Evaluating Amazulu Under Folz

With Sundowns enjoying another rollercoaster of a season, the PSL narrative has mainly been about how good they are. Several haven’t even noticed other teams’ struggles, for example, that AmaZulu were having a pretty difficult season until Romain Folz was recently “redeployed”. A short stint that started with qualifying for the MTN8 final has effectively ended just 5 months later. The team are in 12th place, just four points above the playoff places. So, the question is, what is going on with Usuthu?

Redeploying Romain Folz Solves One Problem But Does It Solve THE Problem?

Firstly, some context. Folz came into the AmaZulu job after it was decided Brandon Truter (who had replaced the highly successful Benni McCarthy a year ago) wasn’t doing a good enough job. Interestingly, both coaches were effectively given half a season to impress (16 league games for Truter, 15 for Folz). In hindsight, Truter’s 38% win rate wasn’t that bad, especially when you compare it with Folz’s 20% win rate in roughly the same number of games.

The points trendline shows how things have remained the same before and after Gameweek 10 (when the Frenchman came in). They started the season well (even topped the table for a week), but have hovered around the Top8 line for most of the campaign, with neither marked improvement nor a marked decline in performances. The stagnant nature of the team is encapsulated in this one stat: no team has drawn more games than AmaZulu since the Frenchman took charge (8).

At their peak two seasons ago, the KZN side were top four within the PSL in expected goal differential, creating 10 more xG than they conceded. Last season when McCarthy left and Truter joined, the decline had started and they had gone down to -4 for xGD (enough for 10th best in the league). This season, they are down to 14th, with -10xGD and are only better than Maritzburg and Richards Bay. To say Folz is the problem all of a sudden would be to ignore deeper, more-revealing issues – it has been 12 months of decline. Why, exactly, is a team with the resources of AmaZulu 14th best when it comes to underlying numbers? It’s a larger problem than just one man.

Rolling averages are one of the most powerful ways of displaying recent team performance across both offensive and defensive aspects over a period of time. Put simply, the green above indicates a time the team was performing well, creating better quality chances (blue line at the top, green shade) than they were conceding. When this is inverted (blue line at the bottom, pink shade), they are not performing well, giving up higher quality chances in comparison to other periods.

The trend is quite clear here, thriving in the McCarthy days, before a negative spiral with the two subsequent coaches. The gold lines indicate the coaching changes. What’s interesting with this plot is how, despite how rough last season was under McCarthy,  they were actually positive for a while in xGD, and were starting to improve. But most importantly, they were tailing off even before Folz arrived. The issues have lasted across regimes.

The one aspect of the game that may be said to have improved is the attack. The 4-0 win over Chiefs heralded a run of scoring in seven consecutive league games, something that never happened even under Benni McCarthy. You’d have to go back to February 2015 for a better scoring run by the club. A post-World Cup average of 1.4xG is twice what the team managed before Qatar (0.7xG per game). In the 10-match rolling average above, you can see the blue line starting to go up, although not enough to compensate for the defensive shortcomings.

A reliable striker would be a welcomed improvement for AmaZulu. The team’s top scorers have just four goals in the league (Mhango & Dion). The former is the main man in the team for shots, but even then he is only ranked 40th in the whole division for number of shots, and 50th for shot quality. The table above shows how nearly half his shots come from outside the box. Mhango is capable of the spectacular, but shots with a 1% chance of going in (that’s his xg per shot) are not what you need from a top striker. His radar confirms how low he ranks (percentile-wise) in relevant metrics compared to other forwards.

When your top striker averages 0.1xG per shot, you have serious issues both at an individual level and as a team. The low xG is not an individual player problem, but it also speaks about the team’s ability to create high-quality chances for their main threat.

Mhango’s top passing combinations involve Buchanan (a defensive midfielder) and Hamanub (a defender). The team’s top passing combinations involve defensive players, led by their goalkeeper, Veli Mothwa. There are many issues at the club, and the removal of Folz may not solve THE problem.  The initial decision to let go of Benni McCarthy may be a forgivable mistake and the one to let go of Truter is understandable. But extending Folz’s contract when results were not improving, brings the executive policy into greater focus. 

The stagnation in performances over the last few months (1 win in 8) may be something Folz is responsible for. But, the fact that AmaZulu hasn’t actually been good for 12 months now – now that is down to bigger factors, one of which we think is an ageing squad. The age-utility matrix above shows how players above average age have received the most minutes (top-right quadrant), while younger players’ bottom-left quadrant received below-average minutes. An average age of 28 is the 4th highest in the league, and the chairman’s talk of challenging for the title may need to be backed by a younger fresher squad. Issues of indiscipline have also arisen in recent weeks, indicative of other squad issues. Unless changes are made on the broader level, we may be back here again soon.