Tuesday 2 December 2014

Bundesliga Week 13: What's wrong with Borussia Dortmund?

A slight digression from the football league for just one post this week.

Possibly the biggest story in European football this weekend was Borussia Dortmund’s fall to bottom of the Bundesliga.
Given the team’s massive support, substantial recent success and as being one of the few real challengers to Bayern Munich over recent years, it is not surprising this has been big news.
This is even more so with Jurgen Klopp’s high profile and rumours of interest from Premier League clubs.
All of that has led to some rather strong (almost gleeful) attacks at Klopp and his reputation.

So here’s the Bundesliga table, not very pretty reading for Dortmund fans:

Position Team Played Won Drawn Lost Goals For Goals Against Goal Difference Points
1 Bayern Munich 13 10 3 0 32 3 29 33
2 Wolfsburg 13 8 2 3 25 12 13 26
3 Leverkusen 13 6 5 2 25 17 8 23
4 Augsburg 13 7 0 6 18 13 5 21
5 M'gladbach 13 5 5 3 16 10 6 20
6 Schalke 04 13 6 2 5 21 18 3 20
7 Hoffenheim 13 5 5 3 21 21 0 20
8 Hannover 13 6 1 6 13 18 -5 19
9 Ein Frankfurt 13 5 3 5 22 24 -2 18
10 Mainz 13 3 7 3 16 18 -2 16
11 Paderborn 13 4 4 5 18 22 -4 16
12 FC Koln 13 4 3 6 13 18 -5 15
13 Hertha 13 4 2 7 17 23 -6 14
14 Werder Bremen 13 3 4 6 18 26 -8 13
15 Freiburg 13 2 6 5 14 20 -6 12
16 Stuttgart 13 3 3 7 18 27 -9 12
17 Hamburg 13 3 3 7 7 17 -10 12
18 Dortmund 13 3 2 8 14 21 -7 11


But let’s have a look at the underlying stats to see if we can pick out anything that’s going wrong at Dortmund.

Can anyone spot the problem?
(Incidentally, this graph was plotted on my standard dimensions for this and so dominant have Bayern been that they don’t fit on it in EITHER direction!)






So yeah, Dortmund’s PDO is so low they barely fit on the graph. It's just brutal.
I’ve not really seen much of Dortmund this season, so can’t comment too much on whether this is a systems thing of just sheer bad luck, but it’s highly unlikely that the PDO stays THIS low for the rest of the season.
Given how dominant Dortmund are in terms of shots, Klopp's assessment that it’s pretty well governed by bad luck is fairly pragmatic, even sensible, approach to take.

Being a smaller league and shorter season though means teams are much more vulnerable to being devastated by short term slumps like this over the course of a season.
Dortmund’s title hopes are (one would imagine) pretty much shot now, but if they get a rebound of PDO as strong as the fall has been and they could yet challenge for a Champions League spot.
The rest of their underlying numbers are good enough – a sparkling shot share (Corsi/TSR) of 64.4% (third behind Bayern’s 72.7% and Leverkusen’s 69.2%) is testament to that.


The problem is that current second place team Wolfsberg are doing a pretty tidy job themselves too. If they can make up the 12 point gap on Leverkusen in third that would be a remarkable end to the season – though Klopp’s employers may just settle for avoiding relegation at the moment.


Position Team Shots for total Shots against total Corsi/TSR shots on target for total shots on target against total Shots on target share Shooting % For Save % PDO
1 Bayern Munich 240 90 0.727 99 33 0.75 32.33 90.91 123.23
2 Wolfsburg 215 143 0.601 89 53 0.627 28.08 77.36 105.44
3 Leverkusen 245 109 0.692 75 46 0.62 33.33 63.02 96.35
4 Augsburg 177 166 0.516 60 56 0.517 29.99 76.78 106.77
5 M'gladbach 163 207 0.441 63 74 0.46 25.39 86.48 111.88
6 Schalke 04 132 222 0.373 61 74 0.452 34.44 75.68 110.12
7 Hoffenheim 190 177 0.518 63 55 0.534 33.32 61.83 95.15
8 Hannover 138 174 0.443 51 53 0.491 25.48 66.03 91.5
9 Ein Frankfurt 170 176 0.491 74 82 0.474 29.72 70.73 100.46
10 Mainz 150 201 0.427 53 80 0.399 30.19 77.5 107.68
11 Paderborn 170 190 0.472 56 68 0.452 32.14 67.66 99.79
12 FC Koln 116 191 0.378 47 66 0.416 27.67 72.72 100.39
13 Hertha 132 156 0.458 48 55 0.466 35.43 58.19 93.62
14 Werder Bremen 151 199 0.431 66 60 0.524 27.26 56.67 83.93
15 Freiburg 147 173 0.459 60 67 0.472 23.33 70.16 93.48
16 Stuttgart 157 200 0.44 54 85 0.389 33.33 68.23 101.56
17 Hamburg 150 168 0.472 40 65 0.381 17.5 73.84 91.34
18 Dortmund 222 123 0.644 68 55 0.553 20.58 61.82 82.4


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