Are Sunderland Actually Good?

They were a tough team to read coming up but the expectations were pretty low, they have blown them out of the water to start the season. Just how good are Arsenal's next opponents?

One of the biggest unknowns at the start of every Premier League season is how good or bad the team that earned promotion through the playoffs will be the following season.

This was no different with Sunderland last season who finished 4th in the Championship but were quite a way closer to upper midtable teams than they were to the clearly superior teams in first and second place last season. Here is what it looks like on the weighted Goals and xG from last season.

Leeds were by far the best team, Burnley were good and ran hot and then there was a group of teams that were pretty hard to separate out that finished in the playoff spots.

Sunderland knew that they were not a great Championship team and that they would need to add talent if they wanted to have a chance of staying up and they ended up with a very strong summer spending €137m net. Adam in his ratings put them 8th best in the transfer ratings, and the early returns agree with that lofty position.

Even with a very good summer, you would have to have been crazy to have put Sunderland into the top four after more than a quarter of the season played. Yet this is exactly where they find themselves after 10 matches played. Sunderland have the third highest points total (18), tied with Liverpool and Bournemouth and are only behind Liverpool for third place on the goals scored tie breaker.

This leads to today’s big question, just how good is this team?

It’s still a tough one to answer with a lot of confidence but we are now at a sample size of matches played that what we are seeing this season can give us a lot of information about a team and it is pointing to them being quite good.

Sticking with the trusty weighted goals and xG metric here, Sunderland are not top four good, but they have been a team that has been solidly in the middle of the League with their numbers so far this season.

On this they would drop from 4th to 12th, but it is a 12th that is not separated by a ton to 9th.

They are the team that has been the best at turning their performances into points this season and have had the biggest over performance compared to expected.

Yet given where they started from, the underlying performances still point to them being a great position given the goal was to finish 17th or better.

How have they gotten to this point?

One of the gifts that the fixture computer granted Sunderland was that they had the easiest start of any team to start the season. You can only play who is in front of you so that isn’t a knock on them at all, but that also helps put some shine on things.

Here is how things look on my team ratings:

The hardest match they have had this season was Chelsea away and that came in the last two weeks (and it was genuinely impressive). They have played the three weakest teams, two at home, plus they have had the fortunate timing of getting Brentford while they are figuring out their transition from last season and they got to face the Ange Postecoglou Nottingham Forest team.

This weekend starting with Arsenal will see them really start to be tested with matches against Bournemouth, Liverpool, Manchester City, Newcastle all in a row.

Again, I don’t want to come across like this is their problem, you can only play the teams on your schedule, and this isn’t a College Football situation where they have the control and packed the schedule with directional State University.

Maxing out the performances

I want to be careful again here, from the starting point of where the expectations were they have been fantastic, the points total so far also looks unreflective of the actual performances so far as well.

I really love this new graphic I made, and it is largely for situations like this.

It is very helpful to see multiple matches combined and see how the team has played compared to the opposition. This really shows in clear and stark focus that this is not the typical look of a team that would be going on five wins, three draws, and just two losses run.

This is a 68-point pace and it’s just not common for a truly 68-point caliber team to have their opponents create more than them.

Sunderland have zero matches this season where they have created more than 0.5 xG than their opponents. They are one of two teams to have done that this season. The other is fellow promoted team Burnley.

Surpassing these xG difference levels of +0.5 and +1.0 are massive for being able to consistently earn points.

To their credit, they also do not have matches on the other side where they have been significantly outplayed, they are tied for fourth with just two of those matches -0.5 xG difference matches this season (Arsenal, Man City, and Brentford all have 0).

Here are the individual running xG charts from their five wins this season.

There are zero matches here that from the chances that they created and allowed where you would have expected them to win more than half the time, and only in the Brentford match did it surpass 40%.

The draws show a similar and mixed view of their performances. They were fortunate against Crystal Palace to not lose; they played it close with Aston Villa and in the last match against Everton started slowly but had a good middle period where they deservedly got a goal back and ended up pretty fairly splitting the points.

In the two losses, they were a bit unlucky against Burnley and then were outplayed away at Old Trafford.

Overall, this season they are negative in the xG difference in all three results.

This season they have taken these fine margin matches and maxed out what they have taken from it.

They have the 6th highest overperformance at turning xG into goals this season.

They have the 6th best rate at stopping xG against into goals allowed this season.

That has put them 5th overall for overall over performance this season on xG.

That doesn’t sound like it should lead to them leading the expected points over performance tables but when you look at the individual matches, they have gotten exactly what they have needed at the exact right time this season.

So how do they play?

That’s enough breaking down how they have gotten themselves to the top portion of the table and lets look at how they actually play.

Starting with the attacking side of the game, the numbers this season are not exactly pretty here.

The attacking numbers are down in general in the Premier League in general this season and that helps the rank against the current peers look a bit better but as an attacking team Sunderland do not stand out for being able to create chances.

For the overall shooting locations, they concentrate their attempts in good locations, but they ultimately have struggled to create clear cut chances.

They have some of the lowest volume of shots (14th) and have combined that with the third worst average shot quality this season. That’s not a great combination for scoring lots of goals.

Unsurprisingly for a promoted team, Sunderland are not a possession heavy team. They mix short passing in buildup with a heavy dose of going long and diagonals to advance the ball.

Their main threat is trying to hit on the counter and when that fails, they look to get it wide and play into the box from there. Their concentration of wide play in the final third opens up another threat for them as well, the long throw.

They have had the second most opportunities for throws into the box and have turned that into the third most launches into the box this season in the Premier League.

They have been effective at turning these into chances as well, they have the 4th most xG following long throws and the third most shots following long throws. They have scored just once (against Chelsea) but this will be a weapon that Arsenal will need to be aware of.

Arsenal are known as the set play kings, but Sunderland are a team that has been even more reliant on set plays to generate their chances this season.

The attack has done just enough this season for Sunderland and that is largely off the back of their defensive performances which have been quite good this season.

They are tied for second in total goals allowed and 4th in xG allowed this season.

They have primarily played a back four system but have moved away from that in the last two matches surprising Chelsea with a 5-4-1 shape and then going with a 3-4-3 against Everton.

They will try to press when the opportunity arises, but they generally will stay compact and disciplined 4-4-2 or 5-4-1 where they squeeze space centrally and funnel play to the flanks.

They are content to let teams play outside of their block (the efficiency against really shows this) but want to minimize the opportunity to get inside into dangerous locations without bodies in the way.

This has worked really well this season, they have conceded their fair share of shots (5th most), but they have worked hard to keep bodies in the way and not give away easy looks.

Sunderland rank 6th for the percentage of the shots faced that they have blocked and have allowed just 1.4 big chances per match. This has pushed them to just behind Arsenal for the average shot quality that they have conceded this season.

Arsenal reunites with Granit Xhaka

After two seasons in the Bundesliga, Granit Xhaka made his return to England.

His choice to join a freshly promoted side raised some eyebrows because he did not look like he had to take that big of a step down and he almost certainly would have had suitors among teams that were expected to be higher up the table. So far, the choice seems to have worked out quite well for him.

For Sunderland, he has been the hub through which things have flowed.

His attempts are down from his time in the Bundesliga, but they are at about the level that he was getting in his final seasons at Arsenal. This hasn’t blunted his ability to impact with him still showing up quite well on the overall passing metrics, even if he is down from his peak seasons.

For Arsenal, he will be one of the key players to slow down to make sure that Sunderland cannot continue their trend of turning these close matches into points.

Final thoughts

I don’t know if I still have a good feel for just how good Sunderland are.

I know I have moved them up my rankings, but they had started very low coming in basically at the bottom in a tier with Burnley. I don’t think that I have moved them up THAT significantly

I think that they are better than Burnley, they are probably better than West Ham and Wolves (who look like they might just crater). Once we start getting past this however it probably depends on the matchup and the day.

An interesting data point on them is that the betting markets, who have pretty strong incentives to get things close to right, are not especially high on Sunderland going forward. I like to take a look at the spreads (basically the guess at the final points tally for teams) and it shows Sunderland at 42-43.5 points. On the surface a 43-point prediction for a promoted team and 15th place isn’t a negative, but given that they have already banked 18 points, that would be just under 0.9 points per match the rest of the way and that is very much a relegation pace.

Overall, the market here seems to view them still as the second worst team for the remaining season.

Betting markets are not perfect, and they get things wrong all of the time. They also tend to be wrong less often than most places that you can look because being wrong too often means that they are opening themselves up to having smart people make money off of them (until they limit you but that is a rant for another day).

We are 2,000 words in here and that means we should finally answer the question that we started with, ‘Is Sunderland Actually Good?’

If by good we mean, actually challenging for European spots good, the answer is pretty clearly no. If good means that they will finish in the top half, that is less certain but also probably a no. If good means they are not a doomed promoted team that has no chance of surviving, then yeah, they have beaten that one.

This will be an interesting test for them, they get Arsenal at weak moment with an injury crisis, on the end of an away Champions League match. If they are actually good, they will have a perfect opportunity to show it here.

My preliminary run of the model does not give them a big chance here in this match and think that Arsenal should be able to 11 wins in a row.

It will be a big weekend for Arsenal with Liverpool and Manchester City facing off with each other and it will start with the team needing to take care of business here up north.