What the data says: Scary xG and the Ghanaian KDB
In March 2015, England were knocked out of the Cricket World Cup at the first hurdle after losing to Bangladesh. The coach, Peter Moores, stumped by a line of predictable questioning about why his team was so bad, remarked that he’d “have to look at the data” to explain it.
Inspired by that grotesquely underachieving outfit, we’re going to follow the same trail of breadcrumbs to assess Leicester’s season so far. A season that descended into parody on Tuesday night as Brendan Rodgers’ side had 80% of possession against a League Two side and failed to score.
Tl;dr: it ain’t good, folks.
(all of this data is from The Analyst’s excellent season stats hub. Parental advisory required.)
We’ve got 99 problems and a visa is one
I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that Leicester are the worst team in the league at set pieces. Again. Our total of 2.2 expected goals (xG) against from set plays is half a goal more than anyone else. For context, there are five teams who haven’t even given up half a goal in total from set pieces yet.
The good news is that from open play we’ve been pretty good! Well, theoretically good! Yes, six goals conceded from open play is the worst in the league. But the xG total of just 2.5 conceded is alright.
You’re still thinking about the bad news, aren’t you?
Shooting stars
“The football philosophy is very much about positive football. If you want to define it: we like to play attacking creative football but always with a tactical discipline”
Having a terrible defence in all facets of the game doesn’t have to be a killer. We’ve seen lots of teams make up for being shaky at the back by being great going forward. Such as, er, Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool, who just needed a historically great forward line to almost win the league.
Where there might be a problem is if, hypothetically, you also rated as the second worst team in the league for expected goals scored from open play and literally worst in the league for expected goals scored from set pieces.
Oh.
We have a cunning plan
The upshot to all this is that the data is bleak. Leicester have been the worst team in the league through three games with virtually nothing to hang our hats on. The defence is bad, the attack is bad, the results are bad.
The real question is: why? This is quite transparently awful and, presumably, not what Rodgers is trying to achieve. But hidden in The Analyst hub is a clue that…it might be?
This graph shows us what each team does every time they have the ball. Top left means they pass it less and move up the field fast. Bottom right means they pass it more and progress slowly. Manchester City are obviously huge outliers here. After the Arsenal game, Leicester were even closer to them than we are now. Congratulations if you noticed the dramatic upturn in how direct we were against Southampton.
Along with this visual representation of utter tedium, there is another stat which tracks ‘build up attacks’: how many spells of possession with more than 10 passes end in a shot or a touch in the box. Manchester City and Liverpool, the only two teams with more of those spells of possession than Leicester, have 20 of those attacks each. They keep the ball with the aim of scoring a goal at the end.
And then there are our brave boys. Who have successfully turned long spells of possession into a touch in the box a grand total of five times.
Unfortunately, the data doesn’t track how many of those spells of possession end up in a shot by the opposition.
Probably for the best.
One more for the road
Sometimes you see things and experience an instinctive, revulsive horror at what you’ve witnessed. Supposedly, humans feel that way when they see blood: we know instantly that something’s wrong before we’ve had time to process the image.
That’s how I felt this weekend when I saw this.
Whatever the Rodgers Way once was, this is now it. We are trying to be Manchester City.
In many ways, we are exactly like them already. If we overlook the fact that we score the fewest goals in the league instead of the most. And concede the most in the league instead of the fewest. And use Daniel Amartey to unpick defences instead of Kevin De Bruyne.
The most alarming thing about the season so far is not that the plan is going wrong. It’s that the plan is mostly going right.