“What enriches you is the game, not the result. The result is a piece of data,” the Spanish football coach Juanma Lillo once said. “The birthrate goes up. Is that enriching? No. But the process that led to that? Now that’s enriching.”
Let that serve as the thinking behind the first annual Football Style Awards, a celebration of process over results. These awards are not about who won, though they are about pieces of data. A club data scientist friend and I have spent the last year building a new football app called futi that measures not just who’s good but what they’re good at, based on detailed phase of play data and models that measure how teams and players play.
Here’s one stylistic trait that stood out for every Premier League team this season. We hope it’s enriching.
1) Arsenal: Defense (maybe) wins championships
Arsenal haven’t just allowed the fewest goals in the English top-flight – they’ve been one of the most impenetrable defenses in almost every phase of the game.
Futi counts a tactical phase of play as “won” if the team in possession improves their goal probabilities from the start to finish, which the Gunners’ hapless opponents almost never did. Want to play through them with organized possession? Good luck winning the buildup, progression or finishing phases against a defense that allowed a bottom-three win rate in all three. Maybe a fast break? Sorry, nope, Arsenal were also the toughest team to get past with speed.
Even if you found a way through, it was another trap: unlike Manchester City, who attempted the fewest counterattacks in the league, Arsenal had the most.
2) Manchester City: Dribbliest boys
In some ways the stats read like vintage Pep Guardiola. Most passes attempted, by a long way. Deadliest attack by goals both real and expected. Highest field tilt, meaning City took far more touches in their opponent’s third than vice versa, just like the good old days.
But change has a way of creeping up on you. During the last World Cup, Lillo, then Guardiola’s assistant, bemoaned the global effects of his team’s widely imitated passing game: “The good dribblers are over, my friend. Where can you find them? I can’t see any.”
City’s scouts had no such difficulty. For the last few years they’ve been assembling a whole heist movie’s worth of lockpickers: first the dribbling god Jérémy Doku at left-wing, then Matheus Nunes and Rayan Aït-Nouri on the flanks, hard-charging Tijjani Reijnders and the luxurious Rayan Cherki in midfield, and finally Antoine Semenyo to complete the set.
The result is a squad that leads the league not only in take-ons but also progressive carries, which shuttle the ball 25% of the remaining distance to goal. The good dribblers are back, my friend.
Related: De Zerbi’s impact at Spurs is undeniable but team’s fragile self-destruction remains | Jonathan Wilson
3) Manchester United: Most versatile
The comeback story of the season took place at United. According to futi’s team ratings, which use a match-adjusted blend of expected and actual goals to model each team’s strength in attack and defense, United were never quite as bad as last year’s 15th-place finish, but no team has made more progress since last fall.
The dirty secret is that most of that improvement came before Ruben Amorim got the sack in January. Although his stubborn attachment to 3-4-3 became a running joke, formations aren’t the same as tactics. Amorim’s team were one of the most flexible in the league, splitting their fixtures fairly evenly between three of futi’s four match styles. Under Michael Carrick, United have evolved to play less Bunker and Counter ball and more of the Press and Possess style more commonly associated with top teams, but this season’s turnaround has been a reminder that there’s more than one way to win.
4) Aston Villa: Staying grounded
Unai Emery’s men kept it on the grass, spending less time in the high ball phase of play and going up for fewer headers than anyone but Man City. Some teams use possession to set up a vigorous high press that can lead to long balls the other way, but Villa were content to take it slow on and off the ball, staying patient in the buildup and not applying much pressure when they lost the ball. Their grounded style allowed the third-fewest expected goals in transition, not to mention the fewest bruised foreheads.
5) Liverpool: Progress, not perfection
It was a season to forget at Anfield, but there were a few positives. Even without Trent Alexander-Arnold’s magic right boot, Liverpool led the league in progressive passes – line-busting balls that gain 25% of the remaining distance to goal – as well as passes into the penalty area.
No one in the Premier League was more successful at moving the ball through midfield in organized possession, measured by how often Liverpool won the progression phase of play. If only they’d been able to figure out how to finish those moves – or stop opponents from making progress in the other direction.
6) Bournemouth: Chaos is a ladder
Some coaches want to keep the game under control, but Andoni Iraola would rather light a stick of dynamite and run for cover. Futi’s “chaos” tendency measures how much time a team spend in loose ball or high ball situations where neither side can really be said to be in possession. By that metric, Bournemouth were England’s lords of chaos, which is what you’d expect from a side that ranked in the top three for direct buildups, high tempo and high pressing.
7) Brighton: Building something
Unlike Brentford, the Premier League’s other data-driven overachievers, Brighton don’t just sell players to far richer clubs – they even manage to play like them. Even in a season where widespread man-to-man high pressing made playing out of the back a dangerous proposition, Brighton consistently found a way through, over or around. No one won more of their buildups than the 67% success rate for Fabian Hürzeler’s side, who edged out Arsenal, Liverpool and Man City for the honor.
8) Brentford: Set-piece savants
Brentford’s decision to promote their set-piece coach to manager was met with widespread skepticism, but like most of owner Matthew Benham’s bets, it paid off with the most expected goals from set pieces in the league.
Benham’s clubs have long exploited an analytics-driven edge with their aggressive dead-ball tactics, and this was the season the rest of the Premier League finally took notice. But even as other teams raced to copy Brentford’s long throws into the box, which are about twice as likely to lead to a goal as shorter attacking throws, no one attempted more of them than the Bees, thanks to Michael Kayode’s heroic hurls.
9) Sunderland: Tactically on-trend
It might be a stretch to call Sunderland cool, but in a start-stop Premier League season where the tactics were all about man-marking and direct set-pieces, they were: second in the league for attacking free-kicks and attacking throw-ins, fifth for high pressing intensity. The pragmatic style worked well enough to make them a feelgood story and to surprise bookies who’d favored them to drop right back down.
10) Chelsea: Press bait
Give them a medal for bravery, at least. While the rest of the Premier League cracked under the strain of increasingly aggressive man-marking and settled for booting it long, Chelsea kept courageously playing through pressure.
According to tactical tendency data, Chelsea’s buildup play was the most patient as well as the most central, drawing opponents high up the pitch to try to create space between the lines. It didn’t always work – Chelsea’s buildup success and high transitions allowed were both midtable – but when it did, their fast breaks were among the very best.
11) Newcastle: Pressure cooking
You may score on Newcastle but they weren’t going to let you make it look pretty. Opponents won a league-low 55% of their buildups against Eddie Howe’s aggressive press and didn’t fare much better in organized progression. The way to beat the Magpies was on fast breaks or transitions, which happened with unfortunate frequency, but hey, credit for putting in defensive effort.
12) Everton: Free-kick fanatics
Sean Dyche may be long gone but his legacy lives on every time Everton take an attacking free-kick, which they do more often than any team in the league. Most set-pieces require getting close to goal first, which the Toffees aren’t especially good at doing. Instead, they simply turn almost any midfield stoppage into an attacking set-piece by bringing Jordan Pickford forward to launch the ball into a crowd of players at the opposing end. Why bother with all that fussy midfield stuff, anyway?
13) Fulham: The closers
Fulham were not a counterattacking team – they actually played it pretty safe in transition. Those high-octane attacks where Harry Wilson skipped past a defender to put home another worldie or Samuel Chukwueze scurried up the wing to put in a cross for Raúl Jiménez? Most of them started from ordinary buildup play.
Marco Silva’s side led the league in futi’s fast break phase, which some analysts call an “artificial transition” for the way it accelerates out of organized possession to create a counter-type situation. All those broken plays made Fulham extraordinarily efficient when they managed to get near goal: they didn’t reach the finishing phase often but they won a higher percentage of them than anyone.
14) Leeds: Air force
There’s something to be said for knowing your strengths. No squad in the Premier League was taller than Leeds United when weighted by minutes played, and no team attempted more headers or spent more time in high ball phases of play. Not exactly a tactical masterclass, maybe, but keeping the ball in the air was enough to leave them looking down in more ways than one at teams expected to finish above them.
15) Crystal Palace: Best Bunker and Counter
Nobody allowed less expected goals in transition than Oliver Glasner’s deep-crouching Crystal Palace and nobody won a higher percentage of their own counterattacks, thanks to the zippy trio of Ismaïla Sarr, Daniel Muñoz and Jean-Philippe Mateta. No wonder Bunker and Counter – at futi, we defined teams who play it as those who “fall back instead of pressing and try to hit the space behind the opponent with quick attacks” – was by far their favorite style of play.
16) Nottingham Forest: Great wide open
There’s an old adage that teams should make the pitch small when they’re out of possession and as big as possible when they have the ball. Nottingham Forest took it to heart: according to futi’s tactical tendencies, they had the fourth-widest buildup and widest attack, and no one’s opponents built up more centrally. Results suggest football may be a little more complex than that, but they managed to stay up, didn’t they?
17) Tottenham Hotspur: Take on me
What’s a team supposed to do when none of their available midfielders can pass? Tottenham’s answer, reasonably enough, was “dribble a lot” – they took on more defenders than anyone but Man City. Did it work? Well, it’s probably enough to note here that Spurs also spent more time chasing loose balls than any team in the league.
18) West Ham: Impossible to counter
When Nuno Espírito Santo took over from Graham Potter at the start of the season, West Ham sunk deep into a Bunker and Counter rut. There’s not much nice to say about what followed except that an allergy to organized attacking phases of play made them the second-most difficult team in the league to counterattack against. Can’t hit the space behind them if there isn’t any, after all.
19) Burnley: Long goal-kick lovers
If you squint a little, it’s possible to view this whole decade as a tactical tussle over the new goal-kick rule: more and better passing out of the back led to more aggressive pressing, causing the Premier League to become an increasingly high-stakes fight for the deepest areas of the pitch.
Scott Parker’s Burnley were having none of it. They took 81% of their goal-kicks long, by far the most in the league, while sitting off far enough to encourage opponents to play their own goal-kicks short. On rare occasions that the other team did try to go long, Burnley won the phase almost 90% of the time, more than any team in the league.
20) Wolves: Counterpressing champs
There are two things a team that’s just won the ball can do: counterattack to push the tempo or play it safe. Futi calls the safe kind of transition “securing possession,” and Wolves were surprisingly good at disrupting it. Their opponents managed to secure the ball safely just half the time, the lowest percentage in the league – slightly less than against Man City or Arsenal. Maybe losing the ball is like anything else: practice makes perfect.
