How teams are creating their pressure
It’s early, these categories are a bit leaky (working on them constantly), and I don’t have a great, easy explanation for the Other category, but…we roll out the rough draft to get the info to the people.
We are looking at how teams are creating their attacking pressure so far this season.
Attacking pressure is xG, deep touches and a bit of progression. We have 5 categories: dead ball situations, settled possession, transitional play (50+ yard moves in 12 seconds or less), takeaways (3 passes following an opponent live ball turnover) and Other (usually following loose ball scenarios but a few rebounds, some throw ins and other stuff that escapes my not so clean code).
We will look at the average team, a few standouts and then all teams listed.
Unsurprisingly our first standout comes from Pep’s City team, who has 56% of their pressure from settled play, the largest single standout attacking wise of any team in the Premier League. This tracks totally with what anyone watching would have said.
Their share of pressure generated in transition is the lowest in the league, the largest “negative” standout.
It is good to remember in absolute terms, City basically have 40% more pressure generated than any other team.
On the other side of the transitional share comes Newcastle at 36% of their total attack (Man City were at 14%). Newcastle are also well above average in terms of dead ball production, meaning a small share of their total comes from settled possession.
The only team higher than Newcastle in % of pressure created via transition is, unsurprisingly, the Marmoush/Ekitike Axis of Excellence and the rest of the guys kind of hanging around.
The team with the lowest settled% is Wolfsburg. Hasenhüttl is trying to create an attack all around dead balls and takeaways…that’s a bit like cooking an omelet with just the cheese and spinach.
While Ten Hag had seemingly improved the transition defense that had been so leaky, no team had allowed a higher % of the pressure against them via turnovers than Man Utd (see: Liverpool match for a great example).
Arsenal are set up to make you work hard in settled possession for your goal threat. They did it almost unbelievably well last year and still are a settled-possession funnel.
While set play defense has seemed to improve for Spurs overall, it still remains a notably high % of the total pressure they allow. That’s partially because they are completely set up defensively to allow almost no settled possession, their 21% rate is the lowest in the league by far.
I think this helps me conceptualize teams and how they play at a glance, even if it is not totally refined right now. Hope it helps you a bit as well!
Totals
