Replacing Jürgen Klopp: Progression and the Penalty Box

The third instalment of a five-part series dedicated to finding a successor to Jürgen Klopp using data

So in the first post of this series, I outlined the background behind Liverpool’s search for a new manager and why the process is complicated to say the least for a whole host of reasons.

In the second post, I offered an insight into my thinking regarding how to judge attacking and defending from a managerial perspective, particularly in relation to taking charge of a major team. For this new post to make sense, I’d highly recommend reading that first.

Now, we’ve reached the good part. Or in my case, the hard part. I want you all to know this took absolutely ages. I entered this series without knowing exactly how I’d navigate the actual analysis, but after considering a few different ideas, I made a start.

---

My sample consists of just under 700 teams. These have been gathered from Europe’s top six leagues — England, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy and Germany — over the past six seasons, including the current campaign.

So for example, six Liverpool teams feature in the sample — 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24 — with Jürgen Klopp obviously managing all of them, and the same goes for Manchester City and Pep Guardiola. Arsenal also have six teams in the sample, but some are managed by Unai Emery and some are managed by Mikel Arteta.

The aim is to compare all of them to determine the best coached teams over the past six years before basically having a look who was managing them at the time. If we keep seeing the same name doing well, that manager is probably good and perhaps worth exploring further.

---

This post is going to focus on the first two ingredients of the game that are so important to establishing dominance on the pitch, as suggested in my last post.

• The ability to progress up the field

• The ability to enter the penalty box

You want to progress the ball as much as possible, while restricting your opponents from doing the exact same as much as possible. And you want to enter the penalty box as much as possible, while restricting your opponents from doing the exact same as much as possible.

To determine which teams have been good or bad according those ingredients since 2018, we need to put a number on their abilities, so allow me to introduce two relatively simple but clever-sounding metrics.

• Progression differential: this is just the number of progressive passes completed by a team per match, minus the number they concede. So if your team completes 20 per match and concedes 18, their differential would be +2.

• Penalty box differential: this is just the number of passes into the penalty box completed by a team per match, minus the number they concede. So if your team completes five per match and concedes three, their differential would be +2.

A team with a negative differential in either of those departments isn’t dominant, at least not in my mind. Obviously I have sympathy for the guys who are managing players who aren’t that good, but we’re searching for a Klopp successor here. The standard is high.

---

So here’s a quick look at the best and worst ten teams for progression differential over the period in question:

Guardiola, eh. But on a serious note, based on the top and bottom ten, you can see an immediate problem with this sort of exercise. Remember when Ian Graham talked about how much the best players had an impact on things?

Nevertheless, we continue. Below, you can see the full picture with every team from the sample included based on their progression differential on one axis and their penalty box differential on the other.

Notice the strong correlation between the two metrics. If you’re good at one, you’re usually good at the other.

At this point, we can remove Klopp and Guardiola from the sample, because why include them? We’re also now going to focus on the top 50 teams for progression differential and the top 50 teams for penalty box differential to see which managers are good at coaching dominance.

---

After picking out of the best 50 teams for progression differential and the best 50 teams for penalty box differential, I realised that 38 of them featured in both groups. So rather than being left with 100 teams, we’re left with 62.

Next, I used common sense rather than science to filter out some of the teams managed by multiple managers in the same season, because in those cases, it’s difficult to determine who deserves credit.

For example, Roberto De Zerbi’s first season at Brighton and Hove Albion remained in the sample because he took over from Graham Potter after just one month of the campaign, whereas Real Madrid had three managers in 2018/19, so I removed that team. This took us from 62 to 53 teams.

Below, each team has been placed according to their performance in both departments, but I replaced each team name with the name of their manager at the time to make things more interesting and relevant to this topic.

After seeing the results, I had three immediate — although not particularly important — takes:

1. The influence of the best players is still pretty clear

2. Bayern Munich have truly dominated the Bundesliga for some time

3. The top sides in Portugal are really good at being dominant

So which managers feature prominently in the top 53? Below is a list of the names and how many of their teams are left in the final sample.

Managers who appeared once in the final sample: De Zerbi, Xabi Alonso, Nico Kovač, Jorge Jesus, Ronald Koeman, Luis Enrique, Maurizio Sarri, Erneste Valverde, Bruno Génésio, Bruno Lage, Mauricio Pochettino, Artur Jorge, Paulo Fonseca, Ange Postegoclou, Rudi Garcia, Igor Tudor, Christophe Galtier, Zinedine Zidane, Ivo Vieira.

---

At this point, I feel the need to include a few caveats. First of all, the above analysis absolutely does not mean the best manager in the world is Sérgio Conceição.

Instead, the managers with more than one team in the final sample simply have more evidence behind them in terms of their proven ability to coach dominance to a group of players.

It’s also worth noting that De Zerbi, Alonso and Postegoclou haven’t been on the scene for very long in Europe. If they had been in place for all of the six years that we’ve covered, they could have easily placed more than once.

Another interesting note; of the 11 outliers, only three of them have evidence of coaching dominance at two different clubs: Nagelsmann, Amorim and Ancelotti.

The others have all coached dominance at one club and upheld that style for more than one season. Arteta has two teams in the final sample, for example, and both of them are Arsenal. All five of Conceição’s teams are FC Porto. All three of Xavi’s teams are Barcelona, and so on.

Does this matter? Who knows, but it does perhaps offer an insight into how much these managers can benefit from time at one club to install their ideas and establish their identities.

Also, Gasperini, for example, has four teams in the final sample which is great, whereas Alonso has just one which isn’t ideal. On the other hand, that one Alonso team looks better in the numbers than all four of Gasperini’s outfits, so do you favour the guy with more evidence behind him or the better performer?

---

To summarise, we’ve basically identified a number of managers who have a proven record of coaching their players to dominate in terms of progression through the thirds and penetration into the penalty box.

As we continue our search for a Klopp successor, the selection of names we’ve identified should all be of interest.

In the next edition of this series — out later this week for paying subscribers — we’ll conduct the same exercise using shots and expected goals to check out the best managers when it comes to the really meaningful stuff at both ends.