Wolves: Spending big to stay the sameYou know things have taken an odd turn when you’re appealing to sign Diego Costa .
Wolves have long been one of England’s most fearless and active zipper clubs, constantly going up and down from one level of the pyramid to another. But they’ve put together a remarkable run since returning to the Premier League in 2018. They finished seventh in both 2018-19 and 2019-20 and reached the Europa League quarterfinals in 2020 before slipping a hair to 13th and 10th in the last two seasons.
When former Benfica manager Bruno Lage took over Nuno Espirito Santo last season, he took Wolves’ two most identifiable characteristics — stingy defense and minimal attack — and exaggerated them. Wolves allowed just 43 goals (fewest outside of the league’s top four finishers) but scored just 38 (fewest among teams not relegated). They neither allowed nor created anything easy.
Through six matches this season, they’re on pace to allow just 25 goals … and score 19. They play in a defiantly analytics-unfriendly way, attempting plenty of shots (eighth in shots per possession) but attempting almost no high-value shots. They rank 19th in xG per shot, and only 3% of their shot attempts have been worth 0.3 xG or more (20th). Their defensive stats are good again, but while both Wolves and opponents have unsustainably strong save percentages at the moment, opponents are attempting more high-value chances. That will probably make regression to the mean a bit harsher on Wolverhampton; with just one win in six matches, any regression could come with harsh repercussions.
In vacuum, this makes sense — a zipper club finding something effective, then watching it slowly lose effectiveness over time. But when you lay down the seventh-highest transfer expenditures in the league, and you make big-money deals like paying Sporting Lisbon nearly $50 million to sign midfielder Matheus Nunes and spending $36 million to bring in Valencia winger Goncalo Guedes , you expect to improve.
Guedes draws contact well, and Nunes pressures the ball and forces the issue in the dribbling department, but neither creates high-quality shots. Adama Traore , back from Barcelona loan, doesn’t either. The only two players who have averaged at least 0.45 xG+xA per 90 minutes for the team this year — not a particularly ambitious average, by the way — are either hurt (new addition Sasa Kalajdzic ) or gone (new Nottingham Forest member Morgan Gibbs-White).
Wolves need finishing, and when they finally landed Stuttgart’s Kalajdzic late in the transfer window, he almost immediately tore his ACL. They tried to sneak veteran Diego Costa in, and he was initially denied a work permit before Wolves successfully appealed. He scored four goals in 15 matches last season for Brazil’s Atletico Mineiro and hasn’t scored double-digit goals since he was with Chelsea six seasons ago. But he’s now the new hope.
While the scoring averages, for and against, should increase simply because of how unsustainably low they are at the moment, there’s no immediate reason to think that Wolves will land in the top half of the league again.
West Ham: When adding talent subtracts cohesion Step 1: Qualify for European competition for two straight years by giving opponents lots of the ball and allowing them to take whatever long-range shots they want but dominating specific areas of the pitch, playing more direct ball than most good teams and taking all the good shots
Step 2: Spend $200 million (third most in the league), including $110 million on attackers — Lyon attacking midfielder Lucas Paqueta , Sassuolo forward Gianluca Scamacca , Burnley winger Maxwel Cornet
Step 3: Stop producing any attacking quality
David Moyes’ West Ham plays even more directly than before in 2022-23, but they appear stuck between their old attackers and new attackers, and no one’s performing. Pacqueta, Scamacca and Cornet have combined for zero league goals on four shots worth 0.46 in 279 minutes of play thus far, and last year’s creative trio of Jarrod Bowen , Michail Antonio and Pablo Fornals have all seen both their creation and scoring averages decrease. West Ham currently ranks 13th in shots per possession and 13th in xG per shot, and their opponents are producing more quality and quantity at the moment.
Throw in a massive gap in the finishing department — West Ham is averaging 0.3 post-shot expected goals for shots on target (xGOT) per shot on target, ninth-highest in the league, and opponents are averaging 0.38, third-most — and you’ve got a recipe for early-season disaster. The Hammers are currently 18th in the table with a league-low three goals in six matches.
It’s potentially gotten better of late. After three straight losses to start the season (combined score: opponents 5, WHU 0), West Ham beat Aston Villa, drew with Tottenham Hotspur and were unlucky in a 2-1 loss to Chelsea. Including a pair of Europa Conference League wins (one in qualification, one in group play), they’ve scored nine goals in their last five matches, even if they have yet to score more than one goal in an EPL match.
In last week’s Conference League win over FCSB, Cornet created four chances, Scamacca attempted five shots worth 0.42 xG (not great but better) and Bowen and Antonio came off the bench to combine for two goals and an assist in just 44 minutes. The energy and creativity were both where they need to be, even if West Ham also allowed shots worth 1.3 combined xG to a team that EloFootball.com ranks 146th in Europe.
Maybe things are gelling for Moyes, but even in their improving state, they pulled just one point from Spurs and Chelsea, two teams that will be obstructing their path back toward another spot in Europe.
Liverpool: Spending big without addressing your biggest issueBy comparison, Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool was almost fiscally responsible this offseason. While half the Premier League spent at least $50 million more than what they brought in in terms of transfer fees, Liverpool brought in $89 million from transfer departures and spent only — only — $99 million, mostly on 23-year old centre-forward Darwin Nunez . Essentially, they traded Sadio Mane (now at Bayern) for Nunez, fullback Neco Williams (Forest) for 18-year old Calvin Ramsey and backup winger Takumi Minamino (Monaco) for 19-year old attacking midfielder Fabio Carvalho .
Those “trades” could all work out in Liverpool’s favor over the next couple of seasons. Carvalho has already scored twice in 150 minutes and snared a game-winner against Newcastle, and while Nunez’s start has been volatile — he was suspended for head-butting an opponent and hasn’t scored since August 6 — he’s taking lots of shots and getting plenty of touches in the box. He’ll probably do just fine at Anfield.
Liverpool, however, is not doing fine. The “trades” did little to alleviate what age is doing to their overall roster — of the 15 players who have logged more than 150 minutes in all competitions, seven are at least 30, and only three are under 25 — and did little to address what was already becoming a concern last season: midfield depth. Injuries have meant heavier-than-expected usage for both 36-year old James Milner and 19-year old Harvey Elliott , and both are pretty one-dimensional players at this point (Milner in intervention, Elliott in attack).
As a result, Liverpool is currently a team that looks mostly like Liverpool — lots of possession, lots of pressing, far more shot attempts than most opponents — but is completely lacking in both creativity and pace. Only 5.1% of their shots have been worth at least 0.3 xG in league play (12th in the Premier League), compared to 11.3% for their opponents (18th). They’re taking more shots, but opponents are attempting most of the good ones, and those averages, of course, don’t include what Napoli did to them last week in Champions League play.
Napoli 4, Liverpool 1 (Sept. 7)
Shot: Napoli 18, Liverpool 15
xG per shot: Napoli 0.23, Liverpool 0.07
Total xG: Napoli 4.1, Liverpool 1.0
Total post-shot xG for shots on target: Napoli 6.2, Liverpool 1.8
Liverpool did a lot of things Klopp tends to want to do. They enjoyed 61% possession, they both started and ended more than twice as many possessions as Napoli in the attacking third, they attempted just 36% of their passes in their own half (Napoli: 72%), and they created four shots on target from set pieces. But Napoli frustrated Liverpool’s attack while carving up both their midfield and defense and creating high-level chances at will.
And all this says nothing, of course, about the sprints.
(I never quite know what to make of running stats, but in this case it can’t really say anything good.)
This is currently an older, slower and thinner Liverpool squad. If the Reds peak in the spring and make another Champions League run, then so be it. But evidently $99 million doesn’t get you what it used to.
Chelsea: Why you don’t ask your manager to serve as sporting director (and then hire another manager to manage) Long term, new owner Todd Boehly’s stewardship of Chelsea Football Club could work out just fine. He’s been at least partially responsible for the juggernaut that the Los Angeles Dodgers have become in recent years, and he knows what a well-run franchise looks like. But he’s taken some short-term lumps.
Boehly’s decision to basically serve as his own director of football, with manager Thomas Tuchel as his primary scout and adviser, blew up in his face pretty quickly. To be sure, the summer acquisitions of players like not only defender Wesley Fofana (21) and wingback Marc Cucurella (24), but also teenagers like midfielder Carney Chukwuemeka (18) and goalkeeper Gabriel Slonina (18), could end up paying off for quite a while down the line. But they paid inflated price tags on both Fofana ($88 million) and Cucurella ($72 million), and they also paid a combined $75 million on attackers Raheem Sterling (justifiable) and Tuchel favorite Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (less so), all because Tuchel had given up on extremely recent attacker signings. Timo Werner was sent back to RB Leipzig for a fraction of what Chelsea paid for him two years ago, and last year’s star signing, Romelu Lukaku , was sent back to Inter on loan and at another potential (and potentially massive) loss.
Post navigation 
