This is why there is no ‘champion luck’ at Feyenoord

The Eredivisie has been a topic of conversation in the Netherlands for many years. Especially the top clubs often occupy the minds of millions of people. From the first round in 2023, Football Zone will also monitor the performance of Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord from a statistical point of view. What is going well and what needs to be improved? In collaboration with Opta, this is round 22 in figures.

Where the battle for the championship was long between five teams, Feyenoord and Ajax now seem to be the two biggest contenders on the scale. The team from Rotterdam is in the best position after the 2-1 victory over AZ, as they cherish a three-point lead over the rival from the capital. However, the three-pointer in the top match against AZ did not come about by itself. In the final minutes, Marcus Pedersen saw a deflected shot go into the far corner to score the winning goal. The fact that Feyenoord scored another decisive goal at a late moment and that the attempt was touched, meant that the ‘championship luck’ was often cited. However, that is not correct.

Feyenoord enforces it all itself
If something happens more than twice, there may be a pattern and the luck factor becomes less and less plausible. That certainly applies to Feyenoord. For the third time since Arne Slot has been trainer of the team from Rotterdam, a home game was won by a goal in minute 90 or later. In the sixteen (!) years before that, it didn’t work out once. In addition, Feyenoord did not lose one of the eight games in which it fell behind, making it the team that took the most points after falling behind. Finally came by Stadionclub by Pedersen’s goal to score from outside the penalty area for the sixteenth time this season. That is more than any other club and only once less than PSV, which scored seventeen times from distance over the entire previous season. Can you still speak of happiness after those three statistics? Fitness, the will to win and a healthy dose of opportunism: these are the reasons for Feyenoord’s current success.

John Heitinga has the leak at Ajax
You can notice how changeable football is in and around the Johan Cruijff ArenA. Where there was grumpiness during Alfred Schreuder’s last weeks as coach of Ajax, there is room for optimism under Heitinga. That makes sense, because the reigning national champion showed against Sparta (4-0 victory) that it can play dominant and well-groomed football again. With a passing accuracy of 92.8 percent, Ajax recorded the highest percentage of all clubs in the Eredivisie in the past eleven years, the twelve shots on target were the second highest number this season and Heitinga became the first coach since Morten Olsen in 1997 who saw his side score at least three times in his first four Eredivisie matches. The way up has been started by Ajax and if we have to believe Aad de Mos, the team from Amsterdam will also be holding the scale at the end of the ride.

The Eindhoven exit syndrome stands in the way of catching up
Dark clouds are gathering over PSV, it wrote Eindhovens Dagblad prior to the away match at FC Utrecht. After the draw (2-2) in the Dom city, the atmosphere will not have improved. Away games are a problem for the current PSV, which has not been able to win the past four matches on foreign soil and also had to swallow twenty goals against outside its own Philips Stadium. For comparison: last season, the team from Eindhoven conceded twenty goals in away games over the entire year. The mediocre functioning in away games means that PSV cannot record a series of won matches and that an attempt to close the margin with Feyenoord becomes very difficult. The gap with the leader is now six points and there is no more mutual duel on the program.

Featured: Twente drops out and Cerny plays a negative leading role again
After sixteen minutes, FC Twente was already 2-0 behind on a visit to Go Ahead Eagles. It had not happened in the past nineteen years that the Tukkers faced a margin of two goals so quickly and more than seventy minutes were not enough to turn the tide. The lack of decisiveness was the root cause of this: only two of the nineteen shots fired went on target and that ratio has never been this low at Twente since the figures were measured. In addition, Václav Cerny attacked his own negative record of number of times lost the ball. Last week he set that record by losing the ball no less than 38 times in the match against FC Volendam, but the Czech came close again on Sunday afternoon with 29 times losing the ball. Perhaps it is time for a backup for Cerny.