Peterborough United: A statistical look at recent failures to return to the Championship. Part Two: 2016-17 season. ‘Underperforming attack, underperforming defence and nothing exciting to report.’

The Peterborough Telegraph asked stats and data expert James Mayley (@ReportPosh on Twitter) to crunch the numbers on Peterborough United’s current stay in League One.
Grant McCann.Grant McCann.
Grant McCann.

Data is only readily available for the last five seasons so we will cover a season a day from Monday to Friday. Today (September 8) James covers the 2016-17 campaign.

Key:

Expected Goals (xG): A model which measures the likelihood of any individual shot being scored, with 1 being a 100% chance of scoring and 0 being a 0% chance of scoring. It takes into account factors such as angle, distance and body part of the shot taken.

Paul Taylor.Paul Taylor.
Paul Taylor.
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Expected goals against (xGA): As above but for shots conceded.

Expected Points (xP): The number of points a side would have collected if the side who had the better chances to score had won, based on each team’s xG data.

Per 90 (p90): How often a team or player performs a certain action every 90 minutes of game time.

Key Pass: A pass or cross which creates a clear situation or opportunity for a goal but the receiving player misses this chance.

Marcus Maddison.Marcus Maddison.
Marcus Maddison.
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Deep Completion: A successful pass (not cross) that finishes within 20m of the opposition goal.

Underperforming attack, underperforming defence and not much exciting to report.

In 2016/17 Posh jumped two places to make an 11th place finish. In a quirk of the stats they collected 62 points, scored 62 goals and conceded, yes that’s right, 62 goals, leaving them considerably short of the 73 point total required to reach the play-offs that year.

This interesting statistic is about as exciting as the season gets. Whereas Grant McCann’s Posh side had briefly thrilled fans and brought the entertainment back to London Road in the previous season, it’s hard to find too much to talk about from 16/17 as everything about the season was distinctly mediocre.

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Posh underwhelmed at both ends of the pitch and to a mid-table finish while putting in mid-table performance data. The 11 points between Posh and that magic sixth spot was a chasm Posh were never going to be able to cross.

Despite not being their lowest finish, it was Posh’s worst season statistically of the last five years: the lowest points total, fewest goals and the only time Posh failed to finish the season with a positive goal difference.

It’s significant that the 2016/17 season was the only year that Posh scored fewer goals than the xG model suggests they should have, underperforming their xG of 66.7 by 4.7 goals. One of McCann’s fatal flaws at Posh was his failure to identify and recruit forwards who could fire Posh up the league. We’ll talk more about McCann’s recruitment of forwards in the 17/18 section, but from the table below we can see that his 16/17 squad failed to pull up too many trees in the goalscoring department.

Top scorer Tom Nichols’ finishing ability was rightly much maligned at Posh as he never scored as many goals as his movement and all-round game suggested he could have. However, Posh’s worst culprit that season was the returning Paul Taylor. Taylor wowed fans during his first spell at Posh, but by the time he returned both his magic, and shooting boots, had clearly been left behind as he scored less than half the number of goals we would expect given the quality of chances he received.

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In a similar vein to Robertson’s Posh, shot locations, specifically a shoot on sight policy, was once again an issue for Posh who were again wasteful with their shooting. They took the second most shots per 90 in the League at 14.23. However, 52.48% of these came from outside the box, the highest proportion in the league, at an average distance of 21.27m. This gave Posh an xG per shot of 0.095, the fourth lowest in the league, which helps explain why Posh only scored the 10th most goals in the league despite taking the second most shots. Although when you have Marcus Maddison, who took the second most shots in the league (151), many of which came from quite ridiculous distances, it perhaps not all that surprising.

It seems as though finishing and shot selection really let them down as Posh posted some highly impressive creative numbers. Creativity was about the only the area where Posh excelled, which is to be expected as the side was packed full of creative talent including Gwion Edwards, Marcus Maddison, Martin Samuelsen and Paul Taylor.

Posh had the fourth most deep completions in the league (9.08 p90), the most through balls (8.42), the fourth most key passes (3.11), the seventh most touches inside the opposition box (15.57) and completed the second most dribbles in the league (33.61). These would usually coincide with a team finishing much higher than 11th and scoring more than the 10th most goals in the league. However, despite regularly getting into some good positions, decision making and composure in the final third regularly let Posh down as they lacked a cutting edge in and around the box.

It was also a frustratingly familiar story defensively for Posh. The 62 goals Posh conceded was more than any top six side, while four of the top six conceded fewer than 50 goals. Posh gave up the second most shots in the league (702), with only bottom placed Chesterfield’s 726 shots against being more. Posh’s xGA of 70.73 was the 6th worst in the league, and worse than any other side in the top 18 of the table. One area where Posh performed well was in blocking a higher percentage of opposition shots (33.6%), than any other League One side, which was a key part in Posh actually conceding significantly fewer goals than expected and potentially saved them from dropping into the bottom half of the table.

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