More advanced metrics show Arsenal played with less pressure and intensity after Wenger was fired

21 comments

1. I don’t think the fault was Emery’s tactics; as you suggest, apart from his insistence that we play it out from the back even when everyone could see we weren’t very good at it, I’m not sure what tactics he was trying to impose. But in order to execute a high press successfully, you have to do it as a team, and everyone has to be willing to run their collective arse off. I think Emery’s biggest failing was his bizarre personnel management, alienating players and undermining morale to the point that the team just gave up playing for him. Whether or not they understood what he was trying to get them to do, bottom line is they clearly didn’t like him enough to put in the effort to make anything work. By contrast, ask the Liverpool players how they feel about Klopp.

   1. I have seen such statements regularly and they were answered by harsh criticism going the other to the manager. I do think most people are trying to balanced, even though some instances are just very bad on one side.

      I get why people will have issues with the players because they are the ones we see playing, but we also don’t realise that they are trying to play to instruction. The best managers are defined by a strong ability to communicate their ideas effectively. The results do not only rely on this ability alone, especially if the players do not give their all into applying those clear instructions. This saying is used a lot around Africa, about the relationship between players and their coach.

      “The coach gives the players the plans that if they apply well with all their effort and energy, it will result in success for the players. The players offer the manager the amount of energy and effort that if he has a good plan, will make him successful.”

      With Unai’s Arsenal though, energy and effort was not the problem. The underlying running metrics show that the players, from the off, were giving the manager their all. This is to the point that Arsenal ran more than any other team in the league in his first season.

      A big misunderstanding in football fandom and by analysts for a while now, has been that successful pressing sides are ,by and large, reliant on energy or intensity. Pressing is a complicated approach to defending and to playing football, it is based far more on positioning and tactical understanding on the part of the manager and on pitch tactical intelligence on the part of the players.

      With Liverpool and Klopp, there is a huge insinuation that the players are pressing well because they like him, but that is an easy simplified statement that misses the point. Players firstly want to succeed and secondly, they want to enjoy themselves. The relationship between the Liverpool players is that Klopp has given them plans that provide them with both, and it already was like that before the success because players can also sense when a manager’s plan can lead to such.

      Pep Guardiola introduced a radical style of play to Barcelona when he started and the players knew from the start, even if it was a bad start, that they had a special plan, that suited their strengths, hid their weaknesses and all they had to do was apply their utmost effort and energy. The players actually had to go to Pep , after an unconvincing start to the season, and convince him him that his plans would lead to success, and urged him to continue.

      I use these two to show their different uses of the press and how it is not an energy thing. With Klopp, his press is set to send teams into central midfield areas. He wants his two fullbacks to press the opposition backwards, his wingers who are less energetic in the press use their body positioning to force the opposition inward while the striker takes the deeplying option out of contention to receive the ball, and send them into a midfield three built to disposes. The purpose to Klopps press is that It works in leading to Liverpool’s biggest attacking strength which is to attack a disorganised defence at pace.

      Pep on the other hand, is very Spanish in his approach in that his press is focused on forcing the opposition to play into difficult zones pressing them into those areas, preferably the wide areas. His press is to force opponents into having less and less options until a hoof up field is played, that way giving the ball back to them and allowing them to rest in possession. The purpose of his press is that it works to City’s biggest attacking strength which is to dominate possession.

      Now ask yourself the purpose for Unai’s press and you will see its biggest shortfall. Unai’s team’s had no particular strength and were weak all round.

      In short, Unai had the player’s energy and effort and failed to utilise it. His press was not successful because it was not structured well and didn’t close the right gaps, and it had no clear purpose. Just like his passing out from the back. He sent players to press in a way the was coordinated wrongly and failed to provide any way for his team to protect the defence after the first press was bypassed or to utilise the ball if it was successful. As players, if a coach’s plans expose you, you lose faith in that coach and become conservative with your talent, ideas, body and effort. What I saw at the end was players saving themselves(talent, ideas, body and effort) up for a better coach. He had their all at the beginning, more than they gave Arsene, but he failed to utilize it and lost their trust. His tactics , I won’t say were bad, but they were (astoundingly) wrong and that failure is in him.

      1. I forgot to add this, but each way of pressing I just described for Liverpool and for City also explains why they are on opposite ends of the pressures applied per game.

         Liverpool use pressures applied as a fundamental aspect of their attack, so they create such situations by shooting, crossing and generally taking more risks on the ball to afford the opposition restarts through goalkicks and freekicks in their own half. Every restart is basically a build up for Liverpool and pressures applied are their chance creation.

         City prioritise possession, so their pressures applied are very intense in getting back the ball, but since their intention is to hold onto possession, they spend most of the game dictating play which means they don’t have as much a need as Liverpool to create many pressures applied.

         Unai’s team on the other hand is right in the middle, this isn’t to show that we are not as good or bad as everyone else, but it does show that we had a less defined idea in terms of our style or plan. The lower we got, we got that way without upping our possession, which just meant we were passive.

         Stats are helpful in that way. Analysis will always need to be well rounded and stats will continue to play a part in explaining what we see.

         1. Nice analysis, Devlin.

         2. Good points, Devlin. To be clear, I wasn’t blaming the players for their reaction to the manager. Success comes from having a clear plan, having players that can execute it, and having the wisdom and flexibility to change things up if they’re not working. And then, having everyone on board and giving the effort needed in today’s game (110%!) to make it work. It starts with the manager, who is responsible for devising the plan, communicating it effectively, and cultivating a relationship with the players that generates the commitment from them to give the necessary effort. Emery did none of these thing, as far as I could tell.

2. Thanks for the post Tim.

   We have talked about this a lot and I am not trying to suggest that Emery was doing a good job but I think your implication that everything that happened was the fault of his tactics, teaching or his management style is off target. You have mentioned this in several posts but in my opinion a bigger part of the problem is the players emery had to work with are just not as good. In Wengers final year he had an Ozil who was 2 1/2 years younger, Wilshere, Ramsey, Mkhitaryan, Kos all playing regular minutes. Any team with that group of players is going to have good passing stats. Give Wenger or any manager the group of players Emery, Llundberg, and Arteta worked with this year and there is 100% chance that teams passing stats are going to look much worse compared with Arsenal in 17/18.

   Stats are only useful if they give an accurate indication of what is actually happening on the pitch. As far as the defensive stats you mentioned, the fact that in 17/18 Pep’s Man City team was the worst in the league at overall pressures applied and yet they won the league and conceded the fewest goals in the league means that stat is worse then useless, its completely misleading.

   1. No, it doesn’t mean that at all.

      Thanks!

      1. Ähm, is Bill telling you about stats 🤔.

3. I was a Season Ticket holder until the beginning of this season when I decided not to renew because of the shambles that I was watching week-in and week-out. I hadn’t been a fan of statistical analysis of the sport I have watched for many, many years without such distractions until Tim’s analysis a few months ago nicely illustrated in numerical data and graphically what I had seen on the field over the last season and a half.

   Tim’s analysis confirmed my impression as a simple but longstanding observer of the game that Emery had presided over a shambolic disintegration of defensive organisation, midfield ball retention and attacking incisiveness that meant not only that we struggled to win against even mediocre opposition but also that we had become awful to watch. I still attended most home PL games this season and without question there was an upswing in organisation and quality as soon as Freddie took over with a further improvement when Mikel Arteta got his hands on the squad. The terrible stats and awful fan experience since Wenger left aren’t down to individual players’ quality, they’re down to bad coaching, confused strategy and a lack of leadership. It’s fair to say this is not the only time these failings have been demonstrated by Emery.

   One of the most worrying things remains the rumour that Sanllehi was considering extending Emery’s contract last summer. If true, it means that confused strategy and lack of leadership are problems further up the food chain as well.

   1. I agree. The problem at Arsenal is bigger than the manager, though it’s objectively true that Emery made Arsenal worse in every metric.

4. Tim

   How can you place any importance or predictive value on a stat such as “pressures applied” when the one of Pep’s teams had the worst record in the league at applying pressure and that same team was the best in the league at preventing the opposition from scoring goals. The only logical conclusion is that stat has no real predictive value

   1. you only look at stats but (cliche) they don’t tell the whole story, bill. stats are a tool meant to enhance your understanding of the football you see. you have to take into account the football that you saw being played first and stats second. it’s why your use of stats don’t convince when you talk about players like mesut and giroud, when their quality is there for all to see. we look at the game as the first metric.

      simply put, if you watched man city, they had the fewest “pressures applied” because they always had the ball. in order for city to apply pressure, their opponents had to establish clear possession. many times, players would nick the ball off a city player but city would, quickly, win the ball back before possession could be clearly established by their opponent.

5. thanks for providing statistical clarity, tim. it confirms something we all knew.

   bottom line, i believe unai emery is a great tactician who knows the game very well. i have no doubt concerning his love for the game and his ability developing youngsters. however, his time at psg and arsenal has convinced me he’s a poor strategist and an awful leader. he’s better suited to be a staff coach than a manager, responsible for making decisions; certainly ill-suited to be a manager of a big club with a dressing room full of egos. no doubt, he’d be a fantastic addition to any coaching staff but, at this point, would he be willing to take on that role? that’s unlikely.

   my take was always that the arsenal players looked uncertain about their role in the team under emery. it seemed unai left them inundated with data that’s simply too difficult to process on the field in real time as it changed from game to game. he couldn’t sell the players on his strategy because he had none. instead of developing a team strategy and making slight deviations based on the opposition, emery completely changed the strategy from match to match. like i said, it’s too much new information to process every 4 days. likewise, the players clearly lost confidence in his ability to lead them to success. when that happens, it’s a wrap.

   arsenal made a few gaffes in the player recruitment department, but none more significant than at cdm. that failure caused wenger to have the worse season of his arsenal career. what the stats prove is that wenger, at his worst, was far superior to emery at his best. credit to emery for trying his best to give xhaka time to grow into the role for which he was recruited…and to arteta for simply saying this role isn’t for xhaka but finding a way to bring him back into the team keeping his quality on the pitch.

   bottom line, with players like mesut, alexis/aubameyang, ramsey, and lacazette all in their primes, arsenal should have implemented a “win now” approach as they’d spent tons of money on those players. however, it was all undermined by the lack of a proper cdm. it was like watching the galacticos after they sold makalele to chelsea; all of that superstar talent was doomed to fail and all the soccer people knew it.

6. I would argue that you don’t really want your team tackling very often in the opposition final 1/3. You want your defenders staying on their feet especially in the final 1/3. A tackle seems like its often a last act of desperation when you are out of position and already in trouble on the wrong side of the ball. A missed tackle is certainly the fastest way to concede a penalty.

7. RIP Don Shula, mastermind of the NFL’s “Invincibles”. They ran the table in the early 70s, a feat that has never been equalled though New England came oh so close, before losing to the Giants in the Superbowl.
   Kudos on yesterday’s post. Melville’s Vanity is one of the best reads anywhere in long time.

   1. Still say NE should have been forced to forfeit the “win” over the Eagles after getting caught red handed. Effin Patriots.

8. I feel like this post was just meant to re-articulate why I owed Tim an ice-cream cone. (I delivered, by the way!)

   What a miserable tenure we had under Emery, in every possible way.

   1. ha! maybe you’re right. you were just defending the manager. but you’re right…it was absolutely miserable. I’m thinking Tim planned this for the end of the season and just decided to proceed with it now.

9. Apart from the lone voice of support now and then, I would think everyone has consigned the Emery years to the bad mistake bin. Thank god for Arteta. The fact that the stats back up Emery being woeful at Arsenal just brings up old wounds though. How on earth was he in line for an extension.

10. Josh

    I understand why you use stats. Some stats are very useful and tell a very accurate story. You mentioned Giroud and the fact that he no longer can score goals which is the #1 job for any CF gives us an accurate indication of why his club managers no longer give him minutes. Mesut’s Ozil’s consistent downward trajectory in assists indicates he no longer can make those final pass which lead to a goal being scored give us an accurate indication that his ability to influence the game has been steadily fading.
    However with the proliferation of stats its clear that not all of those stats are created equal and there are some are just white noise and provide no useful information and there are others actually seem to be misleading. One of the things that distinguishes all of Pep’s teams starting with Barcelona is their willingness and ability to pressure the ball and win it back quickly and any stat which suggests they are the worst in the league at applying pressure means there must be a significant flaw in that particular stat.

11. I love Mikel and I love Wrighty to death. For those who haven’t seen the whole thing, check it out:
    

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