One stat to explain every Premier League team's season, and what might come next

Put another way: Over the entire season, no team exceeded their preseason expectation by more than Brentford's 18 points. Emery's Villa overachieved by two more points than Brentford's league-best mark despite playing 12 fewer games.

Of course, not all of that comes down to Emery; he's not the sole reason the team's results improved. Most teams fire their managers when they're going through a particularly bad patch of performance or luck -- or both -- and they would naturally experience some positive regression even without making a coaching change. But early returns from the betting markets suggest that they've bought into the long-term Unai Effect, too. After the six teams above -- plus Chelsea and Tottenham -- Villa have the shortest title odds for the 2023-24 season.

Tottenham: 38.5

Here's an alternative way to look at the best scorers in the Premier League this season:

To answer your question: Yes, Taiwo Awoniyi is a better goal-scorer than Erling Haaland and should be in consideration for the Ballon d'Or.

To actually answer your question: Tottenham have a Harry Kane problem. He's arguably more important to their functioning than any other single player in the Premier League. Not only did he score close to 40% of their non-penalty goals, but he was also second on the team in passes into the final-third and first on the team in both expected assists and passes into the penalty area. He's also third on the team in progressive passes received, which means he's making plenty of movement off the ball, too.

In other words, he's vital to everything good that happens whenever Tottenham have possession. He'll also be 30 by the start of next season, and he's currently playing for a team that finished in eighth place last season.

The next great Tottenham team won't include Harry Kane. Heck, the next good Tottenham team might not include Harry Kane. However, the next good-and-or-great Tottenham team could include all of the players acquired with the money made from allowing Kane to leave the club this summer in order to compete for trophies somewhere else.

Brentford: 0.14, 0.09 and 18.57

They're the "Numbers Team," so we're giving them three. If there are two bedrock discoveries of soccer's analytics movement -- truths about the sport that remain true amid a dynamic competitive and tactical landscape -- they are: (1) shots from closer to the goal are better than shots from farther away, and (2) you can score a ton of goals from set pieces without sacrificing your ability to score from open play.

Well, in the Premier League this season, Brentford attempted the highest quality shots (0.14 xG per shot), and they conceded the lowest quality shots (0.09 xG per shot):

And as for set pieces, they generated 18.57 xG from dead-ball situations, which was second best in the league behind Newcastle and is essentially equivalent to the value of having an extra world-class attacker on your team.

Focusing on controlling the quality of chances and taking advantage of every set piece has Thomas Frank and Brentford all the way up to ninth in their second Premier League season. They outperformed their wage bill and their preseason betting-market expectations more than any other team in the league. Although Brighton (deservedly) get plenty of headlines for their player-trading excellence, their attractive style of play, and their sixth-place finish, I think Brentford might have had an even better season, relative to their resources.

Next up: Figure out how to do it all again without the guy who scored 35% of your goals.

Fulham: 20.49

Marco Silva's team just went on a season-long heater at both ends of the pitch. They scored nearly eight more goals than their xG total, and they conceded 12.5 fewer than expected. All in all, their actual goal differential (plus-2) beat their xG differential (minus-18.49) by more than 20 goals. No one else in the league was even close to that level:

What does it all mean? Fulham should take the found money and reinvest in the squad. Bernd Leno, a fine shot-stopper for most of his career, had the best season of his life in goal, while all of their secondary players seemed to convert one xG into three goals, or something like that.

There's nothing about this collection of talent or their style of play that suggests they're gonna be able to keep this shot-conversion and suppression up. Sometimes everyone just gets hot at the same time, and it turns a just-above-relegation-level performance into a positive goal differential.

Although the table might make it look that way, this team hasn't solidified its Premier League status just yet. Concede and generate the exact same profile of shots next season, and they might have a relegation battle on their hands.

Crystal Palace: 70

One of the decisive factors in Crystal Palace's season seemed to be: was Eberechi Eze on the field?

Toward the end of his tenure, Patrick Vieira frequently benched Eze, and the team frequently stunk. Then, Roy Hodgson came in, he frequently started Eze, and the team frequently played well. (Hodgson also walked into a cake-walk of a schedule, and he is a legend for taking this job precisely when he did.)

While Eze was on the field this season, Palace's differential was more than a full xG better per 90 minutes compared to when he was off it. And while there are all kinds of contextual factors missing from that number, I think that it speaks to Eze's development into more of a winning player. Last season, before he got hurt, he fit the mold of a classic, exciting, young winger: on the ball a lot, frequently beating defenders and rarely turning it into anything. This season, though, he led Palace in goals, and it's backed up by a massive increase in shot attempts. Last year, he attempted 10 total shots in 605 minutes (1.49 per 90), while his 70 shots this season rated out to 2.39 per 90. The shots themselves are significantly closer to the goal, too.

It's just solid, obvious improvement, and it helped guide Palace into what was ultimately a comfortable midtable finish.

Chelsea: 38

Chelsea spent €611.5 million on transfer fees since last summer; no one else spent more than €243.3 million. Chelsea pay one of the highest wage bills in Europe. And Chelsea scored one goal per game across an entire soccer season. Given all the resources they've poured into the team, this is, pretty easily, the worst single season in the history of the Premier League.

Wolves: 8.44

Wolves were the worst attacking team in the Premier League this season -- by actual goals scored or by the combined quality and quantity of chances created as measured by xG. Their leading scorers were Daniel Podence, a bit-part winger, and Ruben Neves, a midfielder who only attempted terrible shots from outside the penalty area. Podence generated a Wolves-leading 3.9 non-penalty expected goals; 80 players in the Premier League had more.

This team is kind of stuck in no-man's-land. They don't really counterattack at speed like they used to, and they hang onto the ball more often than you expect (they had 50% of possession in their matches), so it leads to a team that's constantly facing set defenses and unable to break them down. They don't take many shots, and they take mostly terrible shots. But the worst part of it all is that they also neglect set pieces, which is the easiest way to kick-start an attack that's struggling to generate quality chances. They generated a league-worst 8.44 xG from set pieces this season.

If they don't find a way to generate some easy goals next season, it could be a long year fighting just to stay out of the bottom three.

West Ham: 12.2

There were four players who took at least 12% of all of their team's touches in the Premier League this season:

1. Kieran Trippier, Newcastle: 13.6%
2. Lewis Dunk, Brighton: 12.5%
3. Declan Rice, West Ham: 12.2%
4. Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, Tottenham: 12.0%

Among those three, only Rice is being mentioned in transfer rumors every 15 minutes. The 24-year-old seems quite likely to leave this summer, and he has been arguably the club's most influential player as they've established themselves as a top-half-of-the-table Premier League team over the past few seasons. Yes, they finished 14th, but they're in the Europa Conference League final and their xG differential was way better than their actual goal differential.

No one on the team scored more than six goals this season, which means goal-scoring will also be a need this summer. If Rice leaves, do they try to find a direct replacement in midfield? Or do they divert some of the funds toward bringing in a more pricey attacker and then attempting to replace Rice's influence -- a la Billy Beane and the Oakland A's -- in the aggregate?

Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest: minus-0.68 and -0.67

They both stayed up, but they also might've been the two worst teams in the league. At least, they were the two worst teams at generating and limiting chances. Bournemouth had the worst per-game xG differential (minus-0.68), while Forest were only slightly better at minus-0.67. And neither side was particularly good at the whole scoring and preventing goals thing, either. Bournemouth had the second-worst goal differential (Southampton was the worst), while Nottingham Forest was third worst.

Despite the slightly worse underlying performance, I think Bournemouth might have the more upside of the two.

Forest bought a college football team's worth of players this year without any real considerations for fit or age. I guess they can just ... keep doing that? It doesn't seem like they ever landed on a particularly promising collection of players at any point or have any kind of plan. Bournemouth, meanwhile, haven't spent a ton of money, and while it hasn't paid off in terms of their performance, they still ground out enough points to stay up. With some internal continuity and some more investment under the new ownership group that took over in December, perhaps they'll generate a few more chances per game or concede a couple fewer -- or both.

The most likely outcome, though, is that all season long, both clubs will be fighting to stay up.

Everton: pick one, any one

It's not like Everton were lighting the world on fire under Sean Dyche, but it's amazing how they were better in just about every aspect of the sport in his 18 games in charge, compared to the 20 coached by Frank Lampard. The areas where Everton improved under Dyche:

- goal differential
- expected goal differential
- shots for
- shots against
- touches in the opposition penalty area
- touches allowed in the penalty area
- possessions won in the attacking third
- opponent pass completion percentage

Funnily enough, the only area where Everton were worse was on the defensive end; they conceded more goals and more xG under Dyche.

It seemed, to me, like Dyche realized the team couldn't generate enough attacking opportunities if he'd kept things as tight defensively as he might've wanted to. This is a weird team with a lot of Premier League-quality players but without many players whose skills -- incisive, quick passing, shot getting -- might allow you to sit back and attack with a limited number of bodies. Instead, Everton frequently contested games in the midfield, which meant they left space in behind more often than you'd expect, but they also generated just enough chances to finish one spot clear of the bottom three.

The construction of this roster makes no sense, but it should also be relatively easy to upgrade over the summer. Then again, that's been true for almost a decade now.

Leicester City: minus-17

You don't even need any fancy numbers to understand why Leicester are one of the better teams to ever be relegated. They were outscored by 17 goals this season, which is not particularly good, but was still the 14th-ranked mark in the league. In fact, Bournemouth's goal differential was twice as bad as Leicester's -- and yet Bournemouth were the ones that stayed up.

Obviously, this was still a massive failure and even finishing 14th would've been a large drop off from where Leicester were two seasons ago -- let alone seven years ago, when they were, you know, winning the whole damn thing.

As for what happens next, I'm not so sure. We rarely see teams with a wage bill as large as Leicester's or with as much talent at Leicester get relegated. So should we expect Leicester to shed more talent than the normal relegated side? Or should we expect Leicester to immediately bounce right back up?

As of now, I'm leaning toward the latter. At least, I'm more bullish on Leicester returning right away than I have been with any other relegated side in a really long time.

Leeds United: 84.2

Under Jesse Marsch, Leeds allowed their opponents to complete 75.5% percent of their passes. That would've been the lowest full-season mark in the league, just slightly below what Liverpool held their opponents to over 38 games. Of course, Marsch didn't coach 38 games, and you can see the club's abrupt shift away from the high-pressing style first established by Marcelo Bielsa and then continued by Marsch, in the same numbers for the three other guys who managed the club this season:

After Big Sam Allardyce took over, the opponent pass-completion percentage rose all the way up to 84.2%, which would have been the third-highest season-long number in the league. Unfortunately the shift in approach didn't improve the team's performance; no, it made them worse and worse and worse:

Pragmatism isn't universal. Turns out a roster of players brought in specifically to play a high-pressing, keep-the-ball-at-the-other-end approach isn't equipped to play passively without the ball. Leeds lost their nerve when things weren't going well under Marsch and never even seemed to consider the possibility that a new coach might make things worse.

Does anything about the past season suggest this club has any idea how to come up with and then stick to a long-term strategy?

Southampton: 24.7

If you're gonna go down, at least go down with the youngest average team (24.7, weighted by minutes played) in the league ... right?

It's not how I would've gone about it, but Southampton's new ownership came in with a plan to load the team up with low-cost, low-floor, high-ceiling youngsters. It's kind of what Brighton have done, but they made sure to first establish their footing in the Premier League before really leaning into those kinds of moves. Southampton hadn't established that baseline level of competency, so they were especially exposed to the possibility of relegation with this approach.

The benefit, I guess, is that you have a team of young players who might be attractive to bigger clubs -- and if not, you have a team of young players who might all get better at the same time and suddenly smash it in the Championship. They weren't as bad as 20th -- more of a side that should've been in the battle for 17th, rather than relegated with weeks still left.

If they can keep some of the young core together and Gavin Bazunu has a bounce-back year in goal, they should also challenge to go right back up.