Why Liverpool–Manchester City Is Soccer's Super Bowl
How football explains football, pt. 2
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The big game is on Sunday. Liverpool host Manchester City, but so too do the Tampa Bay Buccaneers welcome the Kansas City Chiefs to western Florida. As we went over a couple weeks ago, Liverpool and City have the two best NFL-style offenses in the Premier League. They each advance the ball vertically with passes or carries more than 4,800 yards ... per game. Patrick Mahomes would never, and among the big five European leagues, only Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Borussia Dortmund would more often.
But what about the other end of things? Who are the hardest teams to pass forward against? The easiest teams to dribble through? Or, for you NFL fans, who are the Los Angeles Rams of European soccer? And who will soon be hiring a self-proclaimed Lebowskian cannibal as their next head coach? Let’s take a look.
Best Passing Defense
With the offensive stats, we had to figure out whether to look at total yards gained per game or yards gained per attempt. Given who topped both lists -- good teams on one, not-good teams on the other -- total yards gained proved to be the more useful number to glance at. Does the same go for defense? (As a reminder, for this piece we’re using FBref’s data for both progressive passes and progressive carries.)
Here are the top five teams in fewest passing yards allowed per game:
1) Manchester City: 2,044 yards allowed per game
2) Liverpool: 2,179 yards allowed
3) Sevilla 2,202 yards allowed
4) Chelsea: 2,208 yards allowed
5) Paris Saint-Germain: 2,218 yards allowed
Looks pretty good, no? I was worried that these leaders would just be the same as the leaders in passing yards gained because the teams that gain a lot of passing yards have a ton of possession and therefore, by definition, would not allow their opponents many opportunities to pass against them. But that logic might be faulty to begin with; there are technically an equal number of possessions over the course of a match, and shouldn’t we credit these defenses for preventing their opponents from moving the ball with the majority of their possessions? Plus, my fears did not come true. Liverpool -- also no. 2 in passing yards gained -- are the only team in the top five for both pass offense and pass defense. In fact, Bayern Munich, who are first in pass yards gained, are only 14th in pass yards allowed. Meanwhile, Bayer Leverkusen -- fifth in pass yards gained -- are 28th.
However, among the best raw-total pass defenses, only Chelsea rank in the top 40 in terms of yards allowed per pass attempt. City sit 58th (out of 98), Liverpool 79th, PSG 84th, and Sevilla 97th. The only team that allows more yards per pass attempt than the 5.8 conceded by Julen Lopetegui’s side are Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds, whose pass-defense looks like the University of Hawaii’s football team. They concede a whopping 6.2 yards per pass attempt.
On the other end of the spectrum from Leeds, these are the top five pass defenses, measured by yards allowed per attempt (rounded up to the nearest tenth):
1) Fulham: 4.7 yards/attempt
2) Burnley: 4.8 Y/A
3) West Brom: 4.8 Y/A
4) Roma: 4.8 Y/A
5) Inter Milan: 4.8 Y/A
The top three are perhaps not surprising: three bottom of the table Premier League teams that allow a ton of sideways final-third possession that deflates the yards per attempt allowed. But the next two are two of the three highest-scoring (and -point-gathering) teams in Italy. Also of note: Atletico Madrid, who look like they’re on the verge of walking away with the La Liga title, allow the fewest yards per pass attempt of any team in Spain.
Best Rushing Defense
There’s a wider variety here, which fits well with the NFL analogy. Being a good passing defense is something like, I don’t know, 75 percent of being a good overall football defense. It’s pretty easy to understand why: This past season, the average NFL defense allowed 4.6 yards per rush, compared to 6.4 yards per pass. And the volume discrepancy was even greater, as the average team allowed about 1,900 rush yards through 16 games but about 3,800 pass yards.
The gap isn’t as big in soccer, but it’s still, well, pretty big:
-Average pass yards allowed across the Big Five leagues: 2,623 yards per game
-Average carry yards allowed: 1,085 yards
-Average pass yards allowed per attempt: 5.2 yards
-Average carry yards allowed per attempt: 2.8 yards
Here’s the top five in total yards conceded via carry per game:
1) Real Sociedad: 717 yards
2) Southampton: 733 yards
3) Manchester City: 741 yards
4) Liverpool: 745 yards
5) Eibar: 748 yards
For those scoring at home, that’s two of the best teams in the world, a fringe top-four contender in Spain, a borderline top-half-of-the-table team in England, and Eibar, who press as hard as just about any team ever has. At the other end of the table, it’s just a collection of mediocre-to-poor teams from across all the leagues other than Germany, which is notable because the bottom of the pass-yards-per-game table is filled with Bundesliga clubs. There’s a tactical or philosophical trade-off hidden somewhere in there, but I’m not sure if it’s because German teams prioritize passing on offense or that they prioritize eliminating carries on defense.
Here’s the top five in yards allowed per carry:
1) Southampton: 2.3 yards/carry
2) Getafe: 2.4 yards/carry
3) Real Sociedad: 2.4 yards/carry
4) Eibar: 2.4 yards/carry
4) Celta Vigo: 2.5 yards/carry
Good luck trying to move the ball with your feet through La Liga -- or at St. Mary’s. If you really wanna get your Derrick Henry on, then Elland Road is the place to do it. Marcelo Bielsa and Co. give up the most yards per pass attempt of any team in Europe, and same goes for carries: 3.5 yards per attempt. If they don’t stop you from attempting a pass or a carry, then they’re screwed -- and we absolutely love them for it.
Best Overall
We’ll break it down in two ways. First, the top five for yards allowed per pass attempts+carries:
1) Fulham: 3.9 yards/attempt
2) Inter Milan: 3.9 yards/attempt
3) Roma: 3.9 yards/attempt
4) Brighton: 3.9 yards/attempt
5) Atletico Madrid: 3.9 yards/attempt
Before right now, I would’ve said these teams ... have absolutely nothing in common. But after looking into it, well, I’m still mostly stumped. Perhaps it does provide some insight into how these teams want to defend: numbers behind the ball so it’s not easy to pass through them, but also pressure on the ball so it’s not easy to advance it with a carry. None of them rank in the top 25 for passes allowed per defensive action (PPDA), so the numbers seem to bear that out, too.
What about total yards allowed per game, passes and carries combined?
1) Manchester City: 2,875 yards
2) Liverpool: 2,924 yards
3) Real Sociedad: 2,939 yards
4) Sevilla: 2,981 yards
5) Chelsea: 3,019 yards
If we take the two numbers together, it’s enough for me to declare Manchester City as the best defensive team in the world. They’re the hardest team to advance the ball against over 90 minutes, and they also allow an above-average number of yards per carry+pass: 4.1, 40th overall in the Big Five leagues.
Now, in the NFL, defensive performance is tricky to measure; even the advanced numbers tend not to be predictive, and one of the best predictors of a good defense is a team that plays against bad offenses. After all, what we’re measuring is offensive performance while the defense is on the field.
Perhaps that’s an issue here, and with soccer in general; I’m sure it is to some degree, although most teams have played roughly balanced schedules at this point in the season. What makes soccer trickier than football is the transition phase -- the moments when attackers immediately become defenders and vice versa. A team’s defense is always influencing its attack and the attack has a huge effect on how the defense plays. So, what if, instead, we compare the yards a team gains to the yards they concede? That seems like a more directly applicable football-to-soccer comparison. And across Europe, only two teams gain above 1,800 net yards per game: Liverpool (1893) and City (2063). Did I mention that they’re playing on Sunday?