Formed by Hammers supporters Jack Elderton and Callum Goodall to offer their fellow fans in-depth but accessible analysis of their team and its players, Analytics United use performance analysis and data to examine how West Ham United can compete with Manchester City...
After winning their fourth Premier League title on the bounce, Manchester City have started the 2024/25 season at the roaring pace required to push for a record-breaking fifth and further underline their status as one of the greatest club sides of all time.
Pep Guardiola’s teams are known for their faultlessness over league campaigns and this one hasn’t started any differently for the Citizens with a comfortable 2-0 win over Chelsea preceding a dominant 4-1 deconstruction of Kieran McKenna’s Ipswich team. If Sammie Szmodics threw the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons with his seventh-minute opener for the Tractor Boys, City’s four-minute three-goal response made it clear which side was reigning champions and which side was playing in League One two years ago.
It was a valiant effort from Ipswich, but when Erling Haaland slotted home the fourth in the 88th minute to seal his seventh Premier League hat-trick in just two seasons and two games, a sharp reminder was served to the rest of the division that the only hope of stopping City is to do something that nobody has figured out how to do just yet… stop Haaland from scoring. The Norwegian’s record against Premier League opposition speaks for itself – there isn’t a single club he’s played against that he hasn’t scored against – and West Ham unfortunately sit near the top of that table, with Haaland notching four in four previous encounters. Thankfully, he doesn’t like this fixture quite as much as he does Wolves or the Manchester derby, where he has managed to rack up a barely believable 14 goals and three assists in just eight matches.
Konstantinos Mavropanos and Maximilian Kilman produced back-to-back fantastic performances against Villa and Palace, shutting out two strikers that were in red-hot form last season in Ollie Watkins and Jean-Philippe Mateta, and they’ll need to step this up a level again if they want to have the same effect on Haaland. This will also need to come within an altered approach as City’s complete dominance of possession forces a level of focused deep defence that no other side in Europe can match. Formationally, things may look much the same in the final third as they did for Villa or Palace in attack, but where Digne and Bailey or Mitchell and Muñoz were the wide threats in the first two matches, this will be any combination of Jérémy Doku, Phil Foden, Savinho, Jack Grealish and Bernardo Silva for City.
This is one of the things that City are able to do differently, as the quality of the defensive players behind the attackers allows Guardiola to select two out-and-out wide players to stretch the pitch rather than having full-backs marauding forward to support the attack. In particular, Doku is a nightmare to deal with on the left-hand side, as the Belgian has much the same effect as Mohammed Kudus with his direct dribbling, producing 5.42 successful take-ons last year and sitting in the top 1% in Europe in this regard. As a result, we could see Aaron Wan-Bissaka come into the starting line-up with his 73.1% success in the tackle against dribblers: the best return of any Premier League full-back last season. ‘The Spider’ managed an incredible display against this opposition in last season’s FA Cup final too, shutting out Foden before Doku and carrying his side to a trophy that may just have saved his old manager’s job.
It’s difficult to poke holes in a team that has won two Premier Leagues, an FA Cup, a Champions League, and a Club World Cup in the last two seasons, but perhaps dribblers on the counter may be something that Lopetegui’s side could look towards as a way to generate opportunities against his compatriot’s all-conquerors. We saw just how much quality the team possesses in this department in the Palace match, with both Wan-Bissaka and Kilman charging out of defence to set up goals for Tomáš Souček and Jarrod Bowen, in conjunction with Kudus’ production of a match-high six completed take-ons. The Ghanaian is already the early leader across the league this season for this metric, with nine in his first two matches, one more than Manchester-based duo Doku and Kobbie Mainoo. And this area of strength could be hugely important in this game as City rank inside the worst ten teams in Europe for the proportion of shooting chances they give up from take-ons.
Whilst Joško Gvardiol had a hugely impressive debut season in the Premier League last year, the Croat only managed 55.3% success in the tackle, with fellow wide-defenders Kyle Walker and Rico Lewis producing disappointing records of 48.7% and 42.9% success on the other side. City’s relative weakness against carriers may be related to Guardiola’s instructions regarding off-the-ball intensity in different areas of the pitch. In the attacking and midfield thirds, City deploy one of the most intense presses in football, allowing opponents 29.4 touches before an attempted tackle in the attacking third (the most intense in Europe) and 31.9 in the midfield third (among the most intense ten in Europe). However, this is flipped on its head in the City’s defensive third, where they allow 47.5 touches before attempting a tackle, the lowest in Europe.
Guardiola has often been described as ‘duel-aversive’, seeing one-on-one duels as a source of risk and therefore instructing his players to avoid them where possible. Contrary to this, the West Ham squad is full of great 1v1 ball carriers who will look to make City’s wide defenders uncomfortable. Kudus is only one of Lopetegui’s threats here, as Summerville, Bowen, Emerson, Guilherme, and others are all more than capable of producing from carries.
This will be a major test for a Julen Lopetegui side that is still growing and learning at the beginning of a new journey together. Still, if the centre-backs can perform as well as they have in the last two, and wide production can be shut down with top performances from the full-backs and covering wingers, then those dynamic dribblers may just be able to produce something special on the break.
*The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of Analytics United and do not necessarily reflect the views opinions of West Ham United.
