Bundesliga 2014/15: Klopp's finale and who deserved relegation

I’ve dipped in to the Bundesliga a couple of times this season, mostly, it has to be admitted, to gawp at the goings-on at Dortmund.
But I also spent a bit of time actually watching the Bundesliga too this season and it was just about the only one of the five major European leagues to have any real form of race on the last day of the season.

Position	Team	Played	Won	Drawn	Lost	Goals For	Goals Against	Goal Difference	Points
1	Bayern Munich	34	25	4	5	80	18	62	79
2	Wolfsburg	34	20	9	5	72	38	34	69
3	M'gladbach	34	19	9	6	53	26	27	66
4	Leverkusen	34	17	10	7	62	37	25	61
5	Augsburg	34	15	4	15	43	43	0	49
6	Schalke 04	34	13	9	12	42	40	2	48
7	Dortmund	34	13	7	14	47	42	5	46
8	Hoffenheim	34	12	8	14	49	55	-6	44
9	Ein Frankfurt	34	11	10	13	56	62	-6	43
10	Werder Bremen	34	11	10	13	50	65	-15	43
11	Mainz	34	9	13	12	45	47	-2	40
12	FC Koln	34	9	13	12	34	40	-6	40
13	Hannover	34	9	10	15	40	56	-16	37
14	Stuttgart	34	9	9	16	42	60	-18	36
15	Hertha	34	9	8	17	36	52	-16	35
16	Hamburg	34	9	8	17	25	50	-25	35
17	Freiburg	34	7	13	14	36	47	-11	34
18	Paderborn	34	7	10	17	31	65	-34	31

Indeed, the chaos around the relegation places made for gripping viewing on that last afternoon.
In the end Stuttgart completed their great escape by winning at Paderborn in a result that also relegated the hosts.
Stuttgart actually came from behind to win both their last two games – vs Hamburg and Paderborn.
But did Paderborn and Freiburg deserve to be relegated?

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
5	Augsburg	458	458	0.5	150	170	0.469	28.67	74.71	103.38
1	Bayern Munich	583	257	0.694	238	95	0.715	33.61	81.05	114.66
7	Dortmund	567	288	0.663	190	112	0.629	24.73	62.5	87.23
9	Ein Frankfurt	426	430	0.498	171	195	0.467	32.75	68.21	100.96
12	FC Koln	362	463	0.439	126	161	0.439	26.97	75.16	102.13
17	Freiburg	385	515	0.428	158	200	0.441	22.79	76.5	99.29
16	Hamburg	364	494	0.424	114	189	0.376	21.92	73.55	95.47
13	Hannover	384	458	0.456	145	161	0.474	27.6	65.21	92.81
15	Hertha	297	425	0.411	107	156	0.407	33.62	66.67	100.29
8	Hoffenheim	501	453	0.525	171	157	0.521	28.65	64.96	93.61
4	Leverkusen	554	299	0.65	192	128	0.6	32.3	71.08	103.38
11	Mainz	437	482	0.475	145	175	0.453	31.04	73.15	104.19
3	M'gladbach	424	522	0.448	174	151	0.535	30.46	82.78	113.24
18	Paderborn	454	492	0.48	140	177	0.442	22.15	63.28	85.43
6	Schalke 04	418	537	0.438	153	174	0.468	27.46	77	104.47
14	Stuttgart	411	472	0.466	138	179	0.435	30.43	66.47	96.9
10	Werder Bremen	415	499	0.454	170	163	0.51	29.4	60.14	89.54
2	Wolfsburg	522	418	0.555	205	144	0.587	35.13	73.6	108.73

Well, it seems Paderborn at the very least can consider themselves unfortunate and arguably fully undeserving of relegation.
Certainly their overall shot share was a very respectable 0.48 (only ninth worst in the division).

And while their shots on target share throughout the season was less impressive, it only dropped to sixth worst.
However, the kicker is, of course, that Paderborn had the worst PDO in the league.
That mark of 85.43 was a full eight points below their nearest relegation contender (Hannover) and ten less than the next (Hamburg).
I’ve not watch much of Paderborn to suggest any of the reasons for this awful PDO.
According to WhoScored Paderborn did take the third highest percentage of shots from outside the 18 yard box (47%), and the joint fewest (along with five others) inside the six yard box (5%), and were fifth worst at taking shots from central areas (59%).

Combine that with being the equal second worst (with two others) at allowing shots from within the six yard box (8%) and eighth worst at allowing attempts from the centre (62%) and we begin to see some of their problems.
But still, Hamburg were worse in their own six yard box (9%) with Stuttgart not far behind (7%).
Either way you splice it, it seems that to me that Paderborn were at least a little lucky to go down.

A similar, though slightly weaker argument, can also be made for Freiburg who will be plying their trade in Bundesliga 2 next season too.
However, the real beneficiaries from this are Hamburg and (to a lesser extent) Hertha Berlin, who both posted some rather poor shot share numbers.
Indeed were it down to me I might have relegated Hamburg just for their 37% share of shots on target. But that was only “good” enough to earn them a second successive relegation playoff, which they duly won, beating Karlsruhe 3-2 on aggregate.

Further up the table Borussia Monchengladbach certainly rode their luck and the second highest PDO in the league to get in to the Champions League places. With rather average shot share and shots on target share numbers (certainly for a top three team) unless great strides are made with either the playing staff or tactics (or possibly both) it seems unlikely BMG will cause too much trouble in the Champions League next season.
And they could even slip back considerably in the Bundesliga.

But of course the real story of the Bundesliga season was the aforementioned adventures in Dortmund.
It’s quite remarkable that despite owning a PDO score just two points better than poor Paderborn that BVB still managed to finish seventh.
Is that the cost of one departure (Lewandowski) too many?
Perhaps more remarkably, Dortmund continued to improve their shot share and shots on target share numbers throughout the season - moving from 0.645 and 0.583 respectively in week nine to 0.663 and 0.629 by the end. Wow.
But their PDO remained stubbornly sunk well below 90. 
If Dortmund had managed to reach a PDO over 90 they surely would have easily finished in the Europa League spots. And somewhere near 100 may have even seen them recovering sufficiently to battle with Leverkusen for fourth.
That would have completed a quite remarkable turnaround from the mid-season horror show that was the Bundesliga table.

But it was not to be and Klopp’s intended fairytale ending is, while not quite a nightmare, certainly a bittersweet one.

So as we can see, from the Bundesliga season, while a shorter schedule has the advantages of generally being less demanding on players, it certainly does not help with the sample size and leaves the possibility for a greater effect on natural football variance to take effect.

Bundesliga Week 19: Klopp and Dortmund still can't win

So with the Bundesliga winter break over its back to the action and Borussia Dortmund are still nailed to the bottom of the table after losing at home to Augsburg.
Just rubbing that bit of salt into the wounds for Dortmund fans is Bayern's dominant position atop the table.

Position	Team	Played	Won	Drawn	Lost	Goals For	Goals Against	Goal Difference	Points
1	Bayern Munich	19	14	4	1	43	9	34	46
2	Wolfsburg	19	11	5	3	38	19	19	38
3	Borussia M.Gladbach	19	9	6	4	27	16	11	33
4	Augsburg	19	11	0	8	26	22	4	33
5	Bayer Leverkusen	19	8	8	3	29	20	9	32
6	Schalke 04	19	9	4	6	30	22	8	31
7	Hoffenheim	19	7	5	7	31	30	1	26
8	Hannover 96	19	7	4	8	22	28	-6	25
9	Eintracht Frankfurt	19	6	6	7	36	39	-3	24
10	FC Cologne	19	6	5	8	19	23	-4	23
11	Werder Bremen	19	6	5	8	30	40	-10	23
12	Mainz 05	19	4	10	5	25	24	1	22
13	Hamburger SV	19	5	5	9	12	21	-9	20
14	Paderborn	19	4	7	8	21	34	-13	19
15	Freiburg	19	3	9	7	21	27	-6	18
16	VfB Stuttgart	19	4	6	9	20	33	-13	18
17	Hertha Berlin	19	5	3	11	24	38	-14	18
18	Borussia Dortmund	19	4	4	11	18	27	-9	16

I had a quick look at Dortmund's situation back in week 13 and at the time it was a case of a dominant shots team being hammered by a nightmare inducing PDO score. And the PDO problems were at both ends of the pitch - both their shooting and save percentage were around 10 points lower than the league average.
PDO is an interesting tool as it helps spot trends that are not necessarily within the team's control and is often used as a proxy for luck - 100 being the average, below = bad luck, above = good luck.
And, certainly over a large enough sample size (and in ice hockey where its been most effectively used) it regresses towards 100 over time.

Let's have a look at Dortmund's (and the rest of the leagues') stats now.

Position	Team	Shots for	Shots vs	Corsi/TSR	Shots on Target for	Shots on target vs	SoT share	Sh%	Sv%	PDO
4	Augsburg	249	257	0.492	87	85	0.508	29.75	74.03	103.77
5	Bayer Leverkusen	321	156	0.673	99	66	0.601	29.35	69.51	98.86
1	Bayern Munich	348	125	0.735	139	49	0.739	31.00	81.60	112.60
18	Borussia Dortmund	314	173	0.645	99	71	0.583	18.22	61.81	80.03
3	Borussia M.Gladbach	232	295	0.440	97	98	0.498	27.86	83.62	111.49
9	Eintracht Frankfurt	258	257	0.502	116	109	0.515	31.06	64.32	95.38
10	FC Cologne	179	268	0.400	68	86	0.444	27.78	73.16	100.94
15	Freiburg	203	283	0.418	84	109	0.435	25.12	75.16	100.28
13	Hamburger SV	228	257	0.471	63	93	0.402	19.14	77.47	96.61
8	Hannover 96	215	264	0.448	82	89	0.479	26.93	68.47	95.40
17	Hertha Berlin	169	249	0.405	61	97	0.386	39.47	60.78	100.26
7	Hoffenheim	270	266	0.504	95	91	0.511	32.63	66.96	99.59
12	Mainz 05	243	270	0.474	82	98	0.454	30.60	75.54	106.13
14	Paderborn	262	274	0.489	80	101	0.443	26.32	66.17	92.48
6	Schalke 04	217	298	0.421	97	94	0.507	30.96	76.65	107.61
16	VfB Stuttgart	224	276	0.449	72	100	0.421	27.70	66.83	94.54
11	Werder Bremen	230	270	0.460	99	95	0.510	30.36	57.94	88.30
2	Wolfsburg	295	219	0.574	120	80	0.600	31.75	76.19	107.94

Amazingly, Dortmund's "luck" appears to have got worse since week 13, not better.
As you'll see below, I actually had to extend my graph below its normal PDO low point to accommodate them.
(And apologies for stretching the graph in the other direction, but I thought I really should put Bayern on it this time around.)
But perhaps what is most interesting about Dortmund's situation, is they've become MORE dominant at getting shots on target since week 13. The overall shots share score (Corsi/TSR) is basically unchanged, but the SoT share has gone up by 0.03 (or 3% points). That's a really big improvement over such a short space of time and shows just how damning this PDO run is.

It is possible that some of Jurgen Klopp's tactics are playing into this problem (this is a harder state to test), but Dortmund certainly appear snake-bitten defensively, as WhoScored suggested:

Borussia Dortmund: Have committed more errors that have led to an opposition goal than any other team in the Bundesliga this season (10)
— WhoScored.com (@WhoScored) February 4, 2015

I wouldn't go so far as to say calls for Klopp to go are complete madness, but from this initial analysis, it certainly seems a horrible run of misfortune at both ends of the pitch.

Usually when I have to extend for both Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund it would be for the same positive reason, in this case it is anything but.

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