Sunderland want to achieve promotion to the EFL Championship, they also have a group of good players, including experienced former Everton and Celtic winger – Aiden McGeady.
At the frontline, there are also Will Griggs who knocked Manchester City out of the FA Cup years ago, as well as Danny Graham, a striker once scored 12 goals in a single Premier League season.
However, under Phil Parkinson, the results were not enough to meet the expectations of fans and the board in the 2020/21 campaign.
Very quickly, Lee Johnson took over the team in December to try to lead them to search for promotion.
Johnson was one of the most promising young managers in England.
At Sunderland, he introduced an extremely intensive pressing system, which was widely applied across different opponents.
In the first 8 matches, the Black Cats registered 4 wins and 3 draws, and they are seven unbeaten in a row already.
This scout report is a tactical analysis that specifically analyzes their performance in the high press, including explaining the tactics and what the stats have reflected.
Lee Johnson Data analysis At Sunderland AFC
Since Johnson coached Sunderland, the team has been pressing very high and intense out of possession.
PPDA is the best metric to measure a team’s intensity in high press.
Discovered by Colin Trainor in 2014, PPDA refers to “pass allowed per defensive action”.
Only events in a subset of the field (final 60%) are taken into calculation.
The definition from Wyscout is as follows: in that subset of the pitch, opponent passes that started there are divided by the sum of defensive actions (fouls, interceptions, won defensive duels, sliding tackles) of the pressing team and divide opponent passes by defensive actions.
So, this means a low figure symbolizes the high pressing intensity of a team.
The table below shows all PPDA figures after Johnson was the head coach of Sunderland.
The numbers are incredibly low, sometimes it was only 5, comparable to the likes of Leeds United and Southampton in the Premier League.
It was clear that the team has been pressing extremely high and intense recently.
Comparatively, the stably low PPDA numbers of Sunderland was also a huge change compared to the previous managers.
This chart shows the Black Cat’s performance in this metric in every single game of the season, and patterns are clearly noted as follow:
