Can Newcastle United imitate Man City's success?
Newcastle United have been taken over by the Saudi-led consortium for £300m. The deal took 18 months due to the dispute between beIN sports and Saudis over illegal streaming. This made Newcastle United the richest football club in the world with their owners having a new worth of £320 billion and their owners didn't take time to express their ambitions with Amanda Staveley, who was behind the takeover, telling Sky Sports News that challenging for the Premier League title is “absolutely” part of the consortium’s long-term plan.
While it is important to have a long-term plan, the main challenge for them will be to keep Newcastle in the Premier League who are currently placed 19th and face a relegation battle. The first decision for the owners would be to decide if they want to stick with Steve Bruce for the rest of the season. In order to help them make this decision let's look at some stats of how Newcastle have performed under Bruce’s management.
It can be seen that Newcastle deploy a counterattacking strategy with them being ranked 18th and 19th for the in-game possession in the last two seasons. Along with that, poachers like Wilson, have helped Newcastle to outperform their expected goals which can be seen with them continuously ranking higher in terms of goals scored compared to their expected goals. Similarly, they have outperformed their assists as well. Defensively, they have not been good either. In the last two seasons, they have ranked 6th and 5th in terms of goals conceded and are ranked 1st this season.
Based on the points discussed above it can be seen that under Steve Bruce Newcastle have been outperforming in the past years and it looks like their luck might run out this season. If the current news is to be believed with it doesn't seem like their owners are willing to risk this season on Steve Bruce’s shoulders and are already in the hunt for his replacement.
Even if they appoint a new manager, he would definitely need some help in keeping Newcastle up this season. In the upcoming articles, I will look at some key areas and players which Newcastle can target in the upcoming January transfer window.
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The analysis was done based on data from https://fbref.com/en/ website.
The code for the analysis is available in the following GitHub repository:
