Bill ConnellyNov 20, 2025, 06:00 AM ETCloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on X
play1:59Nicol: Arne Slot should bench Mohamed SalahSteve Nicol explains why he thinks Liverpool’s Arne Slot should bench Mohamed Salah.
play1:49Yamal situation ‘playground stuff’ from Barcelona and Spanish FAJulien Lauren believes the Lamine Yamal situation could be “easily figured out” if both Barcelona and the Spanish FA “speak to each other” to sort it out.
play1:03Dyche frustrated at lack of VAR intervention vs. Man UnitedSean Dyche reacts to Nottingham Forest’s 2-2 draw vs. Manchester United in the Premier League.
Is Florian Wirtz ‘lacking confidence’ since Liverpool move? (1:49)Craig Burley discusses Florian Wirtz’s current form with Germany and how that’s linked to his move to Liverpool. (1:49)
Nicol: Arne Slot should bench Mohamed SalahSteve Nicol explains why he thinks Liverpool’s Arne Slot should bench Mohamed Salah.
Yamal situation ‘playground stuff’ from Barcelona and Spanish FAJulien Lauren believes the Lamine Yamal situation could be “easily figured out” if both Barcelona and the Spanish FA “speak to each other” to sort it out.
Julien Lauren believes the Lamine Yamal situation could be “easily figured out” if both Barcelona and the Spanish FA “speak to each other” to sort it out.
Dyche frustrated at lack of VAR intervention vs. Man UnitedSean Dyche reacts to Nottingham Forest’s 2-2 draw vs. Manchester United in the Premier League.
Everybody has an opinion, especially when it comes to Liverpool. The defending Premier League champions have lost five of six in league play to fall to eighth in the table, and they’ve lost seven of 10 in all competitions.
Perhaps predictably, they’ve fallen from third to eighth in xG allowed per shot. Meanwhile, after allowing just nine goals from set pieces last season (eighth in the league), they’ve already allowed a shocking seven this season (18th), including three from long throws.
When they allow one or fewer goals, they’re a perfect 4-for-4 in the wins department. But they’ve managed to do so only four times.
(*Goals prevented is a StatsPerform measure that compares the postshot xG value of your opponents’ shots on target to the number of actual goals you allow.)
Steve Nicol explains why he thinks Liverpool’s Arne Slot should bench Mohamed Salah.
Yamal situation ‘playground stuff’ from Barcelona and Spanish FA
Of course, Real Madrid have suffered their own injury issues and are still setting a higher bar; Barca aren’t keeping up. And while domestic opponents haven’t been able to adjust particularly well to Hansi Flick’s high defensive line in their second year of exposure to it, it has been an issue in the Champions League, where they’re 30th out of 36 teams in xG allowed per shot, 22nd in xG allowed from counterattacks and 18th in goals allowed.
Still, getting and keeping the right personnel on the pitch would help immensely. Unfortunately, that’s something over which you don’t have a ton of control.
Injuries are playing a role here — only four players have seen the pitch for more than 71% of Newcastle’s league minutes, and 21 have started at least once. But injuries are playing a role for lots of teams, and Newcastle are currently far closer to the relegation zone (two points above) than they are to a spot in the top five (six points behind).
Biggest statistical weakness: shot quality. Like plenty of fired managers, Igor Tudor was done in at least a bit by some bad bounces. In his last four matches in charge at Juventus, against a solid run of opponents (AC Milan, Como, Real Madrid and Lazio), his charges allowed just four goals. But they scored zero despite creating shots worth 4.4 xG. While they probably deserved four or five points from those matches, they managed only a 0-0 draw with Milan.
In their first four matches without Tudor — one with interim Massimo Brambilla, three with new hire Luciano Spalletti — both the schedule and the xG gods eased up. Against Udinese, Cremonese, Sporting CP and Torino, Juve scored six goals and managed two wins and two draws. But they still suffered from poor finishing — those six goals came from shots worth 7.9 xG — and their shot quality still lacked a bit. For the season they rank just 16th in Serie A in xG per shot (0.12).
Forwards Dusan Vlahovic, Jonathan David and Loïs Openda, who are paid millions of euros to put the ball in the net, are attempting just 3.5 shots per 90 minutes between them, and even worse, they’re averaging just 0.11 xG per shot. Juve’s creative players — mainly Kenan Yildiz and Andrea Cambiaso — have not been able to get them involved, and with just four goals from their 5.7 combined xG, they haven’t finished the opportunities they’ve gotten either.
Juve are in decent shape overall: Thanks primarily to wins over lower-rung opponents, they’re only three points outside Serie A’s top four. The early signs under Spalletti have been encouraging, but until their scorers both earn and finish better scoring opportunities, climbing the table will be difficult.
Biggest statistical weakness: defensive regression to the mean. They play a reliable style of ball in Bilbao: Defend first, defend second, defend third, and maybe score a goal on the counter at some point. They haven’t allowed more than 50 goals in a LaLiga season since 2012-13, and they’ve allowed under 40 in four of the last six years.
The attack, meanwhile, has been beset by injuries. Primary attackers Iñaki Williams (only 62.7% of minutes this season), Nico Williams (49.7%) and Oihan Sancet (39.5%) aren’t seeing much of the pitch, and Athletic have scored just four open-play goals in 12 league matches. They’re seventh in the league, already eight points off the top-four pace, and Champions League play hasn’t gone any better. They beat Qarabag but have lost three other matches by a combined 8-1.
Randomness isn’t fixable, unfortunately, and if they continue defending well, their league form should stabilize. But a return to the Champions League next season is looking unlikely.
Juric’s Atalanta matched Gasperini’s shot volume — they were fifth in Serie A in shots per possession last season, and they’re fifth again this year — but the good shots have vanished. They’ve fallen from third to 12th in xG per shot. Lower shot quality can produce streakiness, and in their past eight matches in all competitions they’ve managed just four goals from shots worth 11.2 xG. Take Lazar Samardzic’s two goals out of the equation, and everyone else has two goals from 10.6 xG.
That is, of course, unsustainably terrible, and new hire Raffaele Palladino, most recently of Fiorentina, will likely enjoy a new-manager bump simply thanks to progression toward the mean. But as with Juve, shot quality desperately needs to improve, and unlike Juve, they’re now nine points off the top-four pace.
Biggest statistical weakness: set pieces and no margin for error. Looking at full-season stats for a team that has already careened from a successful counterattacking manager (Nuno Espirito Santo) to a possession-and-pressing guy (Ange Postecoglou) back to a counterattacker (Sean Dyche) is probably a fool’s errand, and it’s probably not surprising to learn that looking at Forest’s full-season numbers offer us almost no hint of style or quality.
That said, set pieces have been a rampant problem this season, and they haven’t improved so far in Dyche’s short tenure. They were a life hack for Forest’s rousing seventh-place finish (and Champions League near-qualification) last season — they scored 17 set-piece goals (first) and produced a +8 scoring margin from them (third). This season, they’ve scored just two set piece goals (17th) and allowed nine (20th) for a minus-7 margin (also 20th).
Dyche frustrated at lack of VAR intervention vs. Man United
Sean Dyche reacts to Nottingham Forest’s 2-2 draw vs. Manchester United in the Premier League.
In Dyche’s three league matches, they’re one of only seven teams to score zero times, and they’ve allowed three, including both goals in a 2-2 draw with Manchester United. The simple fact that they’ve earned four points and scored five goals suggests solid improvement under Dyche, but this aspect is still dragging them down, and they still have the second-fewest points in the league — behind even Nuno’s new team, a previously hapless West Ham.
Granted, this isn’t incredibly different from last season, when they ranked 17th in shots per possession. But now neither the defense nor Nebel is overachieving.
With an xG differential that ranks 11th in the league, they’re likely to eventually move up the table moving forward. Despite sharing the lowest point total in the league with Heidenheim, current Opta projections give them only a 13% chance of finishing in an automatic relegation spot. But good fortune covered up some weaknesses last year, and that fortune is well gone.
Biggest statistical weakness: finishing (and set pieces). Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A team that seemingly overachieved in the table last season isn’t getting the same breaks this time around.
Fiorentina finished sixth in Serie A in 2024-25, their best league campaign in nine years, but they did it with an unsustainably brilliant run of finishing: They scored 60 goals from shots worth only 49.7 xG, a 21% overachievement. Important creatives like left back Robin Gosens and midfielders Yacine Adli and Rolando Mandragora got in on the goal-scoring act a little too well, scoring 13 goals from shots worth 5.5 xG.
Like Forest, Fiorentina have also collapsed in the set pieces department: They allowed seven set piece goals last season and have already matched that in 2025-26. Their underlying numbers are solid enough that they probably aren’t a genuine threat for relegation — Opta puts their odds at only 15% — but worse fortune, worse finishing and worse set piece defense have all but relegated them from a shot at another European competition next season.