The Terras are at the half way mark of their 2024-25 season…but where are they headed?…

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It’s Tuesday 7th January and Weymouth FC are exactly half way through their league season. After 23/46 games the club are rock bottom of the table but why…and…what are the chances of another “Great escape”?

Let’s start by looking at why we are bottom of the league…not scoring enough goals…plain and simple.
Just 14 goals from 23 games is a terrible return. Every single club in the division has outscored us with the next lowest total held by Bath City with 22!

The tally so far is…

Brooks – 3

Goodship & Rowan – 2

Bartolo, Linton, McCarthy, Scrimshaw, Thompson, Touray, Ward – 1

You could argue that home form also plays a part with just 5 draws and 0 wins from 11 games but in reality that is merely a consequence of not scoring enough goals.

So why are we not scoring enough?
According to the sofascore app (that uses Wyscout data), chance creation is NOT the issue as we “should have” scored 11 more goals.

The chart below shows how our cumulative goals scored has been worse than our expected goals and how that gap has worsened all season (blue line). Basically chances are consistently not being converted into goals.

Meanwhile the orange line shows chances against and whilst we have conceeded 4 more goals than expected…this is at least less significant and has not decreased since around matchday 5.

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Next…If we look at the performance of individual players…we can see who the data suggests is not making the most of their goalscoring chances…

In the chart above – Only Thompson, Brooks & Goodship have scored more than expected based on the data…just 3/20 that have played more than 360 league minutes this season. Plus…Goodship is only “in the black” thanks to a brace of goals in the recent 2-2 draw v Torquay!

We can look at the same data again (plotted left to right on the X axis) but add in xG per 90mins on the Y axis.

Again we see the three players who have outperformed goalscoring expectations (far right) but interestingly these three are not creating the best chance of scoring per 90mins – that is shown up the graph on the Y axis.

The Y axis shows the xG per 90mins – basically the number of expected goals per 90 mins. Therefore Touray, on average, had the most chances per 90mins so far this season but his position around the middle of the X axis shows he didn’t make the most of those opportunities, scoring just 1 goal when 1.4 would be expected.

Next best on firing meaningful shots are McCarthy & Bartolo. Again both have numerous strikes but have bagged just 1 goal each when 2.2 and 2.3 are expected respectively.

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“It’s not just the fault of the attackers right? It takes a whole team to score goals?”
Let’s look at assists…
Pollock – 2
Amartey, Genesini, Linton, Maguire-Drew, O’Connell, Robinson – 1

That only tells us part of the story though as many key passes result in a shot that never result in goals. All of these are counted as “expected assists”. Interestingly looking at that tally per 90mins we have the following –
Expected assists per 90mins (Top 10)
1. Goodship – 0.181
2. Pollock – 0.161
3. Genesini – 0.134
4. Maguire-Drew – 0.122
5. Touray – 0.121
6. Greenwood – 0.104
7. Hamblin – 0.101
8. O’Connell – 0.100
9. Amartey – 0.062
10. McCarthy – 0.060

A different picture emerges below though…Robinson is 18th in terms of providing possible assists but his 1 actual assist means goalscorers have made much more of what key passes he has provided than expected. On the other end of the scale, Hamblin’s good efforts have seemingly gone most unrewarded…

More generally we can gauge how all players have performed in general gameplay…as sofascore also provide player ratings out of 10…and I have been tracking them all season.

Every player starts each game with 6.5/10 but then get fractions of a point shaved off for what the analysts deem poor play…and other fractions added for good play…to arrive at a final score at the end of the game.

The team average for the season so far is 6.76 and the “progress” can be seen below. It suggests performances were improving up to our second win against Aveley on matchday 14 but since then we can most kindly describe the scores as “erratic”.

The losses to Truro(no.18, 6.41/10) and Hemel(no.20, 6.39/10) suggest we would have scored higher by not trying to interact with the ball at all, whereas Jason Matthews’ first caretaker v Tonbridge (no.19, 6.86) could be considered a “valiant loss”.

There are suggestions in the data that Warren Feeney coming in has “steadied the ship” over the last 3 games but this is obviously a small sample size…

Below is the above but split out by player. (You might need to zoom in!).
I will leave others to make their own conclusions except to say that Buse in goal being ranked 1/27 probably feels warranted due to many crucial saves and Amartey being eschewed after 8 league games (ranking 27/27 players) may show he was not performing at the expected level.

(Colours behind name relate to player positions – underlined scores = sub appearance)

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Great escape 2.0???

Putting it simply it would be a monumental effort to avoid relegation from this points and the achievement would eclipse “Great escape 1.0”.

The facts are we are averaging 0.65PPG (points per game) after 23 matches and would need to more than DOUBLE that ratio over the second half of the season to stay up.

Welling are currently the team just above the drop zone on 24 points from 24 games. If everyone repeats their first half of the season we would therefore need 47 points to be sure of staying up – another 32 required from 23 games at 1.39PPG – 2.14 TIMES what we currently average.

We can also see from the chart below we are 3 points behind where we were after the same number of games during “Great escape 1.0”. We managed 1.30PPG over the second half of that season, lower than what we might need to save this campaign.

Obviously winning at Welling would take a little dent out of that requirement. Win and we’d “only” need 1.32 PPG after that to get to 47 points but…draw and it climbs to 1.41, lose and its more than 1.45PPG. Even at this stage of the season the result tomorrow will make a big change to the required trajectory and 47 points required is a guess…we might need 50…

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It’s the hope that kills you…

The only crumbs of comfort are…

1. Muscle memory…If we have done it before…we can do it again

2. Lies, damn lies & statistics…players and teams rarely over-perform or under-perform against xG over a whole season…therefore if we keep creating chances maybe…just maybe…the law of averages will start balancing again our favour before the end of April…

3. Up for the cup!…Perhaps we can also look to our cup performances for heart as we have scored 21 in cup ties…7 more than in league games!

Here’s hoping…