2022/23 mid-season review: SK Dynamo České Budějovice
Welcome to the 3rd edition of my FORTUNA:LIGA mid-season review. Over the years, I’ve moved from Twitter to Medium, and now I’ve got nowhere further to move — just tweaking the format a little bit to account, among other things, for one big question ahead of the spring and a welcome update to Jakub’s unique pre-season standings projection. Enjoy!
One big question going into 2023
How do you follow up on the single luckiest autumn in recent history?
This should’ve been another Karviná. České Budějovice were already the league’s most noteworthy overachievers halfway through 2021/22, earning 6 extra points to jump up by 6 “undeserved” spots; now there are clubs benefitting from luck more than Budějovice standings-wise (Liberec and Hradec Králové are better off by 4 places, Dynamo only by 3), but as far as points gain goes, there’s really no one to rival the Southern Bohemia club.
Using this neat online tool to calculate win probability and expected points for any given matchday (hat tip to Kuba for the recommendation), there’s a way to quantify Dynamo’s autumn luck, and however fond of the xG method you are, the results are overwhelming. And, frankly, outrageous.
Dynamo 2022/23 expected points gain in the 5 autumn victories:
R15 Brno: 1,74 expected points (49% win probability)
R12 Teplice: 0,43 xP (7% win probability)
R10 Ostrava: 0,05 xP (0,8% win probability)
R6 Bohemians: 0,54 xP (11% win probability)
R1 Pardubice: 0,15 xP (3% win probability)
That’s 2,91 expected points compared to the 15 — fifteen — points earned.
For the sake of comparison, Sigma Olomouc were similarly lucky midway through 2020/21, yet they still accumulated 6,9 expected points in their own five autumn victories, with their win probability only twice dropping below 25%. Sigma were also hot for the first five rounds and then they cooled off; that’s pretty easy to grasp. Dynamo’s lucky victories are more spread apart.
Now, how do you follow up?
It’s worth remembering Sigma sat 6th at Christmas 2020 and ended up a slightly more modest 9th due to what looks like rather mild regression (they would’ve been 11th by expected points). Sure enough, their pace dropped quite significantly (by 0,42 points per game), with them earning a mere 23 points over the 20-game spring sample. Those spring 1,15 points per game, however, still made for a better pace than what an even luckier Dynamo are currently on. Kinda mind-blowing. Damning, too? Well…
If Dynamo’s pace were to slow down by the exact same percentage as Sigma’s pace did back in spring 2021 (26,75%), they would earn just 0,82 points per game the rest of the way which would still be good for 29 points by the regular season’s end, though. The regression will most likely have to be steeper for Dynamo to get truly stuck in a fight against direct relegation — something harder to imagine with a new, up-and-coming coaching duo.
Key numbers
15: It took Dynamo an unbelievable fifteen attempts to enjoy a positive xG matchup — and they would’ve wrapped up the fall with a big fat zero if it wasn’t for the Jakub Hora penalty against Zbrojovka Brno. Even with the penalty, Dynamo didn’t outshoot a single opponent, on average (!) finishing more than 10 shot attempts behind their adversaries. Incredibly, their second best xG differential was minus-0,74 (only the 184th best differential league-wide, by the way) against the reigning champions of Viktoria Plzeň. Karviná of 2021/22 — who were spending the winter break winless, remember — had three positive xG matchups under their belt by Round 16, with five more besting Dynamo’s above mentioned second best differential.
1,63: You may kindly recall České Budějovice were the only top flight side not to win a single regular season away game last term. This season could hardly be any more different. While they earn the least points per home game (0,63), their average jumps up by a whole one point away from Střelecký ostrov, placing them 4th in an alternative table where no one plays in front of their crowd. Dynamo have won 72,2% of their 2022/23 points on the road, making them lowkey rivals of the notorious Bohemians (72,7%). They can say that of themselves despite accounting for only 43,5% of all goals scored on their trips elsewhere, a small travesty in and of itself.
12-15: It’s fascinating to note Dynamo grading out so well in pressure applied high in the pitch despite generally recovering the second least (!) balls in the final third — be it via positional play or duel engagement. That’s simply down to luck, too, with České Budějovice pretty much only happening to generate a relative truckload of chances (12) off of those recoveries. This is heavily offset by both a terrible conversion rate — resulting in just one (own) goal scored — and the second worst record in the league at allowing the same kind of chances at the other end of the pitch. Besides, through sheer lack of attacking quality, three of those dangerously high turnovers didn’t even lead to a shot (and three others occurred in Round 1 against a disoriented Pardubice backline with Rosa and Toml).
Most valuable player
The following few paragraphs will reference my own MVP model, introduced initially here, and further enriched for this season. I now divide chance-creating actions to primary and secondary (assigning different value to both), also credit creators for chances left unfinished not by their own fault, and instead of “low recovery” introduce more cherry-picked defensive metrics, “backstopping action” (preventing a chance from developing, be it via interception, duel or block) to go with “bypassed for a chance” (an error not punished by scoring). The space for goal-creating actions has been expanded to as many as three non-assist contributions to be appreciated by the model — as long as they truly contribute.
It’s never a good sign when 4/5s of your Top 5 MVP leaderboard consists of defenders and a goalkeeper. It’s outright inexplicable when only 34,3% of all MVP points generated by your squad can be traced to attacking-minded players. Moreover, Patrik Hellebrand is pigeon-holed as such for the purpose of this exercise, yet he’s been stationed the lowest in his career. The most valuable purely offensive player (Lukáš Čmelík) lags 320 MVP points behind the team’s leader, Lukáš Havel, and checks in at a very distant 165th spot league-wide. That’s hardly an exciting business card.
For what it’s worth, Havel is plus-4 when it comes to balancing the two main defensive metrics I track as part of my MVP model — getting bypassed for a chance (-) and providing a backstop to a developing chance (+). For a defender on a horrible team, it’s all the more impressive (Králik is minus-4), though it’s fair to add most of his backstopping actions are desperate blocks (12 of 19). Regardless, coupled with three vital goals to his name, the longtime Dynamo fan favourite will surely prove hard to catch in 2023.
Wild card(s)
It’s unclear at this point who opens the spring as the starting goalkeeper, but whoever it ends up being will automatically be one to watch. David Šípoš opened and closed the autumn, racking up a stunning 3,13 goals prevented over a mere five starts while getting tagged for one costly error. Martin Janáček was voted the best Dynamo player of the fall on the club’s website, putting in one absolute blinder for the ages vs Ostrava (a very rare 9/10 mark for a GK from Deník Sport) and very good back-to-back shows against two other championship group candidates (Boleslav, Bohemians). Janáček had lost the way a little towards the end, but the 22-year-old still remains a big part of Dynamo boasting a Top 6 goalkeeping crew all told.
Pre-season projection update
The projection is based on team quality assessed by Elo rating system. The system optimally weighs past results, taking strength of schedule and home field advantage into consideration. MOL Cup is also simulated. The probability of qualifying for UEFA competitions takes both the league and the cup into account.
It’s probably fair to say Jakub’s model has been fooled by Dynamo’s lucky autumn at least a tad, but not to any brutal extent. Their chance of escaping the relegation group has been bumped by 9%; their chance of surviving by 10%. They are now predicted to finish a place higher and earn 4,2 points more, so the model is largely sticking to its guns. There’s (obviously) a reason why I rank České Budějovice dead last at this point, but I can see them finishing in the 33-point region quite easily. The ju-ju is on their side.
My bold prediction’s status: Dead in the water.
This one was admittedly a longshot, banking on a hot start from a couple of new faces headlined by Roman Potočný and Tomáš Zajíc. I boldly predicted the first three Dynamo goals would also be goals scored on debut(s) of their author(s), but the only goalscoring debutant proved to be the Slovak acquisition Branislav Sluka — who only arrived in time for Round 6. Potočný, meanwhile, didn’t score till September and Zajíc unashamedly saved all of his five markers for MOL Cup action. Pretty bad miss from myself — and five of you who had bet on the prediction in our little game.
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