Southampton weren’t really strong relegation favourites for the first half of the season, but so much went wrong that it all seemed quite inevitable in the end.

Most bookmakers and models say that the 17th-18th boundary will be around 38 points.

This has happened too often under Hasenhüttl and now Jones. When the game is level, Southampton have both the worst attack and worst defence in the league.

Hasenhüttl had already announced that he would leave in summer 2023, so the directors had to handle a transition some time between now and then. Several new coaches arrived in summer 2022, so Hasenhüttl and Kitzbichler stayed to give some continuity and four months of space to decide the strategy. The World Cup break was clearly an attractive time to make the next decision.

Romain Perraud will be Southampton’s first choice left back for 2021. He stood out at Brest in 2020-21, playing more minutes than any Southampton player except James Ward-Prowse.

Robin Jones / Getty Images

FBref have added opposition stats to their summary pages for the 2020-21 season. That opens up a world of new analysis.

Using the acciotables API, and some minor data transformation in R, it’s possible to get Statsbomb/FBref expected goals data for every EPL match since 2017-18.

If you use freely available data in your work, it’s polite to give credit. You can do this with a text caption or by placing a logo inside your image.