Analysis: Rugby’s movers in 2018/19

Adam Kyriacou

Our analyst Sam Larner returns to Planet Rugby and this week studies which teams have improved and who has been lucky this season in Europe.

It’s that time of year where the finishing positions are largely set with just a few games left to decide exactly who will end up where. It is as good a time as any to see which teams have faded and which have sprinted up the table between this season and last. This will be a disappointing read for some who have seen their team’s early season optimism crumble to dust and fantastic reading for others who came into the season with hopes of just avoiding humiliation and instead look set to be playing rugby into May.

We’re going to start with the non-movers though. The teams who have performed like a Swiss watch; doing the same thing this year that they did last year. Across the Premiership, Top 14, and PRO14 we have three teams who, according to match points per game (i.e. a 52-10 bonus point win would land 5 match points and 52 points for), have not moved an inch between the two years. They are Benetton, Ulster and La Rochelle. Interestingly, Benetton and Ulster both play in Conference B of the PRO14 and although they may not have moved on the scale they have climbed the table as both Edinburgh and Scarlets have tumbled down this year compared to last.

Both Ulster and Benetton now find themselves in play-off contention whereas last year neither made it into the play-offs. La Rochelle on the other hand have seen themselves go from 7th and just outside of Europe to…7th and just outside Europe, although they can usurp Bordeaux-Begles and potentially Castres on the run in.

Interestingly when you look at the graph above there are just three teams who have improved by one match point or more from last year to now, incidentally also just three who have become worse by the same margin. Teams are generally quite stable from year to year and we haven’t seen teams either collapse or storm up the table thanks to vast changes in match points.

Those three teams who improved by more than one point are Clermont, Connacht and Harlequins. Two of those three had new coaches join at the start of this season; Paul Gustard at Harlequins and Andy Friend at Connacht. That is also true of the fourth biggest improvers, Stade Français, who brought in Heyneke Meyer at the start of the season. Bordeaux-Begles, the sixth biggest improvers, brought in Joe Worsley midway through the season as a new head coach.

That brings up some interesting questions about the value of coaches or managers. We know a huge amount about a lot of aspects of sport but we don’t know much about the impact that managers in football or coaches in rugby actually have. It looks like a coaching change has had a significant positive change for the teams listed above but that may just be correlation not causation. After all, Clermont are the joint best improvers and Franck Azéma has been head coach since 2014 and coaching there since 2010. Toulouse are in the same boat, they have seen the fifth biggest match point improvement but their head coach, Ugo Mola, has been in place since 2015, although this is the first year he has been co-coaching with Régis Sonnes.

The biggest flops have been, unsurprisingly, Newcastle Falcons who are 1.3 points worse than last year – the biggest swing either positive or negative. They have gone from semi-finalists last year to likely relegation candidates this. Pau and the Cheetahs complete the top three with a 1 point loss from last year. That has dropped Pau into a potential relegation dog fight, although they should be able to stay clear, and the Cheetahs are slumped second from bottom in their Conference with no hope of repeating their trip to the play-offs this year.

Interestingly, of the four Welsh regions, three of them have improved. Unfortunately, the net result is a -0.1 decrease thanks to the Scarlets’ pretty dismal -0.8 drop from their fantastic year in 2017/18. Irish teams have improved by a net of 2 points per match this season compared to last, Scottish teams have lost -0.5 points thanks to Edinburgh trailing off, Italians are net -0.8 thanks to Zebre and South African teams are -0.4, the Southern Kings‘ improvement being offset by the Cheetahs’ drop.

We know that scoring points is a better indicator of success than preventing points being scored. It’s therefore not surprising that the most improved team by match points, Clermont, are also the most improved team by points per game. The French team have added an incredible 8.3 points per game more than they scored last season. Toulon on the other hand have found themselves 9.1 points behind what they achieved last year. What is truly scary is the Leinster result, they were arguably the best team in the world last year and they have gone ahead and added 4.3 more points on.

We mentioned previously that the Falcons, Cheetahs and Pau are the teams who have faded most from last season but you may be surprised to see only the Cheetahs near the bottom of this list. Both Pau and the Falcons haven’t been as good at scoring as they were last year but they are by no means the worst of the pack. Finally, we know that Toulouse, Stade Francais and Connacht have been some of the biggest improvers but only Connacht had added more than 1 point per game to their total from last year and all three are solidly mid-pack.

We know from research conducted in American football that offence is more consistent year to year than defence. That means that a good offence this year is more likely to be a good offence next year whereas a good defence this year is more liable to be a bad one next year, or an even better one, or exactly the same. That may be good news for Leicester fans who have seen a team with a not significantly worse attack but a seriously deficient defence. That is especially true for Racing 92 fans, they have been the fourth best team by attacking improvement but the fifth worst by defensive improvement. A defence that rebounds to somewhere around mid-pack matched with their attacking ability would probably see the Parisians do even better next year than they managed this year.

You will also see that Saracens are listed as the third worst defensive team compared to last year. That will be concerning for some fans as their points for is also stuck firmly in the bottom half of the teams featured. It is perhaps not surprising given the first table that we saw to see Quins, Connacht and Clermont all near the good end of the listings. In fact, Clermont have added the best attacking improvement with the second best defensive improvement.

All this means that in addition to seeing which teams have improved we can also see which teams have got lucky this year. Bill James, of Moneyball fame, came up with a stat called Expected Wins. This took all the things you did that season and came up with the win total you ‘should’ have got. Expected wins say you should have won 85 games and actually you only won 75 games then you were unlucky and if you do the same thing year after year it’s likely that you will ‘bounce back’ to 85 wins. Equally, if you’re predicted to win 75 games and you actually won 85 games you were lucky and don’t expect to produce the same results next year.

We can do something similar in rugby. Match points are a function of the points you score and the points you concede each game – score more points than you concede and you win and vice versa. That is also true across a season, teams that score more than they concede typically win more than they lose. Therefore a team that has a negative points difference but finishes high in the league is a lucky team and one with a positive points difference scrapping it out near the bottom is an unlucky one. We can tweak that slightly and use the data we have. We would expect a team who have seen a significant drop in their points difference per game to also see a drop in their match points per game. If you are ranked 20th by match points difference from this season to last and 20th by points difference change from this season to last then you are getting what you deserve. If your match points have taken a dive but your points difference hasn’t then you’re unlucky.

In this graph minus numbers are unlucky, so left is unlucky going up to lucky on the right. That means that the Falcons are the most unlucky team of all the ones we surveyed. It’s true that they have faded in both points scored and points against but their points difference change is just 26th worst whereas their match points change is the worst of the lot, 37th. Their points difference has negatively changed by just 3.8 points per game but their match points have changed by 1.3 per game which is startling. Lady luck may be playing her part in their relegation. Benetton can also count themselves unlucky, they have seen a 3.2 points difference improvement but no corresponding improvement in their match points difference.

Only four teams can say that they have got exactly what they deserved; Clermont, Stade Français, Bath and Sale Sharks.

Without wanting to start a raft of conspiracy theories, Saracens are by far the luckiest team in the rankings. They have achieved the near impossible of having a worse points difference this year than they did last year in conjunction with a better match points record. That is something that has only been achieved by Exeter Chiefs and Glasgow Warriors this year and neither team had anywhere near the drop off in points difference that Saracens did. What may be pleasing for some Welsh fans is that the Ospreys have seen improvements in match points and all other categories but they are still unlucky. If they can continue with this level of progress in 2019/20 logic says that their level of unluckiness should gravitate more towards the middle and they should see an even greater increase in their match points.

The general rule is this, if your team is listed on the left of the graph you can be a little bit more hopeful that they will do better next year than they did this year, if your team are listed on the right then you’ll need to cross your fingers extra hard if you want to see them repeat their performance.

Conclusion

Clermont top many of the rankings but they’re not a lucky team. The resurrection of the team in the middle of France is completely believable and we would expect them to challenge once more in all the top competitions after their year out. Leicester Tigers on the other hand have seen a continued fall and the stats say that they have actually been lucky this year. It’s looking like they will escape relegation but serious changes are needed if they are to avoid a repeat next year.

Newcastle Falcons look like a team who, if they stay up, should rebound to mid-table mediocrity after two years of towering highs and relegation lows. Whereas we can see the Benetton train building up a head of steam into next season if the stats are to be believed, the same is also true of Leicester’s neighbours Northampton, who have been the third unluckiest team in the top three European leagues. They have combined a vast improvement in points difference per game with a miniscule improvement in match points.

by Sam Larner