Hello, and welcome to the Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable soccer analytics podcast. I am Michael Kaley, and it's just nice sometimes when you're in the content game, and you're looking back over what you've done and what you need to talk about and what you haven't touched on recently, and then the world sees fit to give you news stories right in that sweet spot. We haven't talked about the Premier League in a while. We haven't talked about relegation in a while.
And two teams fired their manager within the middle of the relegation hunt this weekend. So we got a podcast. I'm joined by Mike Goodman, where we're talking about what's going on at the bottom of the Premier League table. How you doing, man?
Let's do it. The music you heard on the way in as well is Please Download, Subscribe, Make Us Happy Podcast at patreon.com slash double pivot. We're doing the thing where we're like, these are the podcasts that put up the numbers. Everybody is clamoring for some deep dive analysis on Wolverhampton.
To be fair, we had a Southampton fan on last week, and we didn't talk. We didn't ask a single question about Southampton. And then, of course, they fired their manager. That was just being respectful.
Yeah, that was being kind and respectful to our guests. You wouldn't want to be asked on a podcast that needed to talk about Everton. Yeah, you don't let me get out of it, though, because it's our podcast. You queue up the deep blue something music.
We do the thing and the thing and the whole thing. And then you make me suffer. Well, this year, thankfully, Everton are like bad enough that we don't have to talk about them being surprisingly good and good enough that we don't have to talk about them in the relegation race and we can just pretend they don't exist. All right, well, we will talk about 16th, but we're not going to Everton today.
So we're going to talk about two teams that are worse than Everton and fired their manager. And they're very different situations. Yeah, both cases in which I think that broadly, the sacking makes sense, but teams in various positions. Let's talk about Southampton first.
Like, they suck. So I think the thing that you say about Southampton is like, they do not have nearly enough talent to play the way that their manager wanted them to play. And the way that their manager wanted them to play wasn't really all that good anyway. It was it was insane.
This is a team that came up, didn't spend very much at all. We're not a great championship team. It wasn't like a travesty of justice or anything that they got promoted, but like, you know, they're no leads, right? They're not a team that like, obviously had a quality of talent in the championship that was elite and therefore might think that they could get by with it in the Premier League.
They're probably clearly operating in talent deficit. And yet how they want to play is possession style football with the ball, passing the ball around, but seemingly without any ideas about how to turn that position into attack when the moment presents itself. Like, it is true that passive possession is a good tactic, right? Keeping the ball to keep from getting attacked is a tried and true way to play.
Part of keeping the ball, however, what allows you to keep the ball is that you have to force teams to be somewhat leery of trying to come and get the ball. And Southampton's possession game is so poor that like, there was no disincentive to just going and trying to take the ball off of them. The other odd thing about this is that what you associate with defensive possession styles is a press designed to get the ball and lead to more defensive possession. And there's really two ways of going about it.
The best defensive possession teams, that's how they do it. They have a press which is designed to get the ball and then recycle possession. And the other option is to be reasonably good at defending without the ball and then get the ball and then possess defensively. And that's the Gary O'Neill style, which we'll get to shortly.
But they did not have, they have kind of like a half press. They do deny opposition possession somewhat. They do not simply fall off. But their press is also not nearly good enough.
So a very common thing that happens is they extend a press and then get attacked. They have exceptionally high expected goals per opposition touch in the penalty area in the final third. Because both of these things are happening. They are getting turned over in early possession.
And they are allowing opposition teams to turn possession into transition with their sort of half. It's just really, really bad managing. And it doesn't necessarily mean that, like, his tactical ideas are bad in some objective sense. I would be open to the possibility that they are.
I am giving Kelly a very skeptical face here. But, like, if you have these tactical ideas and you come into a situation where talent-wise you cannot execute them, continuing to do it for 16 games is really one of the most perverse things I've seen, like, covering soccer. Yeah, the last person to try to do this was Scott Parker, and he was fired after five games. Yep.
I mean, I think it's, I mean, we talk sometimes about a strategy that presumes you have the ball, right? That was the last real, like, offender along those lines was Fulham a few years back, I think. And it almost got them relegated. The last time they almost got relegated before Marco Silva.
Actually, so I guess it did get them relegated, now that I think about it. This does not presume you have the ball exactly. It's sort of like, presumably the other team will give up trying to keep the ball at the first sign of a press. Yeah.
This is not a press that is constructed to, like, actively win the ball back. It is a press that is supposed to, like, force them to go long over you and then contest the long ball. But it's not good enough to actually force that to happen. Because it doesn't really prevent teams with, like, a modicum of commitment to keeping the ball from going right through them.
And I don't know if this is constructed because teams in the championship are less able to go through a press or less likely to try. It's probably a combination of both. But this was a part of this puzzle, of this system, that, like, immediately didn't work. And clearly didn't work in the Premier League.
And you've got to change something when that's the case. Yeah. Even last season. So the two best teams in the championship last season were Leeds United and Leicester City.
Like, maybe you put a switch down there, but like, you know, the XG had it as Leeds United and Leicester City. And, like, that's what the talent on the teams would also say. And Leeds United failing to get quite the results they should for their talent. Like, that's the lead story.
And so both Leeds and Leicester played a very possession-heavy style as well. This is, obviously, Maresca for Leicester City and it's Fark for Leeds. Again, we've seen these guys in the way that they like to play. And both of them had somewhat less possession than Southampton.
But Leeds allowed 130 fewer penalty area touches than Southampton. And Leicester allowed nearly 100 fewer penalty area touches than Southampton in the championship last year. Like, it looks like the same thing, just with a talent advantage rather than a big talent deficit. And I thought Southampton were going to be better in the championship than they were.
They really didn't. And, like, I thought they were going to have more of a... Part of that is, like, you know, concern about Russell Martin. Martin, I thought they were going to have more talent in the championship than they did.
Like, they really had a, like, borderline Premier League squad and then they didn't really improve it. They lost a couple of players. And then they came off, they still haven't improved it. And their whole thing of buying young players, they do not have any 24-year-old quality Premier League players the way that they should from a strategy of continuing to bed in 19 to 21-year-olds for years.
Like, we did a whole podcast on Tyler Didley, who was, like, an interesting player. But he's just another 18-year-old. They didn't develop any of those guys into good players. Like, Kyle Walker-Peters is the closest thing to a good player that they got.
Like, clearly, something broke between talent identification and talent development. And so all the risks that they took, taking a team barely, Hassan Hedl, barely keeping them up year after year because they were running cheap and bringing in young players, just failed. Those guys are not good. And that's, I think, the bigger issue here.
Like, this strategy that they were running for years should have led to this team being better in terms of their talent. And then on top of that, like, the Martin stuff, I don't think it worked that well in the championship. And then it was truly horrible this season. There is, like, something really perverse about the fact that, like, Russell Martin is, like, incredibly committed to this system.
And, like, it is insane that this is the system that that guy, who I remember as a defender, is committed to play. Like, I really do. Like, I, and, like, six other people in the world, of which you are one, would be, like, fascinated to read a deep dive into how he developed wanting to manage a team that plays like that because it is quite clearly a thing that he really, really, really wants to do. I don't know, man.
So, like, moving on from him and moving on to something else makes sense, but you're just preparing for the And in soccer specifically, there is so much variance, and the stakes are so high, that this is a really, really big issue. The kind of fascinating thing about Southampton is that they seem to have mostly done that. Martin seems to be okay at that part of the job. It's just that it sucks.
Yeah, well, let me put it this way. They focused on process despite bad results. It is not at all clear to me that it was a good process. Right, the soft skill of maintaining your focus on doing things the way you want and having your players continue to believe it is a very valuable thing, but it cannot substitute for having a good process.
And look, I mean, this was our running theme for the for two and a half years of Arteta at Arsenal. It was like, I'm not so sure this is going to work, but boy, does he have everybody on board. Then in that case, it turned out to work. Exactly.
I like that. There's, it's an interesting question of how much should you say, we have a process, everyone's on board with it. We're going to keep doing it because the value in this going well after everyone's bought in is so high and we've got something that has that potential. Like very, very few teams anywhere do what Arsenal did with Arteta.
Yep. And it has succeeded to a, like, truly spectacular level. It's an interesting question. Now, do we want to, like, drill down on exactly what went wrong on the field for Wolves here?
Yeah, I think so. I think that it's worth separating out two things, one of which is the variance that has run against them, and the other of which is that they have been pretty bad. Yeah. So I mean, to the second point first, that happens to one team every year, at least.
It's like, the way the relegation battle works is, there are a lot of pretty bad teams in a given year in the Premier League. Like, you try to guess who they are at the beginning of the season, and you can usually get, like, six out of eight or whatever. And, like, you know, we didn't, we thought Fulham were bad and they weren't. We thought Nottingham Forest were bad and they weren't.
We didn't think Crystal Palace were bad, and they kind of aren't, but are bad enough that you run bad and you end up at the bottom of the table when you're at the bottom of the table. And Wolves, who was a team that we did not think would be relegated, we thought would be somewhat above relegation level on talent and performance and whatever. But, like, you run bad and you just end up in the thick of the fight. One thing is that they have conceded five penalties and been given none.
You know, if it was up to me and I was building a strategy, I would simply not concede penalties. Exactly. And then I would have the refs give me a fair number of penalties in the other direction. A very important part of coaching the team.
Seriously. And then the other thing that's happened is that saw and Johnson, they've had two different keepers they've used. They've sort of bounced between them, have been the two worst keepers by Opta's post-shot XG. This is just a classic example of what the old saw about how if you have three shortstops, it means you don't have a shortstop.
Yeah. But, like, it's a little interesting because neither of those guys have been historically terrible keepers. Yep. And I have questions about how we're examining things and using post-shot expected goals and, like, the degree to which we really understand what we are and are not capturing in post-shot expected goals is still pretty high.
Especially over, like, eight to ten 90s. You know, and what you're doing, really, is, like, you're splitting up and categorizing some of the expected goals variance, right? And you're saying, okay, some of the variance in how many goals the team has scored versus their expected goals is because they are shooting better and some of it is because the opposition keeper is saving worse. And you are trying to differentiate between those two things.
And I think that, like, on a conceptual level, right, that makes sense. If every time you shot and it was on target, you scored a goal, and every time you shot and it didn't score a goal, it was off target. You would quite easily be able to say that the keeper had absolutely no influence on how you performed against expected goals. And then you would have a range depending on how many goals you scored and how you performed against expected goals.
Like, it is conceptually very appealing. The nitty-gritty of how it gets divided, there are so many questions about it. Exactly, and as we've discussed, little bits of measurement error can screw it up quite badly. Now, the thing that I would say here is that there is an obvious and massive gap between their XG and their goals conceded.
And if you watch their games, and I've watched some, they are not the worst defensive team in the Premier League. And they have the worst goals allowed in the Premier League. And so, it makes sense to me that you've got kind of all of the above problem here. Not a very good defensive team, and then tons of shots have been going in.
It's hard for me to believe that keepers have been good. It's hard for me to believe that opposition hasn't been shooting very well. And maybe there's more opposition shooting very well, and the Opta stats are sort of weighing the keeper effect too much because a couple bounces went a couple different directions. A keeper was here and a shot was here, and maybe the keeper was supposed to be there and Opta doesn't know that.
All those are things that happen. That can, like, make a difference of, like, you know, 0.5, one expected goal on a shot. And that is already the sort of keeper expected goal drop that Opta has them at an eight, eight goals worse than expected between the two keepers. You could have a couple of shots that make up a huge percentage of that, that just are measured incorrectly.
But in either case, like, either that is variance because it's actually just opposition teams shooting well, or it's variance because two guys who've been okay keepers and are 31 years old are having really bad seasons. And I don't know. Yeah. And look, when we get into these conversations about goalkeeping, it's almost always because we're looking at a team where all, like, that has distinguished itself by being very, very different from XG for all of the above reasons, right?
Like, I think it was two seasons ago, Barcelona and Ter Stegen had this great defensive season, and it was like, well, you look at the stats, and it was like all three things. It was like, you know, the expected goals against were even smaller than the XG. And the, even on top of that, then the saves were, you know, the, the, the goalkeeper was even better than that. And like the reverse here.
And it's just like, whenever you have a deviation that is large enough that it becomes meaningful to analyzing the season, it's almost always going to be all of the above. And then the question is like, okay, yeah, like it matters how we're apportioning it. But like, only kind of for like, you know, do we need a new keeper kind of stuff? Do we need to, it's like an academic question in a lot of ways, as opposed to a results question.
Everything is going wrong, you know, sort of in that part of the team. You're running bad. You're playing bad. It's both.
How much is one versus the other when you get to this sort of extreme level? Like, not a huge question when you can confidently say that it's both. I think one of the funny examples of this is that one of the teams over the last five years in the Premier League that had, that ran hot that way in particular, clearly ran hot with opposition teams shooting very badly against them, was Wolves in 21-22 with goalkeeper Jose Sa who had a very good season. It was a plus goalkeeping season, but it was not extremely plus goalkeeping season.
And this was true. And also when we had the statsbomb stats back then. And so this is, Opta confirms those statsbomb numbers. So this also happened with Rui Patricio.
There's been a number of Wolves seasons in which it was good goalkeeping. Yep. Well, this one I think was less good goalkeeping and more just really bad opposition shooting. I'm sorry, there've been a number of Wolves seasons where defensively they have performed better than actually expects them to.
Yeah. And so coming into 22-23, we were talking about Wolves as a potential relegation team. And then they were in fact really bad that season. And they had a terrible goal difference and a terrible XG difference.
And then the next season, they just finished 13th for no good reason. Yeah, that's true. It's like, that's another amazing form of variance. And then so last season, we're like, come on, they're going to be bad.
They're going to be bad. And they were 14th. Not good, but they improved their expected goal difference and their goal difference to this is not a relegation side under Gary O'Neill. And then they sold a bunch of players.
Yep. A couple of years ago, we talked about, like, Fulham having a decent season, but terrible numbers and being like, well, you can't treat yourself like you had a decent season. And that was Wolves last summer. Now, that said, I still think there are a lot of versions of this season where they don't get relegated.
Yeah, and those still exist. Go to his head and create a scrum and do it ugly. Yep. Kunyak just wants to be in transition and he's very good in transition and they've scored a good number of goals in transition.
Like, that's why they have okay underlying numbers. Best control teams, the Thomas Tuchel mantra. Yep. Is you use possession to set up opportunities that are analogous to counterattacks, right?
You bring the defense onto you and then you break through the defense. But like when you're doing this at the bottom of the table, that's not what you're doing. You're just keeping the ball for keeping the ball's sake. You do not have the relative skill advantages to be creating these moments to spring into attack.
Yeah. Now, what I do not envy Pereira for is that he's coming into a team that we talk about how they attack immediately about Kunya and that Kunya has been a good striker this season. And they've scored a good number of goals in transition. Like that's why they have okay underlying numbers.
Best control teams, the Thomas Tuchel mantra. Yep. Is you use possession to set up opportunities that are analogous to counterattacks, right? You bring the defense onto you and then you break through the defense.
But like when you're doing this at the bottom of the table, that's not what you're doing. You're just keeping the ball for keeping the ball's sake. You do not have the relative skill advantages to be creating these moments to spring into attack. Yeah.
Now what I do not envy Pereira for is that he's coming into a team that we talk about how they attack. We talk immediately about Kunya and that Kunya has been a good striker this season. And he's like the whole attack. Yep.
And he's going to be out for some number of games. Yeah, man. And that gets real bad real fast. Like they should have money to go in the sign players because they sold players and didn't really bring much in.
It's impossible, impossible to unpack the finances of Wolves and the Mendes empire in however way it goes. But like purely out of the land of speculation now, like I assume that the way they ran their business relied to some degree on line go up in the same way that every other owner did. And it doesn't seem shocking to me that like what they've had to do since is make money by selling players instead of a lot instead of like, make like, yes, we exist to trade and sell players and make money that way. But like we can keep enough talent on the jewel at the top of our pyramid and wolves to make sure that they stay in the premier league.
Now it's like, we need to like cut the line as close as we possibly can here. And like, that just sort of implies that they need the money. They need the money to stabilize their system as opposed to like be in a comfortable place. Yeah.
And at the same time, if like your system has wolves on the top of that, like wolves getting that premier league money is a big part of it. Like this is the, this is the challenge. Why the football business is terrible. And like, like anyone who gets into the football business should be doing it because it's fun, not because they've got some like business plan.
I mean, you know, business ish plan, I guess you would say in the case of wolves and Mendes. Right. It's a something plan. But yes, they are more likely than not to get relegated.
And they pretty clearly do not have the 18th, 19th or 20th worst talent in the premier league. Yeah. And I mean like on talent, Southampton, Leicester, Ipswich, probably. Yeah.
Ipswich definitely. Ipswich have played really well, but I don't think it's because saying that Ipswich have played really well is absolutely damning on their underlying talent level. Oh, as it should be. I mean, this is a team that has been promoted two years in a row and not really invested in the talent.
And what McKenna is doing is pretty incredible. And speaking of guys who like, you know, you have to like keep the ship stable through two months of running bad or two months of bad results and focus on good process. Ipswich started off this season looking like, you know, they were like a 15 point over the course of a season team. And they have really stabilized in the months since to like, I think they're probably still gonna get relegated, but it's gonna, they're putting up a pretty good battle, which is like, I think really respectable.
Yeah, exactly. Like there's a, I would not be at all surprised. Like they have played somewhat better than Leicester city over the course of this season. They're a little bit worse on expected goal difference, my underlying.
My stats have it somewhat better though with, when you account for red cards and penalties. And they are within two points of Leicester city. Leicester city, we should mention, they also sacked their manager. They did.
I don't understand what their concept was here. Maybe we can make Jamie Vardy 10 years younger. Right. Like that's like, maybe that person will play Vardy and make him magically 10 years younger.
No one knows what Ruben Van Nistelrooy's coaching ideas are. And they seem to be playing the same way they were under the last manager and not better. Like, I don't see anything different in what Leicester city are doing right now. It's the same kind of mediocre possession and trying to spring long balls to Jamie Vardy.
Yeah, it's not good. It's not how you should play. And the talent should be, I think a little better than what they're doing. Also, but like, is there anything that qualifies Van Nistelrooy?
Right. Other than being Ruben Van Nistelrooy and having been like getting jobs in the Manchester United system where people liked him. I don't. He didn't.
He managed in the Eredivisie, but had like, there was nothing special about his record or his tactical indicators. That's the thing, right? Like his career progress made some degree of sense until this move. Right.
Like you go, you retire, you get a job with a small Dutch club. Then you get a job with PSV. Okay. Then you move up to be an assistant with Manchester United.
Makes sense. I mean, moving up to be an assistant is, is an unusual move. Yep. Like a guy on a normal career trajectory who's gotten jobs in his home country in his native language.
And has succeeded at them. Yep. Does not become an assistant manager. Like that is the indicator that he wasn't succeeding.
Right. That's exactly right. And like, that's fine. Like, I, I thought like Van Nistelrooy was making choices that made sense for his managerial progress and progression and career.
And then Leicester city was like, yes, this makes you a great candidate to be our manager. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe, maybe he interviews well, but yeah.
So we have a real relegation fight here because wolves have been bad and are now like, we don't know if they're going to make the additions that I would think they should make, but we'll see. They are very likely to lose their best player for a significant span of time. And we have no idea what they're doing with this new manager. And they're many points behind Leicester city.
And so you have like the Southampton at the bottom, wolves more likely than not, not to catch up, but have a real shot to catch up. And then Leicester city and Ipswich town as quite bad teams, more likely fighting over this place. So it's not, I think going to be like a wide open relegation race. Some of it, you just start dropping points real fast and anything can happen.
That's what happened to wolves. But the story we've got right now is like this real chance for Ipswich town to stay up, which is, as you were saying, really cool. Yeah. I mean, the way it becomes a race like Everton are 16th, but they've got a game in hand.
So the fact that they have 15 points to Leicester's 14th is a little misleading. Although again, when you look at the bottom of the table, a game in hand is worth less, like significantly so than when you look at the top of the table. But the way, I mean, the, obviously the way it turns into a real interesting race is Everton or I guess Crystal Palace or West Ham, like news for in a row while the other team stabilize. And then maybe you've got a couple of teams fighting for a couple of spots.
It's just, it's just so much more likely that, and Crystal Palace have already started playing better. Yes. Oh yeah. They've gone like four games without losing or something.
Yep. And their expected goal difference is back up to a very respectable level. Their goal difference is back up to a respectable level. And I keep expecting Everton to play better.
So we'll see how that works out. Yeah. I mean, Everton have not been good. They've been better than these teams at the bottom, but they've not been a good team this year.
So I'm not gonna make Mike talk about Everton anymore. Didn't make him do it a couple of times. That's the tricks of the trade. So we'll be back talking about some of the better teams in the Premier League and who knows, maybe some news will happen, but there are a couple of very, very good teams that we need to come back around to.
Cheers y'all. Yes.