and welcome to the Double Piffy, the world's most agreeable, Sotter Alex podcast. I am Michael Kaley. We are coming to you heading into a all cups week. We got the League Cup, we got the FA Cup.
So of course, it's not about the Premier League because we got a little bit of a break. We got a little bit of a chance to take stock. And the Premier League table is pretty weird. And what was really interesting to be to start putting together our numbers in advance of this, we found broadly that the Premier League table is mostly weird because the expectations that most of us had, they are often included, clearly most of us, had coming into the season, have in a number of cases not been born out by real team performances, leading to an unusually shaped Premier League table.
So we thought we'd talk at Peru. I am joined by Mike Goodman. How are you looking forward to not having any Premier League on the schedule for a bit? I am very excited about the League Cup semi-finals on Paramount Plus, baby.
The music here on the way is, well, there's please don't try to make as happy as podcast or speechy that comes like Double Piffy. Lots of fun stuff going on in Discord. We are looking at an extended riff on Lee Child's books. Well, there are a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of reach of fun going on in the book channel.
Anyway, yeah, that's something at the table. It's sort of weird because like, usually there are two possibilities and they don't meet. One possibility is like a team is in a weird place in the table and you look at their numbers and you're like, oh, ha ha, that's nothing. It's weirdness from differing from XG and it will probably go away or less to win the title one or the other.
You know, and then the other possibility is, oh wow, that's real. Like they're there, they are what their underlying numbers suggest. And where did that come from? And is it like, do we believe this or not?
And then we do the analysis. And there's like a bunch of teams right now that are sort of in the middle of that Venn diagram in which like, there is something very real about some performances, Norwich, Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, Fulham. I think of the three teams I was zero in on. And then like any other direction, there's something very real going on in their performances.
But also the position in the table is somewhat exaggerated and quirky and a little bit odd, even based, even taking into that into account is how I'm thinking about the table right now. You can sort of pull off the two ends of the table. The fact that Southampton is at the very bottom and Liverpool and Arsenal at the very top, that is like what the numbers show, the gap that our Liverpool have opened up in goal difference, in points, in expected goal difference, if you adjust for red cards, if you adjust to just 11 to the 11, what you find is Liverpool are a very small amount, have been a very small amount better than Arsenal. And sure other systems could find a slightly differently, you could do different kinds of adjustments, but there's not much of a gap at the time.
But there is a really big gap between Liverpool and Arsenal and the rest of the table. And so if you say, well, in the real world, Arsenal did get those red cards, and so they're somewhat further behind Liverpool and somewhat closer to the rest of the table, that's it, that's just simple, that's easy. And the team at the bottom of the table chair. And that's what's reflected in the X-G, too.
I mean, there's nothing surprising there, right? Liverpool are reflected in the X-G as an excellent team. Arsenal is a very, very good team, and then you can make those adjustments and if they're closer together than that. And then it's Chelsea, and like it's just clearly Chelsea.
And I think Chelsea have been a little bit weird in the path they've taken to being clearly the third best team in the Premier League, I think, in that they started off and we had questions, and then they were very, very good for a while, and now they've sort of followed off of that peak in their performances, but they're like a very big throw in the average team, I think. And you throw it all in the average and you get, yeah, like they're the third best team in the Premier League, but somewhat behind the top two, like there's a clear gap. Yeah, and so we'll do it more about Chelsea pockets. Now, the thing that I could say to this is what you say, obviously, Chelsea are the next best, but in fact, Bournemouth are plus 14.6 expected gold difference.
They are third in the expected gold difference table on FBRF. They are closer to Arsenal at Newcastle's in there, too. And so shouldn't the story here really be that Bournemouth are one of the very best teams in the Premier League? Yes, no, the XG oversees it slightly because of penalties.
It only takes it a lot because of penalties. They have a plus five penalty difference. That's huge, just the penalty difference. It takes them below Chelsea, that's it.
Right, yeah, yeah, but that leaves them fourth. And then on top of that, they have also been quite fortunate with red cards in their matches, like the other like two XG benefit from red cards. You take a strip, all of that out, they are much closer to like Man City than they are to Chelsea. Right, that's like maybe six for Bournemouth.
And this is what we're talking about, right? Like that's kind of wild. Bournemouth are about even with Man City in my numbers. Now, saying that before the season, right, like the story here, I mean, we've tracked this a bunch, but like the big reason the table looks so weird is that Man City are not at the top of it.
And Man City are actually like in a table position that reflects the quality of their play. Just like everybody else on this table, it's been a little weird because Man City's results have been worse than their underlying performances, probably for the past two months. But their underlying performances have gotten markedly worse. And where they've ended up in the table with like results that have probably been somewhat worse than justified is about where they are.
They spent a little bit of time early in the season running hot compared to their own house. We were talking very early in the season about how City did not look as good. City did not look like the best team in the Premier League, but they were getting the results, so maybe who cares? Yes.
And then that's, you know, it's regressed to me and they've been worse than expected after being better than expected and that's how everything works. Naturally. So I think we should probably talk a little bit about, you know, if you look at the XG table, you would, but on penalty XG table, you'd have Bournemouth and Newcastle third and fourth. If you look at adjusted tables, maybe you have them behind Chelsea, but you have them even with Man City.
And like a big story, one of the big stories here is that Bournemouth and Newcastle are very, very much in the fight for a Champions League place. And they would be, I hate that word, deserving. It would not feel flooky to their performances for either one of them to play this well for the second half of the season ends, or both, and secure Champions League. So we've talked a bunch about Bournemouth.
We really haven't talked about Newcastle in a long time. Yeah, so Newcastle, also, like, the stats have gone shooting up in the last six weeks. They have been absolutely on fire. I think you could probably argue there's a case here that it's just, Alex Zentberg, Esak is healthy and he's very good.
Yeah, Esak has been absolutely fantastic. Esak is having a superstar season for that. And that makes a big difference. And then on top of that, they have been actually playing their plans starting to fenders sometimes.
That helps. Sven Botman is now back. Yeah. Their schedule has been pretty bifurcated.
Like, the first quarter of the season was significantly more difficult than the second quarter of the season. So when you look at the swings in the numbers, you could probably do with some smoothing of that out and it would feel a little less dramatic. Exide it. They beat the absolute crap out of Leicester City, and it's a challenge.
They have the chance. They also beat up Aston Villa, and they, like, were deserved widders against United and Tottenham? No, sir. Absolutely.
No, like, I think there's a tendency when a team goes through a hot stretch to overstate how you're downplaying it. Like, you know, you want to be able to acknowledge that yes, this is a relatively weak part of the schedule for Newcastle, and you want to be able to, like, put that into your mental model without dismissing the hot stretches there for meetings. Because it's not. Like, they've been playing extremely well.
They have, as we were saying, they're good players on the field at the same time. They have a distinctive style, which, like, it's really funny to me that, like, we talked three years ago about what's gonna happen when everybody else realizes that Newcastle are good. And kind of what's happened is when Newcastle get a lead, they play like they're not good. Not that they play badly, but that they play in a style that you would expect in underdog to play in if they found themselves having a lead.
I don't know quite what to make of that, exactly. Like, stylistically, it's extremely unique. I'm not sure it's bad. Like, I don't think that they're letting teams back into games in ways that they shouldn't be.
But it is kind of wild to watch a team that, early, like, when they're chasing a game at either strikes when they're trying to score, is clearly very good with the ball. Very good in possession. Very good at working chances for themselves. Like, turn into these without the ball, like, defend full Dark Arts-type stuff to kill off games.
And, like, they didn't do a good job of it against Tottenham, for example. They often do a good job of it against bad teams. They really do a good job of it. Like, there is something to be said for the idea of, we have a lead against teams that do not excel at chasing a game.
We're going to let them chase the game because they're bad at. And we will be good defensively. Like, there's like a legitimate line of thought tactically there. But you don't usually seem to do it.
Newcastle are, this season, playing just another version. It's very much in line with the way they've played under Eddie Howe for quite a while. And this is the new style Eddie Howe, not the way he played when he was at Bournemouth. His Bournemouth teams had a lot of nothing possession and gave up the ball and gave up high quality chances.
And it's amazing, like, you can see some of the ideas there but how much they flipped in emphasis. This Newcastle team, they do have a fair amount of possession, but as Mike is saying, they use that possession to kill games or they use that possession to attack quickly. They don't build slowly ever. They're never slowly squeezing another team with possession.
They're either killing off the game or they're trying to get into some kind of transition opportunity and they spend a ton of time happily defending without the ball, which Bournemouth never did. It's just a complete change from the way that he played at Bournemouth, in that sense. And when they are at their best, it is when they are playing a transition style. When they are either getting the ball to move it quickly, when they are pressing high, and they turn that press on and off.
This leads to a team that is sort of middling in possession and middling in opposition possession. But it is that way not because they're sort of constantly at the middle of the dial, but because they're always at one side of the dial. They're always either pressing very high and making life hard for you or they're sitting back and they go between the two of those. You know, there's something to be said for, like, looking around at your peer group and being like, okay, like, what is the thing they are not doing that we can do, that we can recruit talent to, like, fill in that gap, that we can create competitive advantages for ourselves?
And it helps career looks a little bit like that, right? I'm not sure how intentional it is or not. I think Kyle was very good at feeling his way through things that work. And I mean, I think, you know, I used to sort of joke about him at Bournemouth as being like a cut rate or some anger.
He seemed to just sort of, like, figure out the best possession stuff for his team over the course of a season and sort of like make it work. And he's like, done that again with Newcastle. Again, it's exaggerated a lot by the schedule, but like the sort of weird bifurcated system, it's not exactly how they were successful two years, three years ago, two years ago at Newcastle, right? When they were just sort of much more, like, they still wanted to counterattack, but they were just much more like willing to, like, there wasn't a lot of defensive possession really, but they were a great counterattack team.
And so this weird bifurcated system has come about as teams have been like, oh, right, you're good. So like, you know, it's an adjustment to the adjustment. It's working. And the other part of it that is working is they are making, they are getting gimareish into better and better positions, because like, gimareish is, this team is the Alexander Isak and Bruno Gimareish team.
Bruno Gimareish has, there's only one player on the team who has even half as many progressive passes as he does this season. And you know, look, they can do that with gimareish because they have tonality now and because tonality is finally playing every game basically. And so he can play deeper, I don't think he's been like, great by any games, but he is a competent, secure passer, okay, defender who can play deeper than gimareish and get into better positions. And then without the ball be supported by gimareish and you don't lose anything.
Exactly. It's very clever the way they found a job for tonality that works with his limitations. Making it into a useful regular in a good 11 is a good piece of magic. It means it wasn't a great business, but hey, that's why you get a good manager.
The other thing that we've, the other big part of this, because Tally is not letting you move the ball forward. And so you would want gimareish at the base of the field to move the ball forward if you don't have any other answers for that. And I think this was a question we had for a while because they were so dependent on here in trivia. Here in trivia was the main way they moved the ball forward.
And like the Lewis Hall signing has turned out fantastic. Yeah, that's really good call. Lewis Hall is now just giving them here in trivia performances without being a defensive sift. I don't think the other have the final ball that Trippier did, but in build up, they are able to depend on him to move the ball forward in situations where he might just taking up or attacking positions.
It just solves the problem. And this is just like figuring stuff like this out just is what anyhow is. And as a positive, that's the way he works at his best. It's like, you know, here are the pieces I have, let's figure out how they fit together.
And yeah, I think that the Lewis Hall transfer from Chelsea is like a really underrated part of what is making this system work. Much more than I think Tonalia. Yeah, no, look, I think we're spending a lot of time talking about this and this team is exceedingly mediocre if he succes down for about a half. Yeah, like that's just sort of like, these are all really, really nice things.
But like, he's like, there were times when you talk about a striker and you're like, well, he's mediocre because the team, he's honest and getting him enough chances. And isn't doing enough to feature him. And if he was on a better team, he'd be getting more chances and you'd see how good he is. I think if you put somebody who was not Isaac on top of this new castle team, that is how you would describe a lot of players.
He's like sitting on top of the team putting up unbelievably stupendous numbers because he is really, really good. And so I think that it's interesting here to talk about Bournemouth as well because Bournemouth are even more extreme than new castle in their, we only wanna play in transition. Bournemouth don't have the defensive possession gear so much. Which is odd because that's one of the things that Iriola was known for.
And his adjustment this season has become even more pronounced than it was last season. We did a podcast right around the time that Bournemouth went from being one of the worst teams in the league to being pretty good. And the big change was they were just kicking it along all the time. And they have leaned even further into that this season.
And they built from midfield never at this point. I love this because I think it is such a clear example of like how we talk about a manager's strengths versus what a manager's strengths are. And Iriola in Spain did a tremendous job of exploiting mediocre Spanish defenses in a particular way. And what he was doing was these guys are not athletic.
And so, we can play a lot in midfield as a means to getting behind them because they cannot rock cover. We can pass the ball around and move them around and then get in behind. And if we do it with the right height of player movement, we can exploit their lack of athleticism. He comes to Premier League and it is obvious quite quickly that you cannot exploit Premier League teams for being on athletic.
And it takes him about a month and a half. And what we see now is he's exploiting Premier League teams desire for control. That he is exploiting this moment in the Premier League where they want five guys, they wanna keep the ball, they wanna control the center. And he's like, F that, you guys can all congregate in the center.
We're gonna go long and wide is the thing. I mean, I think it's like, it's easy to say like, we go long, I think you, but it is very distinctive that they play into wide areas. They play into wide areas. And then from those sort of like extended elbows, they attack the middle.
And it is like, if that's the area that you, good teams wanna give up, we will exploit that area. That is what they do. They have so many players who are good at receiving out wide. Watara and Semenia are the most obvious ones, but Clybert can do it.
And I think importantly, Kirk has gives them an outlet from full back as well. So they're attacking from a number of different angles. And it's just all, how do we win? Eventually the ball turns over.
We have those runners going and we have ways of getting the ball to them. It's not like, it's easy to describe that first time, but then you watch the games and the number of different ways that they run those out. The passes is very creative and complex. And I would love to see someone like really sort of take some time to work out exactly the way that Bournemouth have become the best, one of the best teams in the Premier League come at a Champions League contender in the Premier League by playing the most long passes in the Premier League.
That's how they do it. They have played the most long passes in the Premier League this season. And that strategy as their dominant strategy has them in Champions League contention. It's pretty wild, to be honest.
And the other way that this is really different, right, is that like, usually, if I tell you, okay, an unexpected team is playing a lot of long balls and they are doing really, really well, you say, oh, okay, they've got a really strong defense. And then they are like counter attacking a little bit and it's enough and on balance, it's making them good. That's not what Bournemouth is. Bournemouth are the best attacking teams in the Premier League and they are pretty mediocre defensively.
So like, what they are doing is clearly like, explaining things, which is the common thread, right, of Ariel's career from Spain to now, is that like, we take our players and we figure out ways to exploit collectively the defenses in the League area. And that's still what they're doing. But it's through like, very clearly like, love us. They played nearly 1,500 long balls this season.
Everton have played almost as many, good for Everton. Like, if we were, I think that a lot of people coming into the podcast, they're gonna say, we're gonna sing the praises of a team that is beating up the Premier League with long balls. We'd be talking about Nottingham Forest. Nottingham Forest have played a below average number of long passes this season.
Like, and Nottingham Forest are, you know, Bournemouth are one of the best attacking teams in the Premier League after the big two. Nottingham Forest are a really bad attacking team. And this is why the table is lying to you a little bit about Nottingham Forest. Yeah, so should we talk about forest here?
They're third of the table. They are only behind Arsenal on goal difference. But I have them eighth in my rankings and like, that's just like, we're the expected goals difference has them. It's just that simple.
Outplaying expected goals by a few goals. And on top of that, like, if you just start the table like goal difference, that would put them in six. So, they're six plays by goal difference, eight plays by expected goal difference, eight plays by adjusted expected goal difference. And they've gotten lots of points.
I don't know. They're a weird team to talk about because they are so much better than I expected them to be. Right? I mean, I think we both thought they were like, relegation candidates coming into the season.
Not the most likely group, but you know, the group that like, it wouldn't take much to go badly for them to get relegated. We have them at the top of the relegation room. Yeah. And they are so much better than that.
But to talk about them in relation to the table is to talk about why they're not nearly as good as they're positioning the table. And so, like, what I want to be doing is singing the praises of Nuno's team, which is like an incredibly, like everything I said that you would expect born with to be. Like, that's what, not like, not even if they're an incredibly well-organized defensive team that has very little possession that just enough counter-attacking to get it done. And like, that has taken a team that was like on the verge of relegation in the relegation battle to being a league average Premier League team.
But that's what they are. They're a little bit better than the average. And then they've run the hot to end up in third. They really have conceded tied for the second fewest goals, third fewest expected goals in the league.
And this is a team that was not a good defensive team at all until Nuno took over last season, when Nuno took over last season, they became a pretty good defensive team. They have remained. Like I said, early in the season, when they were playing as one of the three best defensive teams in the league, I was like, look, they're gonna get worse than this defensively. And they haven't yet.
They are now halfway through a season as one of the best defensive teams in the league. And I think that speaks really, really well of Nuno as a manager. Yeah, I mean, like, look, it's not like, what Nuno does is not exciting, right? It's very, very old school.
But there's often times, especially when you talk about teams that are good, so you spend a lot of time talking about them, this idea that like, and I used to have this argument about choosing the arena screen all the time. They're like, oh, anybody can just play defensively. It's easy. And opting to do it when you could do other things is like a cop out.
No, it's really, really hard to play defense well. Just like, it's really hard to attack well. And Nuno has turned that into a very good defensive team. They've also just got like Chris Wood scored a lot of goals.
Right. And I think that like, in terms of the board and the story being that Iriola has adjusted to what's been given to him, I think that the Nuno, sorry to me, and maybe this is unfair, Nuno, maybe if you asked him questions, he'd have a lot more to say than this. It feels like Nuno just happened to be really well set up to deal with the Numa. Because when you are a very defensive team, like setting up a team to defend well against possession, attacking, you know, that's hard.
But setting up a team so that they somehow never get counter-attacked, they never are defending transition. No one's good at defending transition. No one's good at defending transition. Noting them for us are never defending in transition.
And the entire new meta of top level football that you see, not just the very best team, but many of the lower level teams also trying to execute is that you will not defend that, not attack that much from settled possession. And instead, you will sort of wait around for transition opportunities, that's your main thing. Or you will try to create those transition opportunities early in possession. And Nuno teams don't let those two things happen.
And I think that this really pretty standard, obviously very well executed, but pretty standard version of a pretty standard tactic is suddenly extremely well tailored to the Numa of the Premier League. And that's why I think that Nuno, noting for us, are probably going to remain a good team. I would have bet early in the season that they were going to be coming somewhat bad team because the defensive performance was not gonna pick up. So the attacking for us gets them into the Champions League, but I think this works, and it works at a surprisingly high level.
Yeah, I think that that's right. I can't help it. I need to go back to Bournemouth because I forgot to give you my really great staff here. Oh, fabulous.
So if you look at the number of passes attempted in the Premier League, Bournemouth are fourth from the bottom. They have attempted 7,701 passes. Everton, Nottingham Forest, and Ipswich Town have attempted fewer. Would you like to guess where they write and pass into the attacking third?
Oh, that's good. They're like top third, top third. Number one. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, incredible.
They have attempted 1,156 passes into the attacking third, which tops Chelsea who are in second with 1,140, and Manchester City who are third. Also, and then I will wrap up my little board in this field, they are tied for first in a number of crosses play with 449. Now, would you like to guess where they're tied with? And this will bring us to maybe the next team we're going to talk about?
Is it Tottenham? It's Fulham. Fulham. Marco Silva's Fulham.
But Marco Silva's Fulham is another team that is... No, no, it does actually play much for us. Yeah. They're third before 28, and I just think it's a function of having so much to ball.
They just have so much to ball in those areas, and not players who play. And I think a lot of things that are like on the border between cutback and cross and up in that bucket, when you look at the numbers and aggregate. And so, Fulham are in ninth, and that's about their goal difference. That's about their exact goal difference.
That's about their... Like, the fact that they were running a hotter early in the season, and they've now won one of their last five matches to fall back somewhat, and that just fits where they are a little bit better. They're good. They're not great.
They're pretty good. They're like, you are happy to see them take this step forward as full. It's not quite as big as step forward as you might have thought in the first one since the season. Yeah, and I think that like you're...
They are yet another team like Bournemouth, and like Brettford, who use the wings exclusively for what they do. And so, if all you do is going down the wings, some percentage of what you're gonna end up with there is crosses. Yeah, it's a little different, right? Because Fulham really wants their full backs to play in the process, so they have tons of bodies in the box.
So, they're not doing the kind of funky things that Bournemouth are, where you're playing long balls up the field into wide areas, and then your attackers are oftentimes the ones playing the cross into the box to whichever other attacker happens to be there. You know, they're not doing the somewhat wacky things that Bournemouth are doing, which is like somewhere between Atlantic or Madrid and Atlanta, where like they have their forwards combining on the edge of their own final third in wide areas to try to interchange and dribble the ball up the field. But there's lots of different ways that you can use wide areas if you wanna like focus on using wide areas. And Fulham's is like the most traditional of the bunch.
And so, this really sort of gets in another way the table is not lying to you, which is you've got Fulham in ninth, Brighton in 10th, Bournemouth in 11th, Villa in 8th, for that matter. And those teams just really have played mid-table football. People might have expected Brighton to be somewhat better than that. They mostly haven't been, but they've been fine.
They've been solidly safe in the Premier League. Brentford have been very different than they were last season. They've become a very attacking team that doesn't defend well, rather than being a somewhat defensive team that did enough attacking. But that style change, which I think is a separate topic, has not led to a major quality change.
Yeah, I think that that's 100% correct. They both have the injury. So maybe it could be that. I mean, I think it's all downstream of losing out of the Tony as the way you move the ball up the field.
Yeah. So you've got to figure out other things to do. It could be doing out other things to do, but like the talent direction at Brentford has been concerningly one way for the past three years. And it needs to go the other way for a year or two if they want to remain solidly not threatened by validation.
It's like that gets us to really just the one team further down in the table that the table is mostly lying to you about. Thought I would just talk to them and talk to them. Much like I had this conundrum with that in the forest, where it's like, I wanted to sing their praises, even though like the thing I ultimately had to do was talk about like, they're not as good as this. Talk number not as bad as this, but they have consistently been not great for the past two months in a way that has like, they are worse now than they were two months.
Like the first two months of the season you looked at it and it was just like, oh, they're playing like one of the best teams and they're getting unlucky. And now it's like I'm playing significantly worse than that and still not getting lucky. I mean, I think it's just like, I just think it's injured. It's like, it's just a lot of injuries, but it is true that they are not playing out.
Exactly. Like early in the season, Newcastle were surprisingly like bottom half in their performance and then they got fit. Like they just balanced each other back out, but Newcastle haven't had quite as much misfortune in results as Spurs have. And so Spurs have been like, overall, I've got them even with, I've got them even with Forest, so a little behind Newcastle, Bournemouth and Sea.
The thing about Tottenham is like, they're a real test case in like the various ways one can be unlucky. I mean, I think there's just a real case here that they're obviously they've got one any close case. No close case. So on a points level, they're just kind of unlucky.
Even as like on an XG level, we're not bad unlucky in terms of like, their goal difference is quite high, right? It's a very odd team that has been unlucky. While outplaying their expected goals by about 10. Like that's impressive.
Also though, like injuries to some degree are luck. Mm-hmm. You know, if you're like looking at where injury luck has been this season, Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester City are the three, like clearly like three teams that have been most negatively impacted by injuries. They just are.
And so, should impact your XG level to some degree or another? Like, I don't know, like it is both hard for me to be alarmed by Spurs not being that good, but like it is like worth recognizing that Spurs are not that good. Spurs are playing like the 7th or 8th best team in the league overall, which is not that good for their wage bill and their revenues. You can tell a happy story about it, which is that they were playing like the 4th best team in the league for a while before the injury crisis hit.
And so, the question is, how much is that something that they can count on coming back? And how much are these injuries part of a sustained problem? I have a bunch of takes on this. We did a podcast on Tottenham.
I think the big thing is their squad construction, which is that they built their squad to fit within UEFA restrictions, and they don't have that many of what UEFA terms club home-grown players. And so, they simply didn't have several extra players that you would expect to have. They're only really running out 23, 24 players while playing in all these competitions. That simply can't be done.
And I think the big test for their front office, this January and for their hands really, this January, is can they just work it up to tell some guys, look, you can't be on the Europa League squad, because we need to have enough minutes and we can't do it with all of our senior players on the Europa League squad. And like, I think that's the biggest cause of their injury problems. And it was an error they made early on. The season talked about this at the end of the season.
I was like, well, we expect them to sign another defender. And then they didn't. And not only didn't, they didn't register extra defenders for the Europa League squad because they didn't have the spaces. Like, that's what happened.
And that's the thing I think they need to solve much, much more than there's a question of whether their managers' tactics are too attacking. Yes. But that's all they do. Sorry about that.
Anyway, so that's really good. We barely touched Aston Villa. Do you know what I mean? You can just say, but I had nothing to say about Aston Villa.
Yeah. I mean, Aston Villa are somewhere around the 8th best team in the league. I mean, I don't know what to say about the 2 before the season. The magic of having running hot last season has not continued.
Some would argue this is because they are playing in the Champions League and last year they're playing in the Conference League. And there's probably some effect there. But the simplest thing is just like Aston Villa weren't that great and they remain not that great. They can make a tough fight.
They can happen. Yeah. Just gonna run a little bit hot but be fine. I think we should do the bottom table at another time.
You know, there's not that much too. It's not that interesting. And so I kind of want to see how the relegation race. I am like impressed by.
I am impressed by Jeremy Ken as I can remember being my bad team manager. But other than that, I don't have much going on here. Yeah. It would be nice if they could maintain this level for a little bit and make the race interesting.
Right. You say that. I'm not necessarily thinking about that. Indeed.
All right. So that is your sort of overview of the teams that are in unexpected places in the Premier League table and why those unexpected places are mostly not unexpected in terms of the expected goals. Kind of that. Exactly.
Cheers. Cheers.