Sunderland linked with ex-Liverpool man, FA charge Newcastle United, Aston Villa want Wilson Isidor
Sunderland have had a superb start to the season - but can they really finish in the top four?
It’s coming up to a decade since the Premier League title was celebrated in Jamie Vardy’s living room, with Wes Morgan being dragged around the floor on his back by his ecstatic team-mates as the most improbable champions of them all – Leicester City – were crowned after Tottenham Hotspur’s draw 2-2 with Chelsea.
10 years on, and it’s hard not to feel like many of the same stars are aligning once more. Many of the obvious contenders are either struggling for form or seem to have collapsed altogether. Spurs are doing quite well without really looking like a plausible champion. Most importantly, teams that nobody expected to be anywhere near the top of the table are right up there.
Sunderland are one of them. Promoted via the play-offs, for them to be in the top four a quarter of the way through the new season is already remarkable. But is their form sustainable? Can they really challenge for a place in the top four? Or could they even go one further and recreate Leicester’s triumph?
Just how good are Sunderland this season?
Nobody, even on Wearside, is likely to claim that Sunderland have as strong of a squad as teams like Arsenal, Liverpool or Manchester City, at least on paper – but if there was one lesson to be taken from the 2015/16 season, it’s that the best group of players doesn’t always come out on top.
Sunderland’s summer transfer business has, through sheer volume if nothing else, given Régis Le Bris rather more to work with than many people thought. Some of the signings – particularly goalkeeper Robin Roefs, defenders Omar Alderete and Nordi Mukiele and defensive midfielder Noah Sadiki, have looked like inspired additions.
Other teams have tried to ward off relegation by spending large amounts on a vast number of players, and have often failed or at least succeeded only by the skin of their teeth. Sunderland, however, seem to have reshaped their squad remarkably well despite the loss of Jobe Bellingham, arguably their best player during their promotion campaign last season.
The results of all that wheeling and dealing, and some impressively flexible tactical work by Le Bris, have been spectacular. Their 2-1 win over Chelsea leaves them fourth in the putative Premier League table, and what seemed set to be a tough battle against relegation suddenly looks like a challenge to the established upper order. The question is whether Sunderland are really that good, and whether they can sustain their form.
There are two ways to answer that question. One is to crunch some numbers and look at the stats, and compare Sunderland to previous overachievers like Leicester. We’ll get to that in a minute. The other, which we’ll start with, is to combine the eye test with the common sense approach to the way that the Black Cats are playing.
By that measure, while Sunderland’s grit and graft has been unquestionable, there are some reasonable concerns. For starters, their win over Chelsea was their first against a team in the top half of the table – they lost to Manchester United and drew with Bournemouth and Crystal Palace – and it’s hard not to feel that they have perhaps ridden their luck in one or two of their positive results.
They surely should have lost, for instance, to a Nottingham Forest side that dominated the second half at the City Ground but blew several presentable chances. One could argue that Sunderland have been a classic case of getting luckier by working harder, but there is a sense of a team riding their fortune a little, no matter how much they have deserved that luck by dint of sheer determination and their capacity to create match-winning moments.
Still, it’s hard not to note that things won’t get much easier. They have a horrifyingly difficult looking run of fixtures through December and early January which will seriously stretch their credentials as challengers to the top four– and it won’t help that that same run of games overlaps with the Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco.
Sunderland are set to lose as many as seven players, including Sadiki and fellow summer signings Habib Diarra, Reinildo Mandava, Simon Adingra and Chemsdine Talbi, who scored the winner against Chelsea. It will be a brutal blow and a serious test of their squad depth. The players who took them to the Championship play-offs will have to be good enough in the top flight, too, and recent history suggests that is seldom the case.
Without touching the data, it’s difficult to see a fairy tale that endures for the entire season. But do the numbers offer a little more cause for optimism?
Do the stats give Sunderland any chance of being the next Leicester City?
The recipe for Leicester’s success was a combination of star players plucked from obscurity and a judicious helping of luck at just the right moments. Leicester were good, of course, but their expected points total from that season was 69, which would have been good enough for fourth place. Instead, they earned 81 points and won the league.
They were second for total xG that season, but seven teams had a better defence by the same metrics and on average they ‘should’ have conceded rather more goals than they really did. In short, they were just close enough to being the best to let a bit of good fortune carry them over the line.
Flash forward to this season, and Sunderland aren’t able to paint such a pretty statistical picture. Their total of 8.6xG is the fourth worst in the division. Their defence is bearing up remarkably well – they’re fifth for xG allowed with 10.4 – but they are massively over-performing in attack.
So if Sunderland are able to achieve anything in Leicester’s ballpark, it’s the attacking side of the ball on which they need to get lucky, and it’s a little tricky to see the star quality in their squad just now. Players like Wilson Isidor have been able to score when it matters most but they don’t (so far as we can tell) have a Jamie Vardy or a Riyad Mahrez on the books who will keep the goals flowing week in, week out.
Leicester had a fantastic attack and a defence that was just good enough for luck to keep the goals conceded down low enough to win the league. Sunderland have a fantastic defence – one that, thus far, really does look worthy of a top four team or thereabouts – but are a long way off the best sides in terms of creativity and potency up front.
Over time, teams’ performances tend to revert back towards the mean. Teams that are over-performing up front slow down their scoring, teams that are bleeding more goals than the stats suggest they should usually tighten up. It’s not always the case, of course, and the data is only ever indicative of a likely direction of travel, but all the numbers suggest that either Sunderland need to get considerably better in the final third, or they will start to lose games.
The biggest gap between Leicester and Sunderland is simply the amount of luck they’re asking for. Leicester needed a pretty solid dose of it, and got plenty. Sunderland, way down the ladder in terms of end product up front, need an awful lot more. They’re getting it thus far, but it’s very unlikely to stay that way.
Perhaps it can hold on until January and a few more signings can be made which bridge the gap and make up for the loss of so many players to the Africa Cup of Nations, but it’s considerably more likely that they end up falling short of their supporters’ wildest dreams.
Perhaps it’s more important simply that they avoid relegation, and their defence has looked more than good enough to clear that particular bar. For the past two seasons, every team that has come up has gone straight back down. Right now, Sunderland look like a team that will stay the course. That may be a little less sexy than a Champions League place or a title challenge, but it would be a major victory all the same.
Still, there’s encouragement – of a sort – to be found by looking over at Nottingham Forest. They may have slid out of the top four conversation at the last knockings and may have fallen apart at the hands of a capricious owner since, but they earned European football against all odds, and did so when the stats suggested that they should have fallen well short.
Forest were the 15th best attacking team in the Premier League by expected goals, and the ninth best in defence. By expected points, they should have finished firmly in the bottom half of the table, and yet they’re embarking on their first European adventure in 30 years instead. They didn’t get enough good luck for long enough to make the top four, but prove that it’s possible to keep beating the odds for long enough to defy the stats and achieve something meaningful, and proof that teams don’t always regress all the way to the mean. Maybe Sunderland’s story will be the same. Just try not to sack the manager immediately afterwards if it is.
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