After a few month summer break, the English Premier League is back! Match day one was started with Manchester United vs. Fulham on Friday August 16th and ended with Leicester vs. Tottenham on Monday August 19th. But before I get into the new 2024-2025 season, in this post I provide a high level recap of the events of the 2023-2024 season.

Stay tuned for another post coming soon where I start to dive into the new season and provide more football insights, visualizations and data analysis for the 24-25 English Premier League season.

2023-2024 Recap

After another exciting Premier League season in which Manchester City won their record breaking fourth title in a row, I take a quick look back and recap some highlights of the 2023-2024 season.

Goals

Manchester City scored the most goals for with 96, averaging ~2.5 goals per game (this includes 2 own goals that opponents scored while playing Man City). 27 of those goals were scored by Erling Haaland.

Over the last 10 seasons, the winning team has scored an average of 88 goals, while having an average of 31 scored against. Last year Manchester City had 34 goals scored against them.

Sheffield United were the only team last season to have fewer goals (35) than matches in the season (38). However, they had the most goals against, with 104, next was Luton Town with 85 against.

30 different players scored 10 goals or more in the season, while only 5 teams (Brighton, Fulham, Everton, Burnley, and Sheffield United) didn’t have their top goal scorer hit double digits.

Passes

Passes are always an interesting statistic to look at. And not just the number of passes attempted vs. completed. But also the type of passes in terms of distance.

Pass distance can be categorized as short (between 5 and 15 yards), medium (between 15 and 30 yards) and long (longer than 30 yards).

As a general theme, the teams that sit higher up the table at the end of the season not only complete more passes (makes sense as they typically have more possession) but they also have a greater percentage of their passes categorized as short distances.

Looking again at Manchester City, of the 27,758 passes they attempted in the 23-24 season, 24,616 were completed for a completion percentage of 88.7% (lowest in the league was Sheffield United at 70.5%).

However, of the total passes attempted by Man City, 52% of them were between 5 and 15 yards in distance. The chance of losing the ball in that short of distance is greatly reduced. While only 2,498 or 9% of attempted passes were categorized as long (longer than 30 yards).

In contrast, Everton were tied with the second lowest completion percentage in the 23-24 Premier League season with 73.2% (attempted 15,514 and completed 11,349). Of their total attempted passes, only 41% were categorized as short and 20% were categorized as long.

In summary, short passes results in a greater likelihood of keeping the ball. With the ball, less running is required, energy is saved and there are less forced errors due to fatigue. Alternatively, the longer the passing distance, the greater the uncontrolled variables at play (accuracy decreases, greater time for opponents to judge the pass and intercept it, weather conditions alter flight path, etc.).

Tackles and Blocks

Crystal Palace led the 23-24 Premier League season with tackles, coming in at 788 in total. 373 in their defensive third, 301 in their midfield third and 114 in their attacking third. Manchester City had the least amount of tackles, over 250 less than Palace, with 517 total tackles.

The only team with more tackles made in the attacking third than Palace was Tottenham, with 125. This speaks to both teams desire to press high up the pitch and win the ball back in their opponents half. In contrast, Aston Villa (68) and Nottingham Forrest (72) completed far fewer tackles in their attacking third.

In summary, Crystal Palace makes roughly 20 tackles a game, with Tyrick Mitchell accounting for ~3 of those tackles per game for Palace.

Manchester United made 534 blocks, 207 being blocked shots and 327 being blocked passes. Casemiro led the blocks for United with 74 total (second in the league only behind James Tarkowski of Everton with 82).

Blocked passes show a player’s ability to read and predict the game. Blocked shots show a player’s commitment and desire to keep the ball out of the back of the net.

In total there were 6,343 blocked passes and 2,962 blocked passes in the Premier League in the 2023-2024 season.

Fouls and Yellow Cards

Bournemouth gave away the most fouls in the 23-24 season, with 507 total. That is an average of over 13 fouls per game. For comparison, Wolves had the second highest number of fouls with 476, while Manchester City had the least with only 289.

For Bournemouth’s 507 fouls, they received 79 yellow cards and 3 straight red cards. Essentially for every 6.4 fouls they received a yellow card. However, when considering the number of fouls they made, the number of yellow cards is relatively small.

Chelsea were given the most yellow cards in the season with 109, almost 3 yellow cards per game. Considering that Chelsea gave away 446 fouls, they were receiving a yellow card for approximately every fourth foul.

On an individual basis, Joao Palhinha and Marcos Senesi both received 13 yellow cards last season, tied for the most in the premier league.

Tottenham had the most fouls drawn against them with 510. James Madison was the most fouled player on Tottenham drawing 74 fouls (he only started 26 matches). While Sheffield United drew the least amount of fouls with 318.

Summary

Well, there you have it. A high level recap of the 2023-2024 Premier League season with an overview of the goals, passes, tackles and blocks, as well as fouls and yellow cards.

I look forward to taking a deeper look at various topics throughout the 2024-2025 Premier League season, starting with next week’s post. Stay tuned and send us a message if there is a specific topic you would like to see covered.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read these posts!

JC