Relegation and the tyranny of Proper Football Men

With a quarter of the season played, the managerial merry-go-round is in full swing and several Premier League managers have already felt the sharp end of their chairman’s axe.

Frank De Boer was given the chop by Steve Parish just four games into the season, with Ronald Koeman and Slaven Bilic also finding themselves out on their arse by the start of November.

These struggling teams have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been exclusively recruiting the Premier League’s tried and trusted relegation firefighters to haul them out of trouble: Proper Football Men.

Fans of these clubs have almost unanimously greeted these appointments with a combination of rage, frustration, and despair. The football media, meanwhile, have been unwavering in their support of these overtly cautious, defensively minded coaches being given Premier League jobs. Listen closely to them and a certain refrain starts to emerge:

By now, Roy Hodgson has his feet comfortably under the desk at Selhurst Park. Shortly after his appointment, Brede Hangeland, who played under Hodgson at Fulham, wrote an enlightening article for the BBC detailing just what Palace fans and players could expect from their new manager. He explained that “ he knows exactly what he wants from you in terms of the team’s organisation and shape.” and suggested that “ what Hodgson will do is get the team well organised and hard to beat, and build from there.”

Hodgson himself was similar in his assessment of the task at hand: “The important thing now is to get down to work and make certain we become a really highly competitive team which is hard to beat and is capable of picking up points.” Stuart James of the Guardian echoed similar sentiments regarding Hodgson, specifically about his time at West Brom: “ There was a big emphasis on working on the pattern of play in full-sided games, dividing the team into units in and out of possession, with no more than 10 core practises that Hodgson relied on to get his points across, which inevitably meant a lot of repetition.”

Meanwhile, it seems fair to say that West Ham fans have been significantly more disgruntled about the announcement of their new manager than Palace fans were about Hodgson. David Moyes has already been on the end of a backlash from supporters and he’s yet to even step into the dugout for his new club.

Former West Ham player Dean Ashton outlined these complaints to talkSPORT and offered his opinion on why Gold & Sullivan would opt for Moyes: “ “I can see why the club would look at David Moyes, because straight away you just know he’ll go in, organise the side, make them hard to beat and probably get a few results because of that.” Ken Dyer of the Evening Standard had the same view:“[Moyes] has a reputation… for making his teams difficult to beat.”

The Everton job remains vacant but the frontrunners for the role are Sam Allardyce and Sean Dyche. Sky Sports claim that appointing Allardyce would be beneficial for Everton as “ Making them tougher to break down would be the first step towards improvement.”

As for Dyche, Sports Illustrated have sung his praises (“ As a man to get them organised, hard to beat and keep them in the Premier League? There’s no doubting his credentials over the past 15 months”) and so has Jeff Hendrick (“ “He has us working hard every week, and the bare minimum is to give it our lot and make it hard for teams against us.”), while the Telegraph have gone so far as to call Dyche the “English Simeone” (“ Sean Dyche’s team are hard to beat and there are similarities with one of Europe’s current great managers.”).

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What being “hard to beat” seems to refer to here is a playing and coaching style that is centred around a narrow back four that operates close to their own goal in order to deny quick forwards space to attack in behind or over the top. In front of that, there is a compact line of four or five midfielders who also sit deep to limit the space in front of the back four. This is generally designed to stifle opponents who are talented in possession as it restricts the space they have to thread passes through or dribble into. These “hard to beat” teams often play with a large physical presence upfront who can retain possession with his back to goal in order to give his defence a target to hit if they want to play a long pass or clearance to alleviate pressure on them.

It’s understandable that there is an emphasis placed on stability: teams who are in the relegation zone tend to be there because they’re malfunctioning defensively, conceding a lot of goals and therefore losing football matches. It’s natural that teams would want to plug that hole.

What’s strange about the insistence that this “hard to beat” style of football is a panacea for your “Goals Against” column and the only surefire way to escape relegation is A) that it’s presented as the only way to defend effectively and B) that stemming the tide of goals conceded is more important than solving the other problem that causes teams to find themselves in the bottom three— the failure to score enough goals.

Is simply being difficult to break down and score against enough to steer you to safety?

I’m not so sure. After all, successful teams don’t just avoid defeat. They win games.

A quick glance at the Premier League table from last season illustrates my problem with this line of thinking:

19th placed Middlesbrough conceded 53 goals last season — at least 10 fewer than Bournemouth, West Ham and Leicester who finished 9th, 11th, and 12th. Their problem was that they only scored 27 times and it meant that they drew 13 games. Just being difficult to beat or tight at the back isn’t always enough; it’s entirely possible to draw yourself into oblivion like Boro did. Likewise, Sunderland only conceded 5 more goals than West Ham last year but scored 20 fewer. If you don’t carry a decent goalscoring threat at this level, you can end up bang in trouble.

It’s entirely possible that last season was a fluke, so I decided to see if there was any further precedent for this and whether there’s an argument to be made that appointing ultra-cautious, defensively minded managers isn’t necessarily less of a risk than going for someone who plays more attacking football.

I looked back at how the three lowest scoring teams fared in each of the last five Premier League seasons and then went back and did the same thing for the three teams that conceded the most goals in each season.

Below is a list of those teams, the total number of goals they scored/conceded, their final position in the table, and whether they were relegated or not:

Lowest Scoring:

16/17:

1. Middlesbrough/27 (19th)(R)
2. Sunderland/29 (20th) (R)
3. Hull City/37 (18th)(R)

15/16:

1. Aston Villa/27 (20th)(R)
2. West Bromwich Albion/34 (14th)
3. Norwich City/ 39 (19th)(R)/ Crystal Palace/39 (15th)

14/15:

1. Burnley/ 28 (19th)(R)
2. Aston Villa/31 (17th)/ Sunderland/31 (16th)
3. Hull City/33 (18th)(R)

13/14:

1. Norwich City/28 (18th)(R)
2. Cardiff City/32 (20th)(R)
3. Crystal Palace/33 (11th)

12/13:

1. Queens Park Rangers/30 (20th)(R)
2. Stoke City/34 (13th)
3. Sunderland/41 (17th)/ Norwich City/41 (11th)

There were 17 teams who counted among the three lowest scoring sides in a single Premier League season for this time period and 10 of those teams were relegated. It also seems like scoring 30 or fewer goals makes you nailed on for relegation; at present, Crystal Palace, Swansea, Bournemouth, and Huddersfield are all projecting as sides who will scored under 30 goals based on their current goals per game ratio. It’s still early in the season though and there are plenty of kinks still to be ironed out. Palace and Swansea look like they should be fine according to the shot data if they sustain their underlying performances.

Bournemouth and Huddersfield, however, both look like they could be in serious trouble, while Burnley are currently hugely overperforming their xG and you’d expect them to plummet once their luck swings. That is, unless, you’re a subscriber to the Dyche-has-broken-football theory.

Brief shout out to Tony Pulis who perhaps single-handedly proves that there is some merit to the “hard to beat” argument. His teams finished with one of the three lowest goals tally in the league with Stoke City in 12/13, with Crystal Palace in 13/14, and with WBA in 15/16 and ended up comfortably in mid-table every time.

Most Goals Conceded:

16/17:

1. Hull City/ 80 (18th)(R)
2. Swansea City/70 (15th)
3. Sunderland/69 (20th)(R)

15/16:

1. Aston Villa/76 (20th)(R)
2. Norwich City/67 (19th)(R)/Bournemouth/67 (16th)
3. Newcastle United/65 (18th)(R)

14/15:

1. Queens Park Rangers/73 (20th)(R)
2. Newcastle United/63 (15th)
3. Aston Villa/65 (17th)

13/14:

1. Fulham/85 (19th)(R)
2. Cardiff City/74 (20th)(R)
3. Norwich City/62 (18th)(R)

12/13:

1. Wigan Athletic/73 (18th)(R)/ Reading/73(19th)(R)
2. Aston Villa/69 (15th)
3. Newcastle United/69 (16th)

There were also 17 teams who finished with one of the three worst defensive records in a single Premier League season for this time period. 11 of those sides were relegated, making it slightly more hazardous to your chances of survival to finish with one of the three worst defensive records than it is to finish as one of the three lowest scoring teams. That said, there is little in it, so there’s a case to be made that being blunt in attack is just as damaging as being defensively inept is.

Based on this, conceding more than 70 goals virtually consigns you to the Championship. Crystal Palace, West Ham, Stoke City, Everton, and Watford are all currently projecting as shipping 70+ goals and might want to start looking over their shoulder. You’d expect this to cool off a bit as more matches are played; Watford, Everton and Palace have all played several games against the big boys, which obviously skews their numbers, and the gulf in quality between the Top Six and the rest of the league may lead to this being a high-scoring season in general.

Or perhaps not, as the shot data ranks the clubs listed above as 5 of the worst 6 teams for xG against (with Bournemouth tucked into the mix), suggesting that their poor defensive records thus far are warranted.

So, if failing to score enough goals is (roughly) as likely to result in relegation as conceding too many, why is it that being “hard to beat” is presented as the best way out of a relegation battle?

Maybe it’s because improving a broken defence is quicker and easier to achieve through coaching than improving a dysfunctional attack? Maybe it’s easier to teach mediocre players how to play in a defensive structure than it is to teach mediocre players how to play in an attacking structure? Maybe there’s a tendency towards conservatism in English football born of the enormous financial implications of falling out of the Premier League and that retaining the point you start a match with is seen as sounder policy than pushing for greater rewards and risking the loss of that point.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the main problem a lot of fans have with defence-first, “pragmatic” football is that it doesn’t fulfil some nebulous aesthetic measure or that it fails to provide sufficient entertainment value.

It’s more that it’s not conducive to consistently getting positive results. If you sit back, wait for your opposition to make a mistake that you can capitalise on, while letting them pepper shots at your goal, you might sometimes nick a narrow victory. The problem arises when your luck turns and your resistance is broken inside the first five minutes of a game — now you’ve got 85 minutes to left to play and Plan A is out of the window. It’s far harder to consistently win games by relying on an element of luck than it is to rely on proactive attacking football.

Ultimately, it’s less about being absolutist about attacking football vs defensive football than it is about picking the right manager whose style of football suits the players already in your squad. The same set of overtly cautious, pragmatic managers will continue to be flown in to haul clubs out of the relegation zone. But being “hard to beat” is by no means a guarantee of safety, nor is it the only way to skin this particular cat.