Newsflash: Fulham are terrible under Slavisa and Claudio

With a season-defining match occurring later this evening vs Southampton, thought it would be best to investigate this wildly frustrating club.

I looked at some advanced numbers under Slavisa and Claudio and one thing that stands out the most is the fact we’re simply a bad team.

A lot of ire has been aimed at Claudio. I thought he was a good hire at the time, but its become clear he was the wrong hire for the wrong squad. To use a college football analogy, and one I've used ad nauseam, we were team with a bad spread offense with no defense under Slavisa. We then replaced it Ranieri's triple option and "bend dont break" defense...but kept the speedy undersized players. It's been a mess from the get go, under both managers.

Under Slavisa, Fulham’s record was P12 W1 D2 L9 GF11 GA31. According to understat.com, the xG was 11.75; xGA25.33. Basically, we were scoring what we "should" have been but conceding more goals than we “should”. Nonetheless the xGA chart under Slav is not good.


Toward the end of Slavisa, our offense dissipated. The xG chart basically plateaus. If you can make out the numbers in the table, the 11.75 was 4th worst. This may explain why we had 5 points when xPTS was 9. That’s really bad.


It’s a larger sample size, but under Claudio Fulham have P15 W3 D3 L9 GF14 GA 30. The xG is 19.5; xGA 27.24. So, we’re actually conceding slightly less than we should be (shudder at the thought). However, the past 3-4 matches have been a disaster.


What is crazy is our offense under Claudio is actually…average (the 19.46 is mid table). I was wrong in thinking our offense has regressed under Ranieri. His 19.46 xG is much higher than Slav’s putrid 11.75. Personally, I think the boring style of our play makes thing look way worse than they are.


Nonetheless, under Ranieri Fulham have 12 points, when xPTS is 16. Similar to Slav, Claudio is also underperforming by 4 points. At least they have that in common.

So, what is happening here? We all know our defense is terrible. But our offense is also terrible, and that is not necessarily Claudio's fault.

According to whoscored.com, For the whole season, we are taking a league-leading 46% of our shots from outside the 18-yard box, and league-lowest 47% from inside the 18 (7% are inside the 6 yard box). This is not the NBA: you do not want to be shooting from the perimeter. We're one dimensional and that one dimension is essentially harmless.

Conversely, we’re T-3 for conceding the most shots in the 18-yard box (60%!), and T-4with 29% of the “action zone” being in our own third. We’re 3rd overall for conceding 15.2 shots per game. We’re conceding 15.4 shots per game and taking 12.4…with a paltry 4 being on OT per game.

So what happens when you cant defend and also cant score? You lose. You lose so much you get relegated.

 

Front page material.