Reviving Rennes: Three critical causes of Stephan’s struggle that define Genesio’s job

After suffering four straight defeats and going seven games without a win in all competitions, Julien Stéphan resigned from his role as Rennes manager on 1st March. Former Lyon manager Bruno Génésio, who most recently managed Chinese Super League side Beijing Sinobo Guoan, has now been set the unenviable task of succeeding Stéphan, who led Rennes to the UEFA Champions League for the first time in the club’s history and led them to their first Coupe de France win since 1971 in the 2018/19 season.

The 40-year-old evidently enjoyed plenty of success at Roazhon Park, however, while his tenure at the Brittany-based club will likely be remembered fondly, it’s clear that his final months in charge of Les Rouge et Noir were far below the standards that were set during his time at the club. Génésio is taking over a team that has fallen from a third-placed finish last season to 10th place just one season later, now sitting 21 points off the Champions League qualification places.

In addition to having the task of following Stéphan and the success he enjoyed at Rennes, Génésio must also try to reinvigorate this team, who are in the midst of one of the worst runs they’ve endured in recent years and get the ship steering back in the direction that Stéphan had them moving not that long ago.

In this tactical analysis, in the form of a scout report, we’re going to highlight three key areas in which Rennes have notably struggled of late. We’ll provide analysis of the main problems that caused their poor run in the lead-up to Stéphan’s departure, which will also be the key areas for Génésio to immediately address via his tactics on his Ligue 1 return.

Chance creation

The majority of Rennes’ trouble of late has come via their performance in front of the opposition’s goal, as opposed to their own goal. Les Rouge et Noir have scored just 33 goals in their 27 Ligue 1 games this term. Only five teams in France’s top-flight have scored fewer league goals than them, in total, at this stage of the season.

However, Rennes’ goalscoring record over the last 10 games makes for even worse reading. Firstly, only one team have earned fewer points than Rennes during this period, making them the joint-second worst performers in Ligue 1 over the last 10 games. They’ve scored just seven goals in those 10 games, though, which gives them the joint-worst goalscoring record for this period.

Evidently, their chance conversion hasn’t been anything to write home about of late, but their chance creation hasn’t been great either. At present, Rennes have got the eighth-lowest xG (36.51) of any Ligue 1 side for the 2020/21 campaign. Their failure to create many high-scoring chances isn’t for lack of trying, however, as they’ve also taken the third-highest number of shots per 90 (11.88) of any Ligue 1 side this season.

The issue is that while they’ve been taking lots of shots, their average shot hasn’t been given a relatively high xG value. Rennes have currently got the second-lowest xG per shot (0.107) in Ligue 1. This is down from their xG per shot of 0.119 from their successful 2019/20 season. This stat suggests that the average goalscoring chance that Rennes create during a game isn’t of very high quality, indicating that their poor performances in front of goal recently could be largely attributed to poor chance creation.

One method of chance creation that Rennes have relied on heavily this season has been crosses. In fact, Les Rouge et Noir have made more crosses per 90 (17.1) than any other Ligue 1 side in the 2020/21 campaign, maintaining the sixth-best cross accuracy (32.6%) of any Ligue 1 team in the process.

In this section, we’ll provide some analysis of Rennes’ crossing, examining examples of some of their more successful crosses and some unsuccessful ones, to try and determine how they could improve in this area to create better-quality chances more consistently.

Rennes are generally very good at building into the final third and progressing play to the point where they can put the ball into the box. They’ve demonstrated plenty of creative tactics in possession to progress into the final third. One of these creative tactics involves Rennes forming a rhombus out wide to create an overload and safely progress into the final third, as we can see in figure 1.

In figure 2, we can see an example of another creative way that Rennes commonly set up a crossing opportunity. Here, a crossfield ball is being played from a central midfielder on the left side of the pitch to the overlapping right-back. Rennes will attempt to pull this off on occasion if the space is there for the wide man and this quick switch of play can be very effective at quickly getting the crosser into position without giving the opposition much time to prepare for the incoming ball.