If you've watched a single Leeds United match this season, you've likely had one of two reactions: "OH MY GOD, WHY DOESN'T EVERY TEAM PLAY THIS WAY?" Or: "OH MY GOD, WHY WOULD ANY TEAM PLAY THIS WAY?" And, well, if you watched Leeds United play AFC Bournemouth on Saturday, you likely had both of those reactions before you had lunch.

Amid the chaos, it seemed like Jesse Marsch's job was on the line two weeks ago. Hell, the Leeds manager even said as much after a 3-2 loss to Fulham on Oct. 23. That marked four defeats in a row, and the result pushed the club into the relegation zone.

"I'm not done here," Marsch said. "But I'm not dumb. ... I understand that, if we don't win, I put the board in a difficult position."

If you wanted to read into body language, you could've said the players seemed defeated. And if you wanted to read into the history of the relegation battle, you could've said that a team that continued to insist on pressing high and trying to score lots of goals was doomed. From a certain, traditional vantage point, it certainly looked like Leeds had to make a change. They were, in an overused word, naive.

Since then, they've won twice, and in increasingly thrilling fashion. First, a 2-1 win at Anfield, thanks to an 89th-minute goal from 21-year-old Charles Dickens protagonist Dutch winger ​​Crysencio Summerville. Then, at home to Bournemouth, they blew a 1-0 lead, were down 3-1 by minute 50, and won the match, 4-3, thanks to another Summerville goal in the 84th minute. All of a sudden, they're all the way up in 12th place.

Winning games this way might still feel unsustainable, but that's to misunderstand what this team is trying to do. When I talked to Marsch for my book, "Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game's Analytics Revolution," he told me: "I love scoring goals way more than I love giving them up. If we're winning 2-0, I'm always thinking about 3-0 and rarely thinking about protecting 2-0."

The volatility of these first few months? That's the whole point.

Leeds are normal

Despite everything you've seen and everything you just read, Leeds United are basically an average Premier League team.

Through 13 games, they've scored 1.5 goals per game (10th in the league) and conceded 1.7 (tied for 14th) for a per-game differential of minus-0.2 (tied for 11th). They've been slightly better than their goals or points suggest, too. They've created 1.5 expected goals per game (7th) and conceded 1.4 (tied for 10th). Their cumulative xG difference is plus-1.3 -- eighth in the league, one spot behind Liverpool and better than Manchester United and Chelsea.

All things considered, this is quite good. While the salary data from the site FBref requires lots of estimates, it's still a useful ballpark number. And according to FBref, Leeds are carrying the second-lowest wage bill in the league after Brentford. Meanwhile, the data provider Off the Pitch has wage data for two seasons ago; it's for all personnel at a club -- not just players -- but the only teams that paid lower wages were three teams that have since been relegated (Burnley, West Bromwich Albion and Sheffield United) plus a fourth, Newcastle United, that has since been purchased by a nation state with a comparatively unlimited amount of money.

Either way, in a sport in which wages tend to be destiny, a positive xG differential or league-average performance across 38 games would be a massively successful season for a team with the second-lowest wage bill. Throw in the fact that Leeds sold Raphinha to Barcelona and Kalvin Phillips to Manchester City over the summer, and the consternation over Marsch's credibility starts to seem absurd.

Some of that comes down to the fact that most soccer watchers still haven't come to grips with how random the sport is on a game-to-game basis. Leeds had impressive underlying numbers even before the wins against Liverpool and Bournemouth. A team that's playing well and not getting the bounces being dubbed "in crisis" is nothing new, but the way Leeds got there and then got it out of it? That's different.

Leeds are abnormal

The history of coaching across all sports is a slow march away from conservative decision-making. Baseball teams have all but abandoned the sacrifice bunt, in favor of swinging for the fences despite the risk of a strikeout. NBA teams have only recently discovered that three-pointers are worth more than two-pointers. And you're seeing the same trend play out in real time across the NFL every weekend, as coaches grapple with fourth-down decisions, over and over and over again.

While this has all been driven by "analytics," it's really just an increased understanding of probabilistic thinking. The more conservative decision is more likely to succeed in the short-term. The sacrifice bunt is probably gonna work out. The midrange 2-pointer will go in more often than the 3. The punt or the field goal is less likely to end in catastrophic failure than the attempted fourth-down conversion.

However, in the long run, the conservative decisions actually make you more likely to lose. If a 2-point shot is converted 50% of the time, but a 3-pointer has a 35% make rate, you're going to score more points by replacing all those 2s with 3s, even though you're also more likely to have more individual possessions that end with zero points, too. It's the same calculus across all the other sports. In a strange way, to increase your chances of long-term success, you also have to increase your chances of immediately failing -- and then dealing with all the inevitable fall-out that comes with it.

According to data provided by Seth Walder from ESPN's fourth-down decision-making model, which accounts for all kinds of contextual factors to suggest the option that most increases a team's chances of winning a game, coaches have made the "correct" decision in what we call "non-obvious situations" 79% of the time this season. There's data going back to 2001, and the all-time low was 68% in 2008.

If other sports have seen similar trajectories, but remain a ways away from anywhere near an optimized level of aggression, why shouldn't soccer? And while the sport's dynamic nature mostly eschews this kind of analysis, I think the risk-reward nature of a high-press comes closest to mirroring the evolutions we've seen across the major American sports.

"We're pretty sure that pressing is the most high expected-value system," said Ted Knutson, CEO of the consultancy StatsBomb. "But it's got the highest costs."

Pressing not only demands a heroic physical output from your players; it's also more likely to produce more high-profile, demoralizing breakdowns. Marsch's teams both try to win the ball back high up the field as soon as they lose it, and then they try to immediately take advantage of the gaps in the defense by playing difficult vertical passes. They currently have the most aggressive pressing rate (measured by passes per defensive action (PPDA) in the league, and they complete the second-lowest percentage of their passes:

As such, their matches feature 101 possessions per team -- more than anyone else in the Premier League. The bet is that they are both better than opposition at living in the chaos, and that most of the turnovers are happening in the other team's half. But there's also an obvious downside that doesn't exist if a team plays in a conservative, low-block shell. More turnovers simply mean more opportunities for your opponent to break you down, but then on top of that, Leeds are pushing all 11 players high up the field so they're way more prone to egregious-looking breakdowns, where the opponent beats the press and creates an easy-to-convert chance at the other end.

Like any good manager, Marsch didn't admit to me that a few terrible goals a season were a natural byproduct of playing this way. "Most of those times that it looks bad is a tactical breakdown where the players behind the ball, when we lose a ball, are not in tactically sound positions," he said. "Then the game looks more open than it should be."

In reality, no players are perfect across 90 minutes, and so no unit can be tactically bulletproof for an entire season, let alone an entire match.

"It's aggressive," he said. "There's no doubt. But it's also intelligent. The goal is to not be wild; the goal is to still be in control."

It's intelligent because it's based on a number of relatively sound assumptions. Despite the downsides, the idea is that you're ultimately going to concede fewer chances across a whole season because the ball spends most of its time in the opposition half. And you're going to score more goals because you're creating thousands of moments where the opposition defensive structure is unsettled. For a team with the resources of Leeds, it's a lot easier to find athletic, hard-running players who can create and thrive in these transitional situations than to land the dominant in-possession players that only the best teams in the world can afford. But it works only if you fully commit to it.

"You have to be willing to either enforce that across your whole club and say this is our ethos even if you don't like it," Knutson said. "This is what we're going to be as a club, so it's not the head coach's fault."

Leeds appear to be committed to playing this way. You don't replace the Argentine godfather of the high press, Marcelo Bielsa, with Marsch in the middle of a relegation fight, as they did last season, if you're not fully bought into pressing high. And you also don't cut bait when the bounces don't go your way because you know, by design, you're playing in a way that invites as many bounces as possible. They didn't, and things have finally started to even out.

Now, could a more traditional defend-deep-and-counter approach have produced a similar level of results for Leeds and maybe a roughly equivalent level of performance?

Perhaps. But what would you rather watch?

Source:
courtesy of ESPN

by Ryan O'Hanlon

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