How Has the Bundesliga Changed?
After a week of games within the league's new reality, let's look at what's different on the field
Soccer is back -- sort of, for now, we’ll see. There were no fans, and for those of us watching in America, there was no pre-game, halftime, or post-game analysis to speak of. Despite the apathetic alienation of any prospective casual fan, there were games, all of which started on time and finished on time and now have their place in the ledger of the seasons. Regardless of the weirdness -- the subs sitting in the stands in masks, the players half-touching-half-avoiding each other after scoring, the fact that millions and millions of people were suddenly watching a Schalke match by choice -- these games count as much as the ones from January or August.
The trappings have never looked like that before, but the game itself is pretty much the same. There’s no way that all of the outside factors haven’t bled onto the field, but just how different were this weekend’s games? Let’s take a look.
Subs
The only major rule change was the sub rule. Given the extended time off and the relatively sudden return to play, Bundesliga teams are now allowed to make five subs per match instead of three. As I’ve written about, managers are overwhelmingly stingy with their use of in-game changes. There aren’t many simple Moneyball-esque tweaks that can easily be made to game-play in soccer -- baseball teams can stop bunting, basketball teams can shoot more threes, football teams can stop running -- but coaches are consistently leaving value on the table by not subbing early and often. Three is worth more than two; turns out it’s easier to produce when you’re totally fresh and your opponents have been running around for an hour. Who would've guessed!
Anyway, in this season’s Bundesliga matches before play was suspended, teams made 2.92 subs per match and 0.25 halftime subs, per Stats Perform. This past weekend, there were 4.39 subs per team, and there were 0.39 halftime subs per team. I’m not totally sure the same value-added thinking applies to five subs that does with three; perhaps once you dig into the fourth and fifth guy on your bench, you’re reaching into a lower level of talent that cancels out the boost you get from more energetic players. Depends on the team. But while managers did take advantage of the expanded sub rules -- “there were 4.39 subs per team” is not a sentence I would’ve ever been able to type before had I not been covering professional indoor soccer -- they actually used a smaller percentage of available subs than they typically do.
10 teams used all five subs, while five used four. Wolfsburg only used three subs; they averaged the league-average before the pandemic. However, the other two were most surprising: Bayern Munich might have the deepest roster in the world, they cantered to an easy win at Union Berlin, and yet Hansi Flick opted for the old standard of three switches. Meanwhile, RB Leipzig’s Julian Nagelsmann was one of only four coaches to use every single one of his subs before the season was suspended, but he also only made three changes on Saturday. At least he’s consistent!
Injuries
This aged spectacularly poorly:
Reyna was injured during warmups, moments after this unfortunate post appeared. According to ESPN’s Gabriele Marcotti, there were at least eight muscle injuries from the weekend’s eight matches. That, presumably, is significantly higher than the normal injury rate: if there were one muscle injury per match, the Bundesliga would run out of players by the end of the season. It could just be random, but it seems more likely to be connected with the extended solo time and then the lack of training time provided for teams to get back up to speed.
A group of researchers just published a paper called “Return to elite football after the COVID-19 lockdown”. They highlight a couple issues that seem like they’ll be tough to manage. It’s one thing to ramp up preparation to quickly get players ready to play a single match, but playing games week after week -- and at times, multiple times in a single week -- is a whole different animal. From The Athletic’s Sarah Shephard:
[Magni Mohr, one of the study’s authors,] points out the “Catch-22” situation facing coaches when they return to training. In order to make players “match fit”, they will need to place some emphasis on training games. But if players do not yet have the required “football fitness” to handle playing matches, that could lead to problems. “What I hope is that these teams will have an emphasis on playing games in a progressive manner,” says Mohr. “Maybe having three training games before the start of the season and letting the players play half an hour in the first game, 45-50 minutes in the next game, and so on.
“Playing for too long too soon might give players some familiarisation to the game but because the recovery after a football game is very long, that will also limit how much they can train in the days afterwards. It’s a challenging situation: what do you have as the main objective of your preparation?”
It’ll be interesting to see how each team handles this: Try to push through? Rotate your squad? Tailor your playing style? Or get even more aggressive with your subs as the season goes on?
Home-field Advantage
Before the games started, I asked David Strauss, the head oddsmaker at MyBookie, how they were gonna account for home-field advantage without fans in the stadiums. His response: “Home field advantage is a myth. History tells us that it really doesn't make that much of a difference. While it will certainly be strange without fans in the stands - when the whistle is blown, we expect players to adjust quickly as they get back into the flow of the game. The talent on the field is a far more important factor.”
While every study I’ve looked at on the matter suggests the contrary, he was at least right about these first set of games.
Of course, results don’t tell the whole story. Per FBRef data, the home teams actually created more expected goals in five of the nine matches. I don’t think either of these results have anything to do with empty stadiums:
Home-field advantage is declining. According to the consultancy 21st Club: “A quarter of a century ago, home teams won 49% of matches in the big five European Leagues. Today that figure is around 45%.” But home-field advantage does still exist; we just don’t know exactly what causes it. (The most prominent theory, as put forth in the book Scorecasting, is that fans influence ref behavior.) FiveThiryEight have reduced the home-field advantage effect in their projections by 10 percent. That sounds about right: Home-field will still be an advantage in an empty stadium, but it won’t be as big as it used to be.
Gameplay
There have to be so many biases behind how we’re watching these games now. There was a long layoff, so we expect the players to look rusty. The empty stadiums, the masks -- if primes you to expect something different. But outside of the subs, the game itself wasn’t something radically new. Teams were averaging 1.63 goals per game before the stoppage of play, and that dropped to 1.5 this weekend, but I don’t think there’s much to be read into that, especially since the quality of the chances teams created remained the same: 1.6 xG, both before and after, per Stats Perform.
Plenty of other things stayed the same, too: Yellow cards and foul rates didn’t budge, and the percentage of passes completed barely moved. A handful of other things changed a tiny bit, but not to an extent that seems attributable to the new world we’re in: teams crossed the ball slightly more often, they took about one fewer shot per game, and they completed one fewer pass into the penalty area.
The only changes that really seem connected to the time off are the pace and position of the play. The average pressing rate (Passes Allowed Per Defensive Action) slowed from 12.46 to 13.44. The number of sequences per team (interrupted possessions) declined from 158 to 149. However, the average sequence time increased from 7.9 seconds to 8.7. Most interesting, I think, is that teams attempted nine more passes per game, but they also attempted 12 fewer final-third passes, down from 74. So, what we saw on average was a slightly slower-tempo game that involved more deliberate passing in midfield and defense without as much sustained final-third possession. However, despite that, teams were still able to create the same kinds of opportunities they typically create. After all, the Bundesliga totem, Erling Haaland, scored and assisted again. He’s out-producing Lionel Messi, but we already knew that was true, back in March.