Ange and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Season

Tottenham Hotspur have 24 points from 21 matches this season in the Premier League, a 43-44 point pace. It’s an abject failure of a season in terms of points.

Tottenham Hotspur have a goal difference of +11 and an xG difference of 1.7. How weird is it for a team to have so few points per match from those numbers? I set a threshold of a +10 goal difference over a 38 match season on Stathead.com (fbref) for the Premier League since its founding starting in the 1992-1993 season, so over 30 years.

There have been 197 team seasons over in the Premier League where a team has a goal difference of 10 or more. I cannot compare to other seasons through 21 matches, but over the course of a full season, no team in the history of the Premier League has as few points as Spurs per match with a goal difference so large. And the thing is it’s not particularly close.

Of course, it’s not been a full season, Tottenham in fact are on pace for a goal difference of +18 over the course of a full season. Of course, you might say, well even if Spurs have been unlucky to have the worst point total in the history of the premier league from so many goals, there’s got to be something real there, such that they are racking up goal difference against bad teams and not against better team. So let’s narrow our search and just say: what is the 25th percentile point total, so bad but not historically bad, for a team that has a goal difference between 10 and 20 goals over the course of a season. There are 56 such seasons and the 14th worst season is about 1.55 points per match, so about 59 points over a season.

Okay okay, but Spurs are lucky to have such a good goal difference given their xGD right? So let’s look at this: in the Big 5 leagues in the era in which fbref has xGD, what sort of point total do teams typically have when their xGD is between 0 and 5 over the course of a season? Typically about 1.4 points per match, so in the low 50s. Okay but maybe there’s just something about the way Ange manages such that Spurs get so few points from their goals and xG right? Well, last season Tottenham were one of the 73 teams to finish a season with an xG difference of between 0 and 5 goals and Spurs had the 5th most points ever from that xG difference.

Tottenham have lost every match in the Premier League they’ve played in this season decided by one goal. They’ve won 7 out of the 8 matches they’ve played in this season decided by 2 or more goals. In matches where the xGD was within a goal either way, Spurs are 2-2-8:

People hate when you tell them that this is largely luck, that goal difference and xG difference are better predictors of future points than mere points, but it’s true. There are definitely things that aren’t luck but in terms of performance little separates this year’s Tottenham from last year’s other than points gained.

And you can see it in cup performances. Spurs are 6-0-1 this season in cup matches decided by a goal, including one goal wins over Manchester City, Manchester United, and Liverpool. Last season’s Tottenham went 11-4-7 in matches decided by an xGD within one goal. Last season Spurs won 9 of the 14 matches they played that were decided by one goal. Last season as they were racking up a good number of points in the league from the same goal and xGD they drew to Fulham and got knocked out of the League Cup and lost to Manchester City in the 4th round of the FA Cup by, you guessed it, one goal. Imagine this season Spurs got eliminated early in the domestic cups and instead were 6-0-4 in domestic matches decided by one goal? They’d be on 42 points.

Nearly six years ago, Bruce Schoenfeld wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine about Jurgen Klopp as Liverpool were fighting with City for the title. The piece starts with an anecdote about Liverpool sitting down with Klopp and telling him that his Dortmund team in 2015-2016 was one of the unluckiest teams they had ever seen:

Graham had not seen the game. But earlier that fall, as Liverpool was deciding who should replace the manager it was about to fire, Graham fed a numerical rendering of every attempted pass, shot and tackle by Dortmund’s players during Klopp’s tenure into a mathematical model he had constructed. Then he evaluated each of Dortmund’s games based on how his calculations assessed the players’ performances that day. The difference was striking. Dortmund had finished seventh during Klopp’s last season at the club, but the model determined that it should have finished second. Graham’s conclusion was that the disappointing season had nothing to do with Klopp, though his reputation had suffered because of it. He just happened to be coaching one of the unluckiest teams in recent history.

Klopp had not used any data but agreed:

Klopp analyzed no data at Dortmund. In this, he was like most managers. He was consumed by coaching his young team on the field. But by the time Graham left his office that morning in 2015, Klopp’s epiphany was complete. He was convinced that Graham, despite having watched none of Dortmund’s games, appreciated the unusually bad fortune that had befallen the team almost as keenly as if he’d been coaching it himself. Later, Klopp learned that without Graham’s analysis of that season, which was only one aspect of as thorough an investigative process as any soccer club had undertaken to replace a manager, he never would have been hired.

I don’t know if Ange Postecoglu should be the manager of Tottenham going forward. I happen to think yes, and that he’s lifting the current talent of the team to impressive performances under the circumstances. I think the team without its star center backs isn’t very good (notably Spurs have played at about a 70 point pace with Van de Ven and Romero on the pitch together under Postecoglu). I think the fact that the players haven’t quit on the manager shows an incredible amount of leadership given the run of bad form and bad luck and the number of matches the team has played. I also think he’s been a bit stubborn and flawed, though has adapted more tactically much more than he’s given credit for.

But Ange is the same manager he was last year, and Spurs have mostly the same players they had last season too, and they’ve had drastically different outcomes on largely the same underlying performances. I don’t that what’s happened at Spurs this season in terms converting goals to points and even xG to points is mostly just about the shittiest luck you could imagine. And I am at least a bit concerned that if Tottenham don’t look through the horrible luck they’ve suffered in the league this season they’ll be giving up on a very good manager. And I hope our data focused front office see this the same way I do.