Premier League 2016-17 season grades: Swansea
By Adam Stocker
Swansea finished 15th in the Premier League in 2016-17, but what grade do they get for their overall performance?
No team in the Premier League had as turbulent a season as Swansea. The Swans fired two managers before the turn of the year, and were in the thick of the relegation battle until the penultimate week of the season. Despite the changes, Swansea finished the season well and ultimately finished 15th.
The Swans got off to a horrible start to the season with just four points from their first seven match. That slow start cost Francesco Guidolin his job. Bob Bradley was the somewhat controversial replacement, but he failed to turn things around, as the Swans dropped to 19th due in large part to a horrible defense.
Paul Clement was hired as the third Swansea manager of the season, and finally began to turn things around, winning four of his first seven matches in charge to drag his side out of the relegation zone. However, a tough six-game stretch saw Swansea again drop into the bottom three, before four wins and a draw in their final five matches confirmed their survival.
The manager
Which one? Guidolin was given only seven matches to start the campaign after guiding the Swans to safety the season before. His record — five losses a draw and a win — wasn’t good, but a difficult fixture list certainly didn’t help; Swansea faced Chelsea, Southampton, Manchester City and Liverpool in the Italian’s last four matches in charge. He was fired with club in 17th.
Things got even worse under Bradley, whose 11-game tenure was the second shortest in Premier League history. The Welsh club picked up eight of a possible 33 points, as his side conceded a woeful 29 goals. When Bradley was fired, on Dec. 27 with club in 19th place, relegation seemed all but certain.
Clement, a former assistant at Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, was something of a left-field choice, but proved to the perfect fit for a side desperate need of a defensive overhaul. The Swans won four of their first seven matches under the Englishman, including one against Liverpool at Anfield, to climb out of the relegation zone.
Crucially, the Swans, who were conceding nearly three goals a match under Bradley, let in only 25 goals in their 18 games with Clement in charge. That improvement at the back proved to be the difference in a close relegation battle with Hull, who experienced a late-season resurgence of their own under Marco Silva.
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The players
To no one’s great surprise, Gylfi Sigurdsson was Swansea’s best player this season, and is once again being linked with a move to a bigger club. The Iceland international played in all 38 goals, scoring nine goals and adding 13 assists, many coming off his exceptional set piece deliveries.
Swansea’s two big summer transfers had differing results. Borja Baston, brought in from Atletico Madrid, struggled. The Spaniard appeared in 18 games and scored only one goal after impressing for Eibar in La Liga.
Fernando Llorente, meanwhile, was the club’s second best player after Sigurdsson. Llorente arrived in Wales from Sevilla and scored 15 goals in 31 matches, many of them coming in crucial games down the stretch. The Spanish scored four goals in the last five games of the season to help the club avoid relegation.
At the other end of the pitch, Lukasz Fabianski deserves a lot of credit for an impressive season behind what was, at times, an incompetent defense. The Polish keeper kept eight clean sheets and rarely made a mistake in goal.