From Chelsea's top-four hopes to Leicester flirting with relegation, here are the teams starting to stress about the 2022-23 Premier League season.
www.espn.co.uk
Wolves: Spending big to stay the same
You know things have taken an odd turn when you're appealing to sign Diego Costa.
Wolves have long been one of England's most fearless and active zipper clubs, constantly going up and down from one level of the pyramid to another. But they've put together a remarkable run since returning to the Premier League in 2018. They finished seventh in both 2018-19 and 2019-20 and reached the Europa League quarterfinals in 2020 before slipping a hair to 13th and 10th in the last two seasons.
When former Benfica manager Bruno Lage took over Nuno Espirito Santo last season, he took Wolves' two most identifiable characteristics -- stingy defense and minimal attack -- and exaggerated them. Wolves allowed just 43 goals (fewest outside of the league's top four finishers) but scored just 38 (fewest among teams not relegated). They neither allowed nor created anything easy.
Through six matches this season, they're on pace to allow just 25 goals ... and score 19. They play in a defiantly analytics-unfriendly way, attempting plenty of shots (eighth in shots per possession) but attempting almost no high-value shots. They rank 19th in xG per shot, and only 3% of their shot attempts have been worth 0.3 xG or more (20th). Their defensive stats are good again, but while both Wolves and opponents have unsustainably strong save percentages at the moment, opponents are attempting more high-value chances. That will probably make regression to the mean a bit harsher on Wolverhampton; with just one win in six matches, any regression could come with harsh repercussions.
In vacuum, this makes sense -- a zipper club finding something effective, then watching it slowly lose effectiveness over time. But when you lay down the seventh-highest transfer expenditures in the league, and you make big-money deals like paying Sporting Lisbon nearly $50 million to sign midfielder Matheus Nunes and spending $36 million to bring in Valencia winger Goncalo Guedes, you expect to improve.
Guedes draws contact well, and Nunes pressures the ball and forces the issue in the dribbling department, but neither creates high-quality shots. Adama Traore, back from Barcelona loan, doesn't either. The only two players who have averaged at least 0.45 xG+xA per 90 minutes for the team this year -- not a particularly ambitious average, by the way -- are either hurt (new addition Sasa Kalajdzic) or gone (new Nottingham Forest member Morgan Gibbs-White).
Wolves need finishing, and when they finally landed Stuttgart's Kalajdzic late in the transfer window, he almost immediately tore his ACL. They tried to sneak veteran Diego Costa in, and he was initially denied a work permit before Wolves successfully appealed. He scored four goals in 15 matches last season for Brazil's Atletico Mineiro and hasn't scored double-digit goals since he was with Chelsea six seasons ago. But he's now the new hope.
While the scoring averages, for and against, should increase simply because of how unsustainably low they are at the moment, there's no immediate reason to think that Wolves will land in the top half of the league again.
www.expressandstar.com
