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The Premier League season is here! Let's dust off the newsletter and talk about the most important player on the odds on favorite to win the league. Spoiler alert: It's not who you might think.
There’s never anything definitive to say about a team, player, league or sport after just one slate of matches. Paul Pogba isn’t going to break the Premier League’s assist record. There’s no Harry Kane ‘Ewing Theory’ going on with Spurs. And Everton are (probably) not going to emerge as a dominate force in year one of Rafa Benitez (or any season under Rafa). That said, there some outcomes from each weekend won’t necessarily give us universal truths about the state of the Premier League, but they will help us ask more targeted questions about how this season will shape up.
This week, it’s an important one: Is Kyle Walker the most important player in the Premier League?
Okay, let’s get something out of the way first: City is (probably) fine. They started Benjamin Mendy, Nathan Ake and a 36-year old Fernandinho that finally looked like his legs had gone. Still, while away at Spurs with fans in the stands, City created better chances (1.9xG to 1.3), almost double the number of final third touches (227 to 121) and actually over twice as many penalty area touches (43 to 19) [*all stats courtesy of FBRef/Statsbomb unless otherwise noted]. Per 538 data, City also doubled up Spurs on non-shot xG — 2.0 to 1.0. Basically, City was marginally better and lost on a goal from a player with a history of turning wide-angle chances into goals. These things happen.
While the final scoreboard showed ‘0’ in City’s score column and thus cued the Harry Kane transfer takes, it was hard to leave that match focused on the defending champs’ attack. As mentioned above, City dominated the field possession game with Kevin De Bruyne only coming on as a sub and Phil Foden out injured. That was mostly thanks to their £100 million newcomer — Jack Grealish.
The former Villa star did all the things that hurtled him towards the league’s elite last season. Grealish created five shots (leading City), had 13 progressive carries (second most over the entire weekend slate, trailing Albert Lokonga of Arsenal), carried or passed the ball into the penalty area seven times, took three shots and was fouled six times. That’s a pretty good days work for a side that created almost two goals worth of chances.
The fact that all that creation turned into zero goals definitely paints a picture with a Harry Kane-shaped hole in it. As one person who is much smarter than me pointed out in conversation (he also writes a Substack newsletter about soccer), some of Spurs’ counters could be linked to the fact City often lacked a fixed point in the box to get on the end of chances. Yet the reasons behind their creation doesn’t account for the fact that when Spurs did counter, City were a disaster in defense.
Single match xG is obviously problematic in terms of telling a complete story. In this case, however, it may have undersold just how threatening Tottenham were on their counters. Quite a few transitions that started with Spurs players outnumbering City ones, ended with a pass that went backward, awry or was tipped away by a last ditch effort from a Manchester defender. Also, if Son Heung-min was flanked by attackers slightly more dangerous than Steven Bergwijn (0.28 xG+xA last year, but only 22 and could get better one day!) and a 29-year-old Lucas Moura (0.29 xG+xA in 2020-21) things would likely have looked a lot worse.
A big part of the problem was the combination of Fernandinho and Mendy. The latter’s injuries and resulting lack of game time seemed to have both robbed him of his mobility and the necessary anticipation needed to not look like a fish out of water when defending transitions. The former, however, may have reached the “please gracefully transition to MLS” stage of his career.
It wasn’t so much of what Fernandinho did against Spurs, it was what he didn’t do. Namely, foul the shit out of them. In a game with countless transitions, Fernandinho, the master of the tactical foul, had…..one. To put this in perspective, Fernandinho’s first three years at City (when he was 30 or younger) saw him average anywhere between 1.76 and 2.42 fouls per 90. In a match that seemed built for him to break up transitions with well-timed takedowns and dance on the fault line of a second yellow card for the latter part of the match, Fernandinho looked unable to even get into position to foul somebody.
That Fernandinho is on his last legs is, obviously, not news. The Brazilian’s decline as counter-destroying defensive midfielder that has made Pep’s City machines work has been discussed often as the team transitioned Rodri into the lead man in the No. 6 role. Since that shift, we’ve found out, (or maybe always known?) the Spaniard is far more a ‘possession fulcrum’ than ‘defensive destroyer’. After a rough transition period and equally worrying start to last season, Guardiola ‘Pep’d’ a solution to yet another complex problem and created one of the most suffocating defenses the Premier League has ever seen. That defensive dominance was partly due to throttling back the press and playing slow-mo ball, but Pep also employed a one-man counter stopper who wasn’t a defensive midfielder or even a center back. It was Kyle Walker.
As Grace Robertson illustrated in an excellent series on Guardiola’s Champions League history, the legendary manager’s greatest fear is his ball-control machines being taken apart on the counter. That’s important to keep in mind when you see the decline in any stat that relates to attacking output that Walker’s game suffered between last season and his three previous years in Manchester. Walker’s key passes, passes into the penalty area, carries into the penalty area and expected assists all dropped drastically in 2020-21 — sometimes more than 50 percent of the previous season or pervious high point in his City career.
At age 30, and being a fullback who made his name torching the sidelines in his forays forward, it’s easy to link Walker’s drop in attacking production to the natural aging curve for soccer players. When watching City games last season, it was plain to see that Walker’s decline wasn’t an age problem as much as it was his role. With Joao Cancelo tucking inside and pushing forward as another creator in the final third, Walker’s role at right back was to sit back — essentially forming a back three with Ruben Dias and the revived John Stones. As a result of this tactical shift and the slowed pace, a City team that gave up nine goals on the counter attack the previous two season, gave up just one last year (per Whoscored data).
That’s why a Harry Kane-less Spurs team running roughshod in transition in a Walker-less team stands out (anyone remember Kylian Mbappe’s 0-shot performance in the Champions League semi-final last season?). The absence of Walker in Sunday’s match can actually be summed up in one stat from the Analyst: Steven Bergwijn led all Premier League players in average carry distance at 19.47 (the next closest was Watford’s Ismaila Sarr at 16.43). One of those carries ended with an assist to the lone goal of the match. Oh, and in a related note Bergwijn lined up on the left wing for Spurs, ya know, the area of the field where he’s typically coming into the zone of City’s right back.
Now City, as John Muller pointed out, might have been done in by Pep tinkering with an odd 2-3-2-3 set up. It was a formation that seemed built for Grealish to play out on the left and interact with Sterling, also on the left side of the midfield, in the final third. Out of possession, that meant Sterling was often occupying a zone you’d typically find a central midfielder taking up. Or the hyperactive Bernardo Silva. That all seems less than ideal.
So perhaps with all of Pep’s striker-less tinkering, it’s not a surprise this was the most open we’ve seen City since early last season against Leicester. And while the idea of Grealish and Sterling combining in the left half-space seems like a nightmare for opposing teams, and a way for City to ratchet back up the goal tally that dipped last season, you need a player to stop opponents from blitzing the Manchester goal in the rare times the big sky blue machine doesn’t have the ball pinned in the opponents final third. That player — if we can take something away from this past match result — seems to be Walker.
So if the England right back is the key man to allow Manchester City, the league’s overwhelming favorite, to reach their expected heights, does that now mean he’s the Premier League’s most important player?