Welcome to my season review, this is the first time I’m writing for All Leeds TV. If you aren’t familiar with my work why not check out some of my other work? Mainly using medium atm but I plan on being a lot more active on my Patreon soon.
Medium - https://martin-cbm-riley.medium.com/ Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/CBMPrimate666?fan_landing=true Twitter - https://twitter.com/MartinCBMRiley
*A quick note that any performance data used in this article will have been sourced from FBREF.com, they are in turn supplied their data by Statsbomb.
The dust has settled on the 20/21 Premier League season, the final table decided. So how did it go for Leeds United?
You could say pretty well if you were being harsh, or you could say they were one of the best promoted sides of all time if you want to be realistic. They finished the season in 9th place on 59 points as you can see in the table below.
Also I wasn’t being sarcastic when I said they are one of the best newly promoted sides in Premier League history, I truly believe that. If we take a look back at other impressive seasons for newly promoted sides there was Sheffield United who finished 9th with 54 points in 19/20, then in 18/19 there was Wolverhampton Wanderers who finished in 7th but they needed less points to give them this higher league position and ended with 57 points.
You have to go all the way back to the 00/01 season when Leeds were in the Premier League under David O’Leary when Ipswich Town finished in 5th place with 66 points as you can see below.
However none of these teams we have discussed scored as many goals as Leeds United did this year, they scored a total of 62 goals. Ipswich scored 57, Wolves managed 47 and Sheffield Utd only managed 39 goals.
Due to the attacking nature of Bielsa’s Leeds United Leeds have been called ‘The Entertainers’ of the Premier League by numerous pundits, this is evidenced by the below phenomenal numbers for a newly promoted Premier League side.
However this attacking swagger has at times this season led to a lot of goals being scored by Leeds United’s opponents, leading to Gary Lineker delivering the below tweet.
This tweet directly followed a pretty embarrassing defeat to our fierce rivals Manchester United, in which we were dismantled 6–2 at Old Trafford. Some other pretty heavy defeats came this season too from some of the bigger teams in the league, with a 4–2 loss at The Emirates at the hands of Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal & a 4–1 defeat to Brendan Roger’s Leicester City.
There is some evidence to show that Lineker’s tweet has some truth but please take the below numbers with a pinch of salt when I dig into the numbers later in the second half section.
So as you can see we do allow a lot of chances against us, this did show improvements as the season wore on but more on that later.
Another facet of our play which was constantly praised was our energy levels and commitment to high pressing football. The below graphic is from a recent Tom Worville article from The Athletic.
If you can’t see us, look right up in the top corner, yeah that’s us. We sprint more often per match and for longer distances than any other team in the league and the difference isn’t even close, it’s really not fair at this point.
Yet another quote unearthed this season about this very facet of our game was from Newcastle United’s Jonjo Shelvey and this one I particularly love.
Speaking to the Studs Up podcast, he said: "We played Leeds at St. James Park probably about a month ago, and that Rodrigo fella was in the middle.
"He was meant to be playing centre-midfield, and he was just all over the place.
"I said to him, 'Geez, can you just stand still for one minute? Because you're just running round like a nutcase'.
"Even some of it was just pointless running.
"But he goes, 'I must do, I must do. My manager tells me I must do'."
Shelvey added with a laugh: "I couldn't play for Leeds!"
- Jonjo Shelvey on Stud’s Up Podcast
Me neither Jonjo I couldn’t play for Leeds United, but then again I’m not an elite athlete. However the running Leeds United do is far from pointless. There is a reason for all of the running, it’s to put their opponent under pressure at all times, make it harder for them to play their own football and to regain possession as quickly as possible.
As you can see we run around a lot but this enables us to put out elite levels of tackling, pressing & Interceptions, you’d hate to play us wouldn’t you? This has led to certain questions being asked on a very regular basis this year ‘Can they keep it up?’ well we’ll see later on if we did sustain these levels at the end of the season.
Halfway Point Entertainers
As previously mentioned Leeds were given the name ‘The Entertainers’ because neutrals had fun watching our games and in the first half of the season especially this tag was true with Leeds United’s games having more goals than any other team in the division with a total of 67 goals scored in the opening 19 games, the goals were split pretty evenly with 33 being for Leeds & 34 being against Leeds, this is an average of 3.5 goals scored per match with 1.78 against LUFC and 1.72 for LUFC. The first half of the season puts us at 12th in the league as you can see below.
Some notable displays of attacking verve came up in games in the first half of the season, especially so in victories against Newcastle United(5–2), West Brom(5–0), Fulham(4–3) & Aston Villa(3–0).
The best attacking display of the season was in the game against Aston Villa, we may have scored more goals in other matches but this was the game with the most shots(28) & xG(3.6). All 3 goals were scored by Patrick Bamford.
This was a very entertaining game and the clean sheet was especially satisfying because we were playing with a makeshift defence with Luke Ayling partnering Robin Koch in central defence and Stuart Dallas filling in at Right Back for Ayling and in addition we were playing without our enforcer Kalvin Phillips who was initially replaced by Pascal Struijk but he was replaced in turn quite early in the game due to tactical reasons by Jamie Shackleton.
This was the first time in a long time we had seen no defensive midfielder in use and instead a double pivot Central Midfield was used, Klich was the less attacking off the two for most of the game and did sit deeper more but he did still go forward on occasion, which he did when he setup Bamford’s second goal in the below images. Klich drives forward with the ball from deep, passes to Bamford who takes a few touches and then curls it into the top corner.
However the 1st half of the season also saw our heaviest defeat at the hands of Manchester United when we lost 6–2 at Old Trafford. This game exposed a lot of our weaknesses, we were caught in transitional sequences many times which led to us being exposed and goals came very quickly with Scott McTominay scoring 2 goals in the opening 3 minutes of the match.
McTominay & Fred were a lot more influential in this game than we had expected, they were pushing forward with increased frequency and this caused problems with our man marking system. In the third goal Fred drove the ball forward and initially Kalvin was with Bruno but you could see Kalvin caught ball watching and Fernandes drifts away from him as he wasn’t close enough to him and he just drifts behind him to have an uncontested shot on a loose ball as you can see below.
If Kalvin was closer to Fernandes as he should be then this goal wouldn’t have happened, Kalvin has been superb this season but this was one of the times when he lost concentration and his man which is an issue with the man marking system as all it takes is one man losing his man to cause us problems.
Second Half Pragmatists?
In the second half of the season there was a change in the way we played, this seemed to be in response to the heavy defeat by Manchester United.
This game against our hated rivals seemed to spark something in Bielsa, the second half of the season was vastly different in terms of goals conceded and even the goals scored dropped too, in the second half of the season there were 49 goals scored, 29 for & 20 against. This breaks down to 2.6 goals per match with 1.52 for LUFC & 1.05 against LUFC. This is quite a difference, but more positively this showed a massive improvement with more goals being scored than conceded and the second half of the season shows us much higher in the table in 7th.
So what changed? Well firstly we saw a new face entering midfield. In the opening games of the season we primarily saw Mateusz Klich partnering mainly Rodrigo with Roberts, Dallas & Hernandez in Central Midfield.
But in the second half of the season we saw Stuart Dallas play a lot more in midfield. In the first 19 games Dallas only played in Central Midfield on 4 occasions but in the second 19 games of the season Dallas played as a CM in 16/19 appearances. Secondly Rodrigo picked up a number of separate injuries and he was replaced by Tyler Roberts in midfield.
Firstly lets have a look at the Left Central Midfield role or the “Reserved 8” as I like to call it. As we can see from the below heatmaps we have two different approaches to the role against the same opposition, Klich is further forward more than Dallas is which leads to more stability in midfield, in addition Dallas has been operating more zonally than other players.
Now if we compare where the two players are touching the ball and pressuring we can see Dallas has more influence in deeper areas and Klich has more in advanced areas. Note the below stats are taken from the above two games vs Liverpool, I had to do this as Dallas has spent a lot of time playing in defence so this would alter his season averages.
Then let's look at the difference between Rodrigo & Tyler Roberts, both of these players would probably say their best role is as a Forward rather than a midfielder and especially you can see this in Rodrigo’s heatmap.
Roberts has his high concentration of heat around the middle of the pitch with a fair amount just outside the box whereas Rodrigo’s highest concentration is outside the box and a lot inside the box. Roberts has had more practice in this role so it is natural that he will play the role deeper than his counterpart who is still thinking like a striker.
Now let us look at where each player has their influence on the pitch the same way we did with Klich & Dallas. I will use one game for each player, both games are against Wolves, Rodrigo at home & Roberts away.
As we can see Roberts is much more involved in the middle of the pitch than Rodrigo is with 33 touches to Rodrigo’s 19 but Rodrigo has more touches in the attacking third and Penalty area meaning he commits himself forward more from midfield. However we do see that Rodrigo presses more further up the pitch too.
As you can see with both Roberts & Dallas playing in Central midfield we will have two players who don’t commit as far forward as the alternate choices we have in midfield, this has led us to having more bodies in central areas in times of transition and as such has been part of the reason why we have conceded less goals in the 2nd half of the season.
The second reason why is we changed the way we approached pressing, as you can see from the below numbers there was quite a difference in certain areas of the pitch.
Tackles & Pressures
As we can see there was an overall increase for the amount of tackling we did except in the attacking 3rd where it dropped by 6.4%, however we actually attempted more pressures with 34% more pressures in the 2nd half, this could show that we weren’t pressing as intently as we were in the first half of the season meaning we would keep our defensive shape better.
Touches & Carries
Above we can see once again that there was less involvement in the final third in the second half of the season than there was in the 1st half of season, all carries dropped with progressive carries dropping by 17.5%, this means that we were taking less risks with our carries. Also the only area which increased was touches in our Defensive Penalty Area & in our Defensive Third, this indicated we were keeping hold of the ball more in deeper areas and not risking moving forward too quickly.
Shots & Passes
Once again we can see some changes between the 1st and 2nd half of the season, our total volume of passes decreased by 18.8% in the second half of the season, however we had a slight increase to how often we play the ball long which increased by 1.9%, conversely our medium & short range passes decreased which means we played long balls more often in the second half of the season.
There were less passes across all creative pass types too with more than 25% less for Progressive Passes, Final Third Passes & Passes into the Penalty Area. Not surprisingly this did lead to less goals, shots & xG per 90, however we did score more goals for each shot we took, this could show that we made the most of our chances in the second half of the season and were slightly more clinical.
So there has been a lot of changes in the way we attacked our opposition which has led to less goals as we have already seen but let's take a little look into how our opponents attacked us in the 2nd half of the season compared to the first half.
Opposition Shots & Passes
As we can see there was a drastic change in goals conceded, the 2nd half of the season saw a 47% decrease in goals conceded and this also tied in with a 38% reduction in goals per shot. Yet we still allowed the same amount of shots, I read this as we didn’t allow as many high value chances which tracks with the xG reducing by 16% too.
The passes look a little different, we allowed 18% more passes to be completed in the second half of the season, but less Key Passes & Crosses. The figures for Final Third Passes, Passes to Penalty area didn’t have a big change. But allowing the opposition more passes in less dangerous areas is a very good sign especially since we allowed more passes but the dangerous pass types didn’t increase by the same amount. The one which stands out is crosses, we allowed 14.3% less crosses in the second half of the season, as this has been a weakness this is a good thing to see.
One thing I want to cover individually is set piece chances, we have had a lot of talk about how bad Leeds have been at conceding from set pieces and this is true, however as you can see below. We really did address some of these problems.
Opposition Set Pieces
As you can see there is massive change from the 1st half of the season to the second half of the season, there was a 75% decrease in goals scored from set pieces and 10% less overall chances. I checked too if we had allowed less corners and we hadn't, we allowed 8.63 in the first half of the season and 8.58 in the second half of the season, so with such negligible a difference this isn’t the reason for the big change.
I feel we have firstly done work on addressing our problems at set pieces and secondly we have more aerial strength with the introduction of both Pascal Struijk & Diego Llorente, both of whom are strong in the air. Lastly I feel that Illan Meslier has been a big part of this improvement, the way he has commanded his box has been superb and he takes a lot of pressure off our players with his claims and punches. The changes have been very positive and we can hope this continues.
Conclusion
This season can be read quite differently depending on which part of the season you look at, it’s the classic ‘Game of two Halves’. As the season has progressed Bielsa has made tweaks to his gameplan, but it remains to be seen if this was just a temporary change to allow for the difference in raw quality his side has in comparison to the bigger teams in the division or if it is a permanent change.
Bielsa has never spent this long as a club before and while he has perfected his own idea’s over many years, it is never too late to improve. Especially when you spend time with the same group of players for this amount of time. So these changes he’s made to his tactical idea’s may well become permanent.
The season can be seen as nothing short of a tremendous success, unbeaten at home against the “Super League 6”, beating the current champions and going toe to toe with every club in the league.
Marcelo Bielsa is nothing short of a genius with what he has done with this team and no doubt we will see a few more quality additions enter the team courtesy of the transfer window wizardry of Victor Orta in the summer.
Personally I would like to see a natural Left back, a creative press resistant ball progresser for Central Midfield and a right footed winger to compliment the many left footed options we have on the flanks.
Hope you all have enjoyed this season as much as I have and you enjoyed this article just a fraction of that. I will be releasing a more detailed review of each position soon which will look to see which players stood out the most against their league counterparts.
Many Thanks
Martin Riley
Medium - https://martin-cbm-riley.medium.com/ Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/CBMPrimate666?fan_landing=true Twitter - https://twitter.com/MartinCBMRiley
Comentários