With their 1-0 win over Manchester United on Tuesday, Nottingham Forest tightened their grip on third place in the Premier League. It moved them 10 points clear of sixth, which is the cutoff, likely, for Champions League qualification for next season. Obviously, a team that barely survived relegation the previous season (with a points deduction) then turning around the very next season to qualify for the game's highest competition is a naturally weird story.
Given how weird Forest have been in previous seasons — buying every player under the sun, hiring Mark Clattenburg specifically to moan about refereeing, their fishy finances, e.g. — it only gets more so. But maybe even more weird than we first realized.
When I set out on this little sojourn, it was mostly to track how teams that have so little of the ball do in the season after they've climbed to such great heights. Most teams that come from the clouds to finish in the top four, and there aren't many of them, have some sort of swashbuckling aspect to them. They play some variety of attacking football, with some youngsters plucked from bigger clubs or an older player finally putting it altogether or some combination thereof that creates a barely held together force of nature.
There isn't much of a track record of teams defending so deep and hitting teams on the counter, finishing in the top four. I thought it would be fun to see how sustainable it would be. Well, dear reader, you're not going to get that answer here. Because there isn't enough of a sample to give you an answer. There are only two teams!
Everyone is right — Nottingham is a lot like Leicester City
That's right, this season's Forest and the team they are most compared to, the 2015-16 no-seriously-they-won-the-league Leicester City, are the only teams in the past 10 years of the Premier League to average less than 50 percent possession and finish in the top four. It isn't just rare, it's unheard of.
But Forest are even weirder than that! That 2015-16 Leicester team had a PPDA (passes per defensive action) of 9.57. That ranked 13th in the Premier League then, though funny enough it would rank 6th in this year's Premier League, an indication of how many more teams have opted for control and backed off hair-on-fire pressing. BUT THAT'S NOT WHY YOU CALLED.
This season's Forest have a PPDA of 15.08! It ranks dead last in the league, as you might expect, and would have been so far behind the rest of the 2015-16 Premier League so as to have been left behind the horizon. Compared to Forest, Claudio Ranieri's Leicester were basically a Marcelo Bielsa fever dream. Some managers from the past might look at this Forest team and wonder if they aren't clinically dead for most of the matches they play.
But what works is what works. Forest fans can laugh at anyone bitching about their tactics next September when Barcelona or Bayern Munich show up to The City Ground.
For that Leicester team, they obviously weren't able to repeat their heroics, but there were some mitigating circumstances. They lost their best player, N'Golo Kante, to Chelsea, and didn't add much to augment their Champions League campaign, and ended up finishing 12th. Who Forest might lose in the summer, we'll just have to see. Forest's squad is a little bigger already than Leicester's was (the latter had seven players top 3,000 minutes in the league, Forest should only have three or four do so). So perhaps they could weather one or two departures a touch better.
Obviously, Forest have had some fortune to get where they are. They've outscored their xG on the season by 11.5 goals so far. In the past 10 years, 10 Premier League teams have outrun their expected goals count by more. Four of them are Manchester City teams under Pep Guardiola, who just do that kind of thing. One was Liverpool of 2018-19, who then backed that up by outrunning their xG even more the next year in winning the title. Then they popped like a balloon in 2020-21 when their entire defense got hurt. 2020-21 Tottenham outscored their xG by over 10 goals, and then outscored it by nearly eight goals the following season.
Frighteningly for Forest, the 2021-22 version of Leicester outscored their xG by nearly 15 goals. The following season ... they were relegated. But most teams that have outshot what the numbers say so aggressively have been able to come close again the following season. Of course, all those teams were "Big Seven" clubs. The one who wasn't was Leicester, and we see what they've become.
That's a worry for next season. For now, perhaps it's just best to salute Forest, the weirdest Champions League club England will have produced.