The Week in Stats: Liverpool have Europe’s most durable back line

We take a closer look at the numbers behind the headlines, including Liverpool’s impressive defense.

This week we examine when teams are scoring and conceding their first goals in games, how evenly clubs are spreading goalscoring duties within their squads, and which sides’ passing styles neutrals will probably want to avoid.

First impressions

Having previously looked at fast/slow starters in terms of goals scored or conceded in the opening and closing 15 minutes of matches, we’ll return to the subject here. This time, the focus will be on when teams are netting or conceding their first goals in matches.

When Cardiff allowed Brighton to score after just six minutes on Saturday, it continued a trend of conceding early in games that dates back to their opening match at Bournemouth, which saw the Welsh side let in their first goal of the season within 25 minutes.

These tables certainly support the general narrative about Liverpool this season – less freewheeling, less fun, but very durable indeed. In contrast, on average Leicester have conceded more than half-an-hour before they’ve scored, while Liverpool have found the net 35 minutes before letting in a goal.

We can also see why Napoli’s games in recent months have been so entertaining, even by their high standards – they’ve repeatedly had to make comebacks, encouraging them to throw all of their considerable attacking talents at opponents.

There are some surprises here as well, though, along with clear evidence that starting a game well is no guarantee that it will end the same way. For example, despite tending to score very early in matches, Leverkusen have had a rotten time of it in the Bundesliga so far.

Similarly, this has been a poor league campaign overall for another of Europe’s fast starters, West Ham, even if Manuel Pellegrini has predictably managed to steady the ship at the east London club. And no team in the top four European leagues is scoring its opening goals later in games than Wolves, who nonetheless deserve to be much higher up the Premier League table than their current 11th position.

The average time of the first goal in any game is fairly constant across these leagues, by the way, coming at around the half-hour mark in England, Germany and Italy, and about five minutes later in Spain.

Spreading the load

Dortmund’s deliriously exciting 3-2 win over Bayern on Saturday saw them remain the Bundesliga’s highest goalscorers, and they also emerged from the weekend as the club in Europe’s major leagues with the largest number of individual players to have scored.

That perhaps shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, given that six different Dortmund players managed to get on the scoresheet during their 7-0 rout of Nurnberg in September.

Of the teams posting the lowest numbers, Guingamp and Fulham are currently bottom of Ligue 1 and the Premier League respectively. But while there’s a strong correlation between the amount of goalscorers in a squad and a side’s eventual league position, registering very highly or poorly in this metric isn’t an absolute guarantee of success or failure.

Fiorentina only managed to finish fourth in Serie A in 2014-15, and Monaco ended up third in Ligue 1 a season later, more than 30 points behind big-spending PSG.

And while Burnley went down in 2014-15, Caen finished above the relegation zone in both of those seasons, albeit only by a point. However, the player whose goals kept the French club up — Croatian forward Ivan Santini — left for Anderlecht in Belgium during the summer, so repeating the same trick a third time might prove especially problematic.

Passing judgment

During their 6-0 mauling of Shakhtar last Wednesday, Manchester City posted the highest percentage of backward passes by any team in Europe’s top seven tournaments this season.

https://twitter.com/brlive/status/1060328547456294912

While intuitively most of us would see this as a sign of a negative game plan, in practice it usually demonstrates a patient approach rather than a lack of attacking talent or intent. City went on to post the season’s seventh-highest percentage, 43.7, in their convincing Manchester derby victory on Sunday.

Although backward passes certainly aren’t a reliable indicator of games and teams that you’d rather give a wide berth, high balls and long passes do tend to be.

Very few people outside of South Wales and the southern fringes of Madrid would choose to watch Cardiff or Getafe play one ball in every four long, and it’s clear which clubs and matches the vast majority of neutrals would opt for here.

The same is true of teams that are prone to playing high balls. It’s hard to imagine many wanting to tune in to see Huesca and Getafe engage in prolonged bouts of head tennis, and unless you’re Tony Pulis or Sam Allardyce, the choice between the two sets of games again seems very straightforward.