70 points, 20 wins and 10 draws in 44 matches. With 67 goals scored and 63 conceded: at first glance, a Championship team like many others, fighting until the end for a playoff spot to return to the Premier League. Yet, beyond the simple standings, Hull City's situation has become a real case study. Because not only were the Tigers, at the starting line, among the main candidates for relegation – having narrowly escaped it last season thanks to a favorable goal difference. But even the more advanced data would confirm a record among the bottom positions of the league: only the bottom-placed Sheffield Wednesday precedes Hull in terms of expected goal differential – that is, how many goals a team should have scored based on the chances created compared to the goals it should have conceded, one of the parameters increasingly considered in football statistics.
So how to explain the anomaly? Is Hull City the luckiest team of the season? Does the theoretical model have weaknesses? Or, beyond the indicators, do Hull's players demonstrate a formidable combination of technical elements – ruthlessness in front of goal and defensive resilience under pressure – that is difficult to capture in numerical terms?
A few more data points confirm that Hull – coached by Sergej Jakirovic and with Oliver McBurnie as the top scorer at 15 – is indeed a very precise team or one blessed by good fortune: it ranks 19th in the Championship for number of shots, yet boasts the fourth-best attack. At the same time, it concedes a staggering 653 total shots on goal: only Charlton and Sheffield Wednesday fare worse – and indeed, that orange-and-black is the fourth-worst defense in the tournament, which aligns with the numbers. Here then is the other interesting aspect of the so-called xG differential: not only would Hull be second to last based on this parameter, but it would be five goals behind the 22nd position. In other words, it would be quite far from being second to last.
The issue, in fact, is that the expected goals extrapolated this way risk being misleading. Hull City has been quite fortunate in a long series of circumstances: there's even a compilation circulating on X of the missed chances by opponents. However, we are talking about a team that deliberately makes pressing and counter-attacking its best weapons: factors that worsen the opponents' game, drastically reduce the number of chances in their own, but those few are clear, clean, to be converted without too many compliments. The few shots created by Hull often end up on target, despite having one of the lowest possession rates in the entire league. In short, it is a team with its strengths, compact in its collective play and capable of assimilating the clear precepts of its coach: Jakirovic wants this, and McBurnie and his teammates put it into practice on the field. And going from a near relegation to a promotion still within reach shows that the music has definitely changed at Hull City. If reality works, to hell with the statistics that try to describe it.
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