Match Facts Analysis: How the season went at Bayer 04 Leverkusen
In Simon Rolfes, the Bundesliga and its partner AWS have an expert who knows the Bundesliga from A to Z. Bayer 04 Leverkusen's Sporting Director, Rolfes wore Die Werkself's colours 288 times between 2005 and 2015, and represented Germany on 26 occasions. Rolfes is the ideal man to write a regular column for the 'Bundesliga Match Facts Zone' on bundesliga.com, analysing current trends and giving unique insight on the Bundesliga Match Facts.
This week, Simon Rolfes takes a closer look at his own club, Bayer 04 Leverkusen, analysing their season.
By Simon Rolfes
With a 1-1 draw against Union Berlin on Matchday 33, we at Bayer 04 Leverkusen achieved our minimum objective for the season by qualifying for the UEFA Europa League. It has been a season with highs and lows, during which we unfortunately also had to change our coach.
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Speed Alert: Leverkusen the most represented club in the top 10
One of the fundamental elements of our DNA at Leverkusen is playing attacking football with quick wide players. This is reflected in the Bundesliga Match Facts, where no other team has more players in the Top 10 of the Speed Alert for the league's fastest players than we do. Naturally it is our two wingers Leon Bailey (22.13 mph / 35,62 Km/h) and Moussa Diaby (22.1 mph / 35,57 Km/h) who lead the way, but also Jeremie Frimpong (22.08 mph / 35,53 Km/h), who we signed from Celtic in January, has expressed his outstanding pace on the pitch. I'm delighted that there are only six players in the league who were only marginally quicker than our trio.
A look at Attacking Zones also supports our approach, with 68 per cent of our incursions into the attacking third happening down the wings. The relationship between the right and the left wing was 33-35, which is quite even and says a lot about how balanced our squad is, and which makes us overall that little bit more unpredictable.
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xG: less quantity, but plenty of quality
Our attacking endeavours through quick wing play still need to be combined with a decent finish, and we were able to convince in terms of efficiency too. The chances that we created for our strikers were taken very well, with our xG of 44.6 – indicating how many goals we would normally have been expected to score with those chances – exceeded by our actual return of 51 goals, excluding own goals. Only Bayern Munich (24.1 goals over xG) and VfL Wolfsburg (8.7 goals over xG) have a greater surplus over xG.
Exemplifying this are our top strikers Lucas Alario (11 goals) and Leon Bailey (nine). Both scored more goals than would have been expected from them, and are therefore among the league's best performers in terms of efficiency. While Lucas (4.4 goals over xG) is a classical predatory finisher in the penalty area, and has that innate goalcoring instinct, Leon (3.6 goals over xG) often scores his goals from further out, which you can gather from these statistics. His fantastic drive into the top corner which put us 1-0 up on Matchday 11 against Hoffenheim had an xG of just two per cent, for example.
One area where we still have room for improvement, on the other hand, is in our chance creation. Although we are a very attack-minded team, we still should have created more dangerous opportunities than we did: our total xG of 44.6 only ranks us in mid-table in the Bundesliga.
Hannes Wolf and the defensive stability
With the change of coach at the start of April, we nevertheless managed to stabilise our defence impressively. With Hannes Wolf on the touchline, the team adopted a generally deeper position and were, as a result, a little less focused on possession. The consequence can be seen quite easily in our results: we lost only one of our seven games with Hannes (against Bayern) and only conceded five goals.
The Match Facts confirm this impression: under Peter Bosz, we were conceding an average of 10 goalscoring opportunities and 1.5 big chances to our opponents each game. Under Hannes Wolf, this average may have risen to 12 overall opportunities, but the number of big chances has dropped to 0.7. Our xG Against value per 90 minutes consequently dropped from 1.2 to 1.1. In other words, our opponents were finding it harder to get into good goalscoring positions and were therefore having to take more shots from difficult positions and from long distance.
Finally, I would like to say a word about one of our many highly talented players, Florian Wirtz. In his first full season as a professional, his five goals and five assists not only made him our third most prolific player in terms of contribution to goals, but he was also our Most Pressed Player more times than anybody else. That means he was the player our opponents put under significant pressure the most.
For him still to deliver such good statistics shows how far he has already come at such a young age. What pleases me in particular is that he is the youngest player in Bundesliga history to score six goals. I'm really excited about his further development, but one thing is for sure: we're going to get a lot more pleasure from him in future.
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