eleven and the other options is sizeable. They'll need to avoid injuries to hit their full potential. But, if things go well this is a side that’s ready to finish in the top 10 in their first campaign back in the Premier League, a great building block for a project that will be looking to achieve more and more over the next few seasons.  

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.   Header image courtesy of the Press Association

It came so close to perfection.

But for a particularly tragic 90 minutes in which Mohamed Salah picked up an early injury and Loris Karius made some unfortunate, perhaps even concussion influenced, mistakes, Liverpool could have won the Champions League. One game could have made everything sunshine and rainbows, and the world would be talking about Jürgen Klopp’s side as a truly elite side perhaps even on par with Manchester City., Realistically speaking they aren’t that good though, so at least the defeat created some more realistic expectations. That said, Liverpool are really quite good, so the expectation bar for this season remains quite high.

Manchester City’s historic 100 point season had a distorting effect on the rest of the Premier League. They were so far ahead of the pack at just about everything that a distant second was the best anyone could hope for. Liverpool managed to be second in raw shots per game both for and against, second in expected goals conceded, third (behind Tottenham by a hair) in xG created, and second in xG difference. The strong defensive numbers are perhaps the most significant here, with an area of long term struggles slowly getting fixed over the course of the season. When looking at the trendlines, we can see how Liverpool gradually became more solid as the year went on.

 

 

Virgil van Dijk’s signing is easy to look to as a pivotal turning point here, and while he clearly had a positive impact, the improvement started before his arrival. In the first nine games of the season, culminating in the embarrassing 4-1 away defeat to Tottenham, Liverpool conceded 11.35 expected goals, or 1.26 xG per game. In the next 29 games , the side conceded 19.35 xG, a much more pleasing 0.67 per game. It’s possible that this is just random variance, and some bad performances just happened to come earlier in the season, but there’s a decent chance this reflects a genuine improvement.

On the attacking end, the numbers did take a hit, generating 2.01 xG per game for the first 19 games of the season but just 1.56 for the second half. Perhaps that this is just the trade-off for being more solid defensively, and since there was a net gain, it’s worth it. Alternatively, there is the elephant in the room of one Philippe Coutinho. When you sell a star attacking midfielder and buy an expensive centre back, the likeliest scenario is that of course your attack gets worse and your defence improves. The late season injury to Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and consistent fitness problems of Adam Lallana probably also didn’t help in this sense, as it forced Klopp to play three of Jordan Henderson, James Milner, Emre Can and Gini Wijnaldum, none of whom offer a lot in terms of attacking ball progression.

(It is worth noting here that Liverpool did put in some big attacking performances after the Coutinho sale in the Champions League knockout stages. The small sample size of knockout tournament football makes it difficult to accurately gauge the significance of this, but we can’t rule out the possibility that Liverpool’s best attacking games just happened to occur here and perhaps this season they will occur in the Premier League.)

Obviously Mohamed Salah fueled Liverpool’s attack, managing to hit the joint 38 game Premier League record of 31 goals including just one penalty. There was a touch of the finishing pixie about this, only managing to generate 20.55 expected goals, though we do have some evidence that he may be an above average finisher. Even if he does regress, though, around 20 goals would still be an excellent return for a wide forward who also offers a lot in terms of dribbling and link-up play, so there shouldn’t be an overreaction if his goalscoring comes down a touch (though of course there will be, because it’s the internet).

 

 

As for how Liverpool go about things, it’s well established that Klopp is an advocate for an aggressive counter press. Liverpool’s high press probably isn’t quite as complete as City’s (who seem to shut down everything in the final third of the pitch to the extent that they really don’t have a lot to do elsewhere), but it’s still impressive to look at.

 

 

Unsurprisingly Roberto Firmino was the most aggressive presser in the side. His 22.31 pressures per 90 is well ahead of any other striker at a top six Premier League side, and more than double the figures of Harry Kane (9.64) and Romelu Lukaku (10.47). Whether this makes up for his mediocre 9.26 expected goals all season is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s impossible to understate the work he does to trigger Liverpool’s pressing both as a defensive tactic and in order to launch fast attacks in transition.

 

 

Elsewhere, Andy Robertson finally showed that it is possible to be a specialist left back for Liverpool without constantly embarrassing yourself, while youngsters Trent Alexander-Arnold and Joe Gomez both did solid work on the opposite side. The aforementioned Van Dijk quickly established himself as the side’s key centre back, though neither Dejan Lovren nor Joël Matip provided enough reasons to be the obvious partner to him. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s injury, which rules him out of the entirety of this season, is particularly unfortunate given how important he was in terms of the side’s pressing and ball progression last year. Sadio Mané remains a strong all-round wide forward.

Someone particularly of note from an analytics perspective might be Dominic Solanke. Despite just one goal and one assist last season, the 20 year old striker generated 3.59 expected goals and assisted another 2.6, contributing to the best xGChain per 90 in the Liverpool squad. It must be stressed that 7.3 90s is a very small sample size, but should the Law of Ibrahimovic hold, there’s a good chance this could be a breakout season for Solanke.

 

 

In terms of incomings, Naby Keïta is the standout name, finally arriving from RB Leipzig after the deal was agreed last summer. StatsBomb has been singing Keïta’s praises for a few years now, so we’ll keep it relatively short this time. Keïta’s ability to dribble through a congested midfield is among the best in the world, while he still manages to contribute in terms of goals and assists in the final third as well as working hard defensively. He’s great. With Liverpool’s midfield options generally being more functional than fun (an even greater problem with Oxlade-Chamberlain’s injury), the Guinean should bring a different midfield flavour to the side.

Elsewhere, Fabinho should be solid as an eased in replacement for the injury prone Jordan Henderson as well as an immediate successor to the departed Emre Can., One concern is that Fabinho’s skillset leaves midfield a little light on passing and  earlier links to Jorginho and Ruben Neves imply that perhaps Liverpool settled on him after failing to acquire a more nimble ball mover. With the side already having a plethora of hard working, busy midfielders, Fabinho is perhaps too similar to others already in the side. Nevertheless, he should be capable of putting in solid work and playing a lot of minutes without too much trouble.

The crown jewel of Liverpool’s summer business is Roma goalkeeper Alisson Becker. While Karius’s Champions League final performance brought this position under the microscope, the irony is that the goalkeeper position finally looked to be fixing itself before his untimely horrorshow. Since Karius took over goalkeeping duties from Simon Mignolet midway through last season, Liverpool conceded 13 non-penalty goals from 11.24 expected goals, well within the range of normal variance. This is somewhat of a blip, though, and the data available on goalkeeping suggests that Liverpool have conceded more than they should have for a number of seasons now. Alisson has not yet played a huge amount of high level football, but what we have seen from him suggests he will be a significant upgrade. He also rates very well in terms of his distribution, an aspect of the game neither Mignolet (who preferred to be a more conventional shot stopper who would just kick it up the field) or Karius (more comfortable stepping out with the ball at his feet, but never especially good at it) ever impressed in. The pricetag of £66.8 million may well have been an overpay, but it is understandable why the deal was done, and he should prove a decent enhancement.

The £13.75m purchase of Xherdan Shaqiri came as a surprise to many, and as James Yorke has written for StatsBomb, this looks to be a reasonable gamble:

 

“The first thing to note is that this is quite obviously a percentage play depth signing. The price of around £13.75 million is cheap by comparison to most in today’s market and for that you’re getting a vastly experienced international player who is amazingly still just 26 years old. ...More squad depth will do no harm, and the bottom line is that Liverpool are covering some areas that they are slightly lacking with Shaqiri. There’s quite a lot of player in there for your £13.75 million.”

 

Shaqiri seems like an obvious attempt to deal with the problem of losing Mohamed Salah half an hour into a Champions League final and having nobody similar to replace him with. Surprisingly, Shaqiri’s one preseason friendly appearance so far has come as the most advanced player in a midfield three, a position he has the raw tools to play, though he may be wanting in terms of work rate and general understanding of the role. It is promising, though, that he seems to have the versatility to do this, especially when the deal for Nabil Fekir, a specialist in that role, fell through.

The failure to get the Fekir deal over the line feels important considering it looks as though nobody else of his profile will be brought in. This is a strategy Liverpool have employed in the past, with the club opting to sign no centre back last summer and wait for Virgil van Dijk rather than bring in a lower priority target. It is possible that Fekir, or someone else not currently available, will be signed in the next twelve months and Liverpool’s patience in the market will pay off. For the time being, however, there are concerns over the lack of a clear attacking midfielder since the sale of Coutinho. The Brazilian's value in terms of creative passing are well known, and his 3.41 open play passes into the box per 90 remain totally unmatched by anyone in the current squad. Klopp’s belief in using the counter press as a playmaker is well known, but it would have been nice to have an actual human playmaker to complement the tactical one. Adam Lallana’s return to fitness does provide more of a passing option in midfield, but he’s not Coutinho, and it is unclear how reliable he’ll be post injury.

 

 

Concerns about creative passing aside, Liverpool are in the best position they’ve been for several years. Long term defensive issues are gradually being eased while the side increasingly has a squad capable of challenging in multiple tournaments. The scale of spending has been significant, attracting a lot of attention in both a positive and negative sense, and that it has been primarily on peak age players tells a story in itself. This is a squad increasingly coming into its prime, and expectations are higher than ever. It is very difficult to make a case that any team other than Manchester City should be favourites to win the league title, but of the chasing pack, Liverpool may be best placed to put pressure on Pep Guardiola’s side and even capitalise if things take an unexpected turn.

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Thank you for reading. More information about StatsBomb, and the rest of our season previews can be found here.