After narrowly surviving in their first year and making it for the first time in their history to a European competition in the second one, TSV Hartberg are back to pushing above their weight this season. They sit comfortably in mid-table (currently 8th), with less points distance to the upper Play-Offs than to the relegation zone. Head coach Markus Schopp has been doing a decent job since taking over in 2018 and doesn't seem to stop.
Their underlying numbers do however tell a slightly different story. They are actually the second-worst team of the league xG-wise. The strange thing about their season is that they do not actually overperform their xG-difference. They are on -.75 actual goal difference per game from -0.65 non-penalty expected goals.
So what causes their overperformance in terms of points? One reason might be penalties, which are usually excluded due to not being a really repetitive skill. It is however not the reason for their good points tally. So far, they had one for them (in a game they draw 1:1) and one against (in a 7:1 defeat), hence penalties explain one single point in the table.
The answer lies more in the way they score goals under specific circumstances. They obviously score (expected and actual) goals of higher value than an average team. The graph shows the relationship between xG-difference and points per game since the start of the 2016/17 season at team level. Points are coloured according to tier (regular season or Play-Offs), they grey area is the 95% confidence interval. We can see that points are largely a function of xG-difference. There are some outliers, out of which many will be down to luck or random variation.
As we have seen, this is not the case for Hartberg (blue dots in the diagram). They perform about as well as you would expect them given their underlying performances. However, they seem to have found to way to beat these expectations by keeping games tight, with rather few goals both scored and conceded. That is when they excel. Around 60% of their games since their promotion in 2018/19 were tight games, i.e. games in which both teams either scored the same amount of goals or one team exactly one more than the opponent. They won half of their points in those games, a far higher percentage than other teams with a similar amount of tight games.
Their special strength in comparison to their direct rivals are games in which exactly one goal is scored. They win 1.36 points on average in those games, considerably more than comparable teams such as Admira (1.0), Altach (0.67) and WSG Tirol (0.6). Only St. Pölten nearly reach this same level (1.33).
When goals galore, they are however doomed. They have lost seven games in the two and a half season in which their opponent scored at least five goals, while they themselves have yet to score that many goals in a single game in the upper league.
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