Replacing Jürgen Klopp: The Business End

The fourth 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.

In the third post, I finally explored the data with a specific focus on the first two ingredients of the recipe, progression from deeper areas and penetration into the penalty box.

I’d recommend reading all of those posts before this new one, which will repeat the same analysis as in the last post but this time around, we’ll focus on the business end of the pitch in attack and defence. The meaningful stuff.

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So again, we’re using the same sample. Just under 700 teams from Europe’s top six leagues — England, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy and Germany — over the past six seasons, including the current campaign.

This post is going to focus on the final two ingredients of the game that are so important to establishing dominance on the pitch.

• The ability to create shots

• The ability to create valuable shots from optimal locations

You want to create as much as possible, while restricting your opponents from doing the exact same as much as possible. And you want your shots to originate from as close to goal as possible, while restricting your opponents from achieving 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 another two clever-sounding metrics.

• Shot differential: this is just the number of shots posted by a team per match, minus the number they face. So if your team generates 20 per match and faces 18, their differential would be +2.

• NPxG differential: this is just the non-penalty expected goals posted by a team per match, minus the number they concede. So if your team averages 1.9 npxG per match and concedes 1.7 npxG, their differential would be +0.2.

Again, any team with a negative differential in either of those departments isn’t dominant. It’s also worth pointing out that npxG differential is already a thing on the analytics scene, unlike the other three metrics I’ve used in this series.

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