Just a results crisis?

From almost two and a half points per game down to less than one, fewer goals scored and almost double the amount of goals conceded, former leader LASK has clearly not made a good start into Post-Covid football. Given that points were halved after the regular season and they got six points deduced from their tally due to misbehaviour during lockdown, they went from being first in the table with six points ahead of Salzburg to sitting in third position, twelve points behind. One can easily conclude that the club is in crisis, despite winning their first game after the Corona break last Wednesday, against arguably the weakest team in the upper play-off group.

The question is whether this downward trend in results is due to some unlucky factors or actually caused by worse performances. They are in any case still the second-best team in the league in terms of expected goals scored and conceded even after the league restarted, a position they held also before Corona. Furthermore, they still have the realistic chance to finish second (which means the chance to qualify for Champions League football next year). On the other hand, there are some worrying trends in the underlying numbers as well.

Table 1 shows the change in expected goals for and against as well as the difference between the two for all clubs in the champions group (a.k.a. upper play-off) in the Austrian Bundesliga before and after football's lockdown. Before this break, the twelve teams of the league played each other twice in the regular season. In order to make numbers comparable, I only included those from games against direct opponents (those which made it into the upper play-off) from games before the break.

We can see that the former league leaders are the team with the second highest drop in xG created. They score almost half an expected goal per game less, which in turn can explain why their goals tally went down by almost the same amount.

Their increased defensive vulnerability is, however, not backed up by the numbers. They remain almost unchanged in comparison. The only problem there is that relatively, they became worse, given that almost all the other teams (with the exception of Wolfsberg, obviously an interesting case in itself) improved their defensive performance much more.

	Expected Goals for	Expected Goals against	Expected Goals difference
Salzburg	-0,23	-0,77	0,54
Rapid	-0,23	-0,70	0,47
LASK	-0,41	-0,01	-0,40
Wolfsberg	-0,88	0,36	-1,24
Hartberg	-0,03	-0,67	0,64
Sturm	-0,05	-0,04	-0,01

Table 1: Difference between xG-values per game between regular season and play-off. Only games against direct opponents.

This relative decline is mirrored in the change of xG-difference, where they are again the second worst team of the upper league group. We can therefore conclude that they obviously got worse in the attacking sphere of things and did not improve enough defensively to catch up with their flaws.

The next question to look at would be to gauge whether the decline is due to structural reasons or related to more individual ones. On a structural level, it is hard to identify any significant differences. One of their most important strengths during the season so far, set pieces, works almost as well as before. They create chances from dead balls as well as ever, but concede some more. This can however not explain their drop in expected goals created. Likewise, chances created from counters and crosses have not changed notably.

This is where the individual level and one of the most popular excuses in football comes in, i.e. injuries. They lost two of their key players, Marvin Potzmann and Thomas Goiginger, both within one week at the beginning of March due to ACLs. Potzmann had accounted for a combined 0.41 of xG and xA per 90 minutes played and Goiginger for 0.67, the latter being their second most productive offensive player in this regard during the regular season.

The gap left by them could not be filled by the remaining players. Out of players with at least two xG or xA during regular season, only one improved his numbers considerably after restart, central defender Gernot Trauner. Direct replacements for Goiginger such as Dominik Frieser and Samuel Tetteh saw their numbers decline. In the case of Potzmann, younger players occupying his position such as Andrés Andrade and David Schnegg are not yet up to meeting demands and produce offensive output. The only one getting near to him, René Renner, had lower numbers even before lockdown (especially assisting his teammates less than Potzmann), plus declined slightly after restart.

The crisis that LASK are going through seems to be real, and down to losing two key players which could not be replaced neither internally nor externally, given that the transfer window is shut. Not the best prospects for the remainder of the season.