This week, the CIES Football Observatory’s weekly report focussed on just how watertight defences are around European football, and their research throws up some initially surprising results.If you want to find the best defence, it might be prudent to just search for the team with the fewest goals conceded per game, but after only 11 games that sample size is small. If you were going to extrapolate on the whole season based solely on a stat which gives you no indication of the way the first games have gone, then you may well be disappointed come the end of the season.Instead, what they’ve looked at is how many shots each team has conceded per game, and that makes sense as a metric: if a team has only conceded one goal all season, but every opponent they have faced has been missing their best striker through injury or suspension, then you’re going to get unrepresentative data. Conceding chances only matters if the opponent has the players to take them, but you can’t always count on opposition weakness.
The data shows City as the top team in Europe’s top leagues, but even just looking at the top teams in England starts to get interesting.
Over the last few months, we’ve heard a lot about the defences of teams like City and Liverpool, and how they fail to convince. On the other hand, we’ve also seen that they concede fewer shots than most teams in the league. In Liverpool’s case, the obvious conclusion is that they’re contriving to concede the majority of the shots they face. For City it might be a little less obvious as to why their defence is seen as the weakest part of their team – is it due to a historical lack of trust in their defence, or something we’ve seen this season itself?
But that might have something to do with the way these teams set up, harrying the opposition with high pressing tactics and moving together as a team. Interestingly, Huddersfield – managed by David Wagner – concede fewer shots than Chelsea on average this season. Interestingly, they’ve conceded exactly the same number of goals as Swansea, who are second bottom.
Then there are the more old-school defences, the ones that don’t seem to rely on this newer, holistic style of defending. One that gets a lot of praise is Burnley who, according to the Football Observatory, have conceded the second-most shots on their goal this season in the Premier League. And yet, that praise hasn’t been misplaced: outside of the Premier League’s current top three, Sean Dyche’s side have the best defence in the division, and – again, outside that top three – are the only club still to have a goals against column in single figures.
Then there’s Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United, who have conceded the fewest, but have only conceded the fifth-fewest shots.
All of this starts to look like a jumbled mess and points to one question we should probably be asking: just what is defending?
This week, ahead of his country’s ill-fated play-off second-leg at home to Sweden, Giorgio Chiellini spoke about this very thing, labelling ‘Guardiolismo’ as something which has ruined a generation of defenders who now have no regard for, nor have they even learned about, the art of man-marking, according to the Juventus defender.
In the English-speaking press, that’s been picked up as a criticism of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, and it’s important to point out that ‘Guardiolismo’ is more a dig at cheap imitations of the man who led Barcelona to victory in every competition they entered in 2009 and who is currently top of the Premier League and on course to win a league title in three different countries whilst playing this style of football. Not the man himself. Chiellini isn’t stupid.
Indeed, Chiellini has a point.
When you look at the stats, only five teams have conceded more goals than Liverpool so far, and what’s striking about the fact that they’ve conceded so many from so few shots is mostly what tells us about the chances they give up. One of the hallmarks of stubborn defences is usually that they wear down the other team’s patience, forcing them to shoot from distance or from areas where shots are less likely to result in goals. They block well and they stay tight to attackers. None of that is true for this Liverpool side, but it is true for, say, Manchester United and Burnley, who both have better defensive records than the Reds, and who both concede more shots on goal every game.
Clearly, this shouldn’t be about pointing to shots conceded but to what kind of shot. Are we talking about one that’s been blocked? Or one where only part of the goal is there to aim at? Or are we talking about one-on-one chances or cut back crosses?
On the other hand, having the ball is a sure-fire way of keeping the opposition from scoring. That’s a central tenant of Guardiola’s game, and of Johan Cruyff before him – it’s as much a defensive measure as it is an attacking one, and it would probably be wrong to accuse Mourinho of being overly defensive whenever Guardiola’s own methods just as effective in keeping the other team out. It’s just that they prioritise keeping possession, and for most people, that’s easier on the eye – even if there are very real dangers on the counter-attack.
This is a question that isn’t going away because it gets to the heart of how football is played these days. It all comes down to a matter of style, but when your team is conceding goals at an alarming rate, it’s especially interesting if they’ve conceded fewer shots than most other teams, too: in that case, there may be no right answer to how you play the game, but there probably is a wrong one.