Salzburg: Could their defensive weakness cost them the title?

Although they finished the first part of the season in first place, they cannot be wholly satisfied with the way things are going. They lead the table only by goal difference and average only slightly more than two points per game, their lowest tally in recent years. Even last season, when they went into the Play-Offs technically six points behind their opponents LASK, they had a better point average, more goals scored and less goals conceded.

Their current problems are mainly down to defensive issues. They have conceded 15 goals in 12 league games, which is way more than their competitors Sturm (five goals conceded in the same period) and LASK (ten). From a historic perspective, their troubles become more evident: for the first time since the start of the 2016/17 season, they are averaging more than one goal conceded per game. This holds for both expected (1.15) and actual (1.25) goals.

We can see from this number that some of this is down to variation, given that they concede more goals than an average team would. But the difference of 0.1 per game amounts to only two goals in the course of the regular season, so not a huge factor to explain their worrying trends.

The issue was more pronounced in their international campaign. They finished third in the Champions League group and will therefore continue in the Europa League in February. Finishing in this position was however a bit more unfortunate than their current league standing. According to FBREF, they conceded 17 gaols from 8.7 expected ones. Their underlying performances had them as an only slightly below average (8.4 xG conceded) team, but their number of actual goals conceded was the second worst of the 32 teams in the group stage. Accordingly, no team had a higher percentage of xG that ended in goal (195%) or a bigger difference between expected (+2.7) and actual (-7) goal difference. They also had the best xG-difference in their group, topping reigning Champions League winners Bayern Munich (+2.4) and current La Liga leaders Atlético Madrid (+0.3).

Their domestic numbers this year leave them however only in 14th position in terms of expected goals per game conceded, out of a total of 56 club seasons in the league since 2016. They find themselves behind teams like Altach 2016/17 and LASK 2017/18, which both finished fourth. Another indicator of their relative weakness is that four of the six best teams in this ranking were previous versions of their own club.

 

The only conclusion from these numbers is that they have to improve defensively if they are to win the league yet again. But preparation during the winter break (which normally lasts around two months in Austria) was shortened to two weeks this year due to the full calendar, so the question remains if they were able to work a lot on the issue. They also did not do very much on the transfer market to alleviate their problems, bringing back in only defensive all-rounder Bernardo on loan from Brighton. At the same time, central defender Jérôme Onguéné left the club also on loan towards Genoa CFC.

So we can expect that their defensive numbers won't change much in the near future, which makes their offensive output the more important. The graph shows the expected number of points per game for different levels of expected goals per game scored, maintaining their current number of xG per game conceded at the fixed level. The vertical dotted lines show the actual levels of xG scored for the current and last two previous seasons.

If they keep scoring the same way, they are expected to finish the season with around 2.25 points per game, which in turn would be approximately 47 points after the end of the Play-Offs (note that points after the regular season are halved). This would be less than 2018/19 (52) and 2020/21 (50), but would in both years still have been enough to win the title.

The problem with these metrics is that until now, there are two teams in the league with also outstanding numbers, nearly reaching Salzburg's performance levels. LASK and Rapid (both not playing international football anymore, which might be a slight advantage), will challenge them in the upcoming months. This was not the case at the same level in previous years. If Salzburg are to overcome this challenge, they will have improve their defensive work and decrease the chances they concede to a lower level.