Looking at the Premier League Team of the Season according to the WhoScored.com ratings, the startling thing is that there is not a single Manchester City player in it. That says much about what a team effort it was, how, superb as Yaya Toure was, they weren’t reliant on a single player to carry them.
And, in fact, a closer look at the rankings shows how close that team of the season was to being dominated by City players. Sergio Aguero would have replaced Wayne Rooney alongside Luis Suarez had he had sufficient playing time (a problem that also kept Aaron Ramsey out of the centre of midfield). Yaya Toure was just 0.03 behind Mile Jedinak, whose excellence this season is suggested by the fact he managed to supplant a player who scored 20 goals. Yohan Cabaye, the fourth highest central midfielder, was rated the tenth best player overall, which perhaps offers some excuse for why Newcastle went so badly off the boil after his departure.
David Silva was only 0.12 from ousting Eden Hazard on the left with Pablo Zabaleta 0.17 from getting in ahead of Mathieu Debuchy. Perhaps more surprisingly, the much-maligned Martin Demichelis was only 0.01 behind Curtis Davis as the second centre-back.
That there are four Liverpool players in the side suggests how they excited this season, although it seems telling that, although Daniel Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho only narrowly missed out on the side, and Jordan Henderson isn’t too far behind, you have to plough through a lot of names before finding any defenders after Skrtel. Glen Johnson is next in the list at 68th, John Flanagan at 86th, then Daniel Agger at 106th, which seems a neat summation of where Liverpool’s problems lay. A similar point might be made about Chelsea, whose highest placed striker is Samuel Eto’o at 88th. City’s success was rooted in the fact that a range of players performed.
Other than that, perhaps the most striking aspect of this season in the Premier League – statistically speaking at least - has been the figures for possession. Possession has been much debated in the last couple of months with many keen to assert that, because a couple of teams have lost key games having dominated the ball, possession means nothing. That is to misunderstand the nature of the statistic, though. Lots of possession or barely any possession are not in or of themselves good or bad; what the figure indicates is not whether a side should win or lose, but how it plays.
What’s intriguing about the figures is that they show nine teams had 54.8% or more and nine teams had 46.2% possession or less with only Newcastle United and Stoke City in the middle. Teams, in other words, divide pretty clearly into two categories: those who look to dominate possession and those who don’t (clearly there will be games when a possession team has less possession and vice versa; when two possession teams meet, for example, one is always going to have more of the ball than the other).
What’s also fairly clear from the stats is that there is a correlation between having the ball and finishing high up the league. Of those clubs in the top nine for possession, only Swansea did not finish in the top nine (Stoke being the side who replaced them). The real outliers are Crystal Palace, who finished eleventh in the table but had less possession than any other side in the division.
Tony Pulis’s side also had fewer shots than any other side, with Newcastle the big overperformers in that metric, having the fifth-most shots despite finishing tenth. There is, understandably, a general correlation between shots and league position and, even more understandably, an even greater one in terms of shots on target – although Stoke, who finished the season ninth, had only the sixteenth most shots on target.
Liverpool had the most shots on target and the highest average player rating. It was on shots conceded that City won the title, though: they conceded the fewest shots, while Liverpool were only eighth in that ranking. It’s clear then that while Liverpool may have been more thrilling, City were the better all-round team.
Were City worthy champions in the 2013/14 Premier League? Let us know your thoughts in the comments
