Ceiling and Floor Performances plus Team of the Week (ft. a sneak peek at the Bournemouth/Fulham Conundrum!)

Watching Brighton and Aston Villa I have been recently thinking about attack ceilings and the ability of your offense to steamroll opponents. It often feels watching those teams that a 2-goal performance is about as much as they have in the tank so underdogs can often feel like they just need a goal to have a shot at a win. This is not true against Chelsea, Spurs in their pomp early this season and last year, maybe Newcastle and more where an early goal can be wiped away much more quickly. Arsenal are another example, I feel like we see the same grind it out 1-2 goal type of performance every week to set up a consistently dominant defense. The variance of teams performances does not seem consistent across the league. How can we look at this in an interesting and numbers-based way? Well, let’s try something here today.

Every week I track “Team Performance” which is just a basic rate of weighted team ratios in different metrics: xG, deep touches, shots, Fields Gained and transition. I look at just offense and defense numbers as well. Here is an example of the week by week metrics for Fulham, for example:

You can see the defensive struggle vs Wolves, the shootout vs Man City, the pummeling of Brentford, etc, etc.

Today we are going to look at a simple measure of how often does a teams attack reach 75 or above in my attack score and how often it scores 25 or below.

To orient ourselves, the average Liverpool game is a 69 with Chelsea at 64. Ipswich is the lowest at 24 with Leicester at 33. The best defenses are Arsenal and Liverpool at 28 and the worst defenses are Saints at 69 and Ipswich at 66.

Ceiling Attacks (Games with scores above 75)

Man City-12

Liverpool-10

Tottenham-7

Chelsea-7

Newcastle-6

Fulham-5

…..

Nottingham Forest-1

Ipswich, Wolves, Everton-0

Floor Attacks (fewest games with a score below 25)

Chelsea-0

Brighton, Man City, Tottenham, Liverpool-1

…..

Leicester, Ipswich-12

Everton-11

Ceiling Defenses (most games with opposition attack score below 25)

Arsenal-12

Liverpool-11

Fulham, Man City-8

Chelsea, Aston Villa-7

…..

West Ham, Leicester, Ipswich, Wolves-0

Floor Defenses (fewest games allowing an opposition attack score above 75)

Fulham, Liverpool-0

Arsenal, Wolves, Crystal Palace, Chelsea, Man Utd-1

…..

Southampton-13

Ipswich-11

Leicester-10

Brentford-9

Interesting Tidbits

Wolves almost never get overrun for a bad team. City did, and Brentford came inches away but for a team battling relegation they have a very solid defensive setup. Solid meaning solid, not very good. They have had just a single “shut down” game (vs Man Utd).

Fulham’s high floor and solid ceiling. Fulham have not had a single floor defensive game and just two floor attack performances (Brighton and Arsenal back to back though United to start the year escaped by a hair).

They have shut down Saints, Ipswich x2, Leicester x2, Brentford, West Ham and Man Utd.

The attack has had a ceiling performance against Leicester x2, Newcastle, Spurs, Palace, and Brentford. They have built something incredibly stable with the ability to bash bad teams and to avoid getting rolled up by good teams at Craven Cottage. It’s almost the platonic ideal of a Europa League team in my mind, a team that has solid control of both transition and territory and is just a smidge of shot quality away from pushing on up.

Arsenal’s attack ceiling is so rarely seen. 3 times we have seen a ceiling performance from Arsenal (Leicester, Saints and Forest) and 4 times we have seen a floor performance (Bournemouth, Liverpool, City and Spurs). Playing with the handbrake on increases the odds of draws (Arsenal have 8 of them) They are theoretically in the title race but it doesn’t feel likely at this point, Arteta’s personality likely helped shape Arsenal into the force they are today (along with lots and lots of money) but his inability to free the team up and allow some extra risk of conceding has hurt the team this season.

The team who triggered this in Aston Villa come out exactly like I expected. They rarely have either a ceiling or floor attack performance (2 of each). Home performances vs Everton and Southampton were ceiling and away at Newcastle and Arsenal were floor. But Villa were never truly a CL level team with how they play, they don’t have the ability to pile the pressure consistently on anyone but the very worst teams so always want to limit opponents.

The team in the middle couldn’t be anyone else could it? Crystal Palace have finished between 10th and 15th every single season since 2013 and it’s showing up again this year. Last years absurd efficiency under Glasner made them look like a European team has slipped away (mainly due to poor shot quality lacking the gamebreaking Olise) and they look a lot like a team that will finish somewhere between 11th and 14th this season. They have a total of 8 ceiling or floor performances split almost evenly between for and against offense and defense (2/2/1/3). In this time of chaos, knowing Palace are Palace can be calming in a way.

Is there a lot more to be drawn out of the West Ham attack under Potter? They had a ceiling game vs City and one last time out at Aston Villa, two spots most teams really struggle. They pummeled Ipswich and Leicester earlier in the year. The ceiling they have shown is much higher than you would expect for a team with 28 total goals.

Does This Actually Matter?

Or is it a sort of numerical oddity/randomness over 23 game weeks that sort of makes intuitive sense…well I am not totally sure. This is a first foray but I certainly think something is there. The style Villa play just feels much less likely to dominate than Fulham or Bournemouth. There will be something there in the data to find this, this is just a first pass.

Team of the Week, Week 23

FWD: Dango Ouattara [3], Antoine Semenyo [6], Justin Kluivert [4], Nicolas Jackson [4](inexplicably subbed off early after a dominant performance at City), Mo Salah [14], Alexander Isak [9]

MID: Carlos Baleba [2], Sander Berge, Boubakary Soumare, Dominik Szoboszlai [5], Ryan Gravenberch [4], Alexis Mac Allister [5], Ilkay Gundogan [2] both in a row for the man who looked absolutely washed up around Christmas, Bruno Guimaraes [7], Lucas Paqueta [2]

DEF: Ilya Zabarnyi [2], Virgil van Dijk [6], Ibrahima Konate [4], Andrew Robertson [6], Trent Alexander-Arnold [7], Aaron Wan-Bissaka [3]

I was going to add a piece in about why Bournemouth is 3rd in the xG table while they show up down in 9th in my metrics while Fulham is 6th in my metrics and 8th in the xG table but there’s enough for another piece. The Bournemouth/Fulham conundrum. I think readers of this site are probably well-informed enough to understand Forest are simply a league average team running extremely hot so I haven’t even really bothered looking deeply into their numbers. Maybe something pops up but this last week definitely felt like a “they were due” type of game.

When you allow so much efficient progression eventually the other team is going to get off some good shots.

Meanwhile, poor Fulham to lose that game

More on these teams hopefully coming soon. Also I basically own their entire attacks in fantasy (Muniz, Wilson, Nelson, Traore, Iwobi, Robinson, Ouattara, Evanilson, Unal, Semenyo, and Christie all on my second place teams roster) which has drawn my focus towards them often and given me a bit of real-life eyeball takes and not just excel nerd only. Metaphorical sunlight to liven up the dark and dank spreadsheets if you will.