Can Cristiano Ronaldo do what Man United need? Four questions that will define their season

It doesn’t look good, does it? First, Manchester United got bounced from the fourth round of the FA Cup by Middlesbrough. Sure, they outshot them 30-6 and only lost on penalties, but according to FiveThirtyEight’s rating system, Middlesbrough are the 156th-best soccer team in the world. By that metric, they wouldn’t be the best team in Liga MX, MLS, the J-League, or even Hungary‘s Nemzeti Bajnoksag. Then, a couple of days later, United blew an early lead en route to a 1-1 draw with Burnley, who are bottom of the Premier League table with 14 points from 20 games.

This week’s results leave United in sixth place in the completely lopsided, traditional Premier League table — and also in our much more preferable points-per game table. With Arsenal and Tottenham ahead on points per game, FiveThirtyEight gives United just a 19% chance of finishing in the top four. And yet they’re still right there, right on the verge of fourth, with a roster of players that the crowd-sourced valuations from the site Transfermarkt consider to be the sixth-most valuable in the world after Manchester City, PSG, Liverpool, Chelsea and Bayern Munich — or the five favorites to win the Champions League.

In terms of potential performance over the rest of the season, United have the widest array of possibilities of any team in England, if not the world. So, let’s take a look at the four questions that will determine how their final 15 Premier League games play out.

All data courtesy of Stats Perform unless otherwise noted

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Is Rangnick’s system actually working?

When you think of a pressing team like the ones Ralf Rangnick developed for Red Bull’s network of clubs, you probably think: lots of running, lots of turnovers, lots of forward passing and, well, lots of goals. And it’s often the case that pressing is an attacking strategy. After all, Jurgen Klopp said so in so many words: “No playmaker in the world can be as good as a good counter-pressing.”

Yes, pressing high up the field is technically a defensive action — you’re attempting to steal the ball from your opponent — but it’s more accurate to think of it as the first offensive action: the thing that wins that ball and allows you to attack against an unsettled group of defenders who were just getting ready to attack.

Of course, soccer is a dynamic game, everything is interconnected, and all actions affect a team’s likelihood of scoring a goal and conceding a goal. In addition to kick-starting attacks, a perfectly executed high press — an impenetrable attacking third swarm that never gets broken down — would be a perfect defense because the opponent would never be able to move the ball out of their own half. They wouldn’t be able to shoot, and if you can’t shoot, you can’t score.

By contrast, the absolute pinnacle of low-block defending still requires a bit of luck to keep a clean sheet; you hold your opponent to a bunch of terrible shots, but they’re still getting shots or launching crosses into the box, and weird stuff happens when you wallop a ball into a crowd of defenders.

The last time Rangnick coached — RB Leipzig in 2018-19 — his team’s press created the best defense in the Bundesliga. They ranked third in passes allowed per defensive action in the final three-fifths of the field (PPDA) and allowed the second-lowest opponent pass-completion percentage behind Bayern Munich. They scored only 63 goals — fifth most in the league — but allowed the fewest (29). They finished third in Germany, with the third-best goal differential, and the biggest driver behind that was how few goals they allowed.

Through Rangnick’s nine Premier League games in charge, we’ve seen roughly the same pattern:

• PPDA: 14.44 under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, 12.31 under Rangnick
• Opponent pass-completion percentage: 81.9 under Solskjaer, 75.6 under Rangnick
• Goals allowed per game: 1.8 under Solskjaer, 0.8 under Rangnick

While the PPDA would just be roughly league average over a full season, the opponent pass completion would be bested only by the Premier League’s two pressers-in-chief: Leeds and Liverpool. Manchester City, meanwhile, are the only team in the Premier League allowing fewer than 0.8 goals per game.

In his previous job, Rangnick’s opponents struggled to complete their passes and then struggled to score goals. Just nine games into his current job, the same is true once again.

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Yeah, but can they score?

Ah, yes, that thing: scoring goals. In the final 12 games under Solskjaer, United scored 1.7 goals per match. Through nine games under Rangnick, United have scored 1.4 goals per game. You know who’s also scoring 1.4 goals per game? The entire Premier League; it’s the league average as of early February.

All of which raises the uncomfortable question that’s pretty much been there since the moment he returned from Italy, but especially so since Rangnick arrived: Is Manchester United better with Cristiano Ronaldo?

On the one hand: Of course not. Per the site FBRef, the only players with more non-penalty expected goals per 90 minutes in the Premier League this season are Liverpool’s front three of Diogo Jota, Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane. It’s just … well … Ronaldo doesn’t do much else.

Statsbomb created a metric called on-ball value (OBV) that aims to “objectively and quantitatively measure the value of each event on the pitch … by assessing the change in probability of a team scoring and conceding as a direct result of the event.” It’s a way to value things other than shots or assists — or all of the things that Ronaldo doesn’t do at this point in his career:

To put it another way, Diogo Jota is leading the Premier League in non-penalty xG per 90 minutes; he’s also leading all forwards in the league in pressures per 90 minutes with 20.53. That’s elite production on both sides of the ball, but the league average forward is still pressuring the ball 15.33 times per 90 minutes. Ronaldo is making 6.45 pressures per 90 — dead last at his position.

The answer to the with-or-without-Ronaldo question also depends on the player’s potential replacement: In this case, it’s 34-year-old Edinson Cavani. The 34-year-old Uruguayan probably can’t start every game, but in 600-plus minutes this season he’s roughly equal to Ronaldo in npxG/90, and he’s tied for second on the team in expected assists per 90 with 0.17. He’s not pressing like he used to, but at 11.6 pressures per 90, that’s nearly double what you’re getting from Ronaldo at this point.

At times, it also seems like Cavani’s constant movement is much better suited to the floating positional interchanges that the likes of Jadon Sancho, Bruno Fernandes, Marcus Rashford and Paul Pogba seemingly function best within. Playing most of his minutes with Ronaldo, Sancho in particular has been totally noneffective. After averaging either a goal or an assist per 90 minutes in the Bundesliga, he has a goal and zero assists across 1,000-plus minutes in the Premier League. The underlying numbers aren’t much better — 1.4 xG, 1.1 xA, per FBref — and United just have to get more attacking production out of him, somehow.

Burnley are not a good team at all, but United’s first half against them — with Cavani and those four non-Ronaldo players behind — was their best half under Rangnick. They outshot Burnley 12-0 and created 1.15 xG over the first 45 minutes. I’d probably stick with those same players again, but whether that’s tenable in a locker room containing an extremely well-paid four-time Ballon d’Or winner is another question altogether.

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Is David De Gea human?

When Manchester United finished second under Jose Mourinho in 2017-18, the biggest reason was David De Gea. United allowed the second-fewest goals — 28 to Manchester City’s 27 — despite conceding 41.7 expected goals, just the fifth-best mark in the league. Per Statsbomb’s data at FBref, De Gea conceded 8.5 goals fewer than the average keeper would be expected to, based on the shots he faced. It’s one of the greatest goalkeeping seasons of all time — and he’s been even better so far this year.

Although he has already allowed 31 goals this season, De Gea has saved 9.5 goals more than expected, per Statsbomb. And that’s with 15 games still to go! Did he steal Jan Oblak‘s lifeforce? Among all the keepers in Europe’s Big Five leagues, no one else has saved more than 6.6 goals. The Stats Perform goalkeeping model, which doesn’t account for as many variables as Statsbomb’s, shows De Gea as saving only — only — 6.1 goals, which still ranks him as the best shot-stopper in Europe.

See below: The bigger the circle, the harder the save …

De Gea is essentially a pure shot-stopper, meaning he saves shots and doesn’t do much else. Over the past 365 days, per FBref, he ranks in just the second percentile for percentage of crosses claimed (3.7%), and he’s in the eighth percentile for number of defensive actions outside the penalty area (0.29 per 90). Combined with the lack of pressing juice up top, De Gea’s inaggression off the line might help explain why United’s PPDA isn’t lower. But even though De Gea may not be a great fit for the higher line that Rangnick probably wants to play, he’s making up for it by saving everything in sight.

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Will it work against good teams?

Since Rangnick took over, here’s where United rank across a number of key metrics:

• Points per game: 2.0 (2nd)
• Goals per game: 1.4 (T-10th)
• xG per game: 1.6 (6th)
• Goals allowed per game: 0.8 (4th)
• xG allowed per game: 1.3 (7th)
• Goal differential per game: plus-0.7 (4th)
• xG differential per game: plus-0.33 (6th)

Despite the nice points haul, it’s the profile of a team that’s somewhere between the fourth-to-sixth-best team in the league. They’ve conceded fewer goals than expected, thanks in part to De Gea’s brilliance, and they’re also scoring fewer goals than expected, thanks to the randomness inherent to kicking a round ball with a foot.

The optimistic case for the rest of the year: De Gea’s shot-stopping blinder will continue because he’s done it before, the attackers will start to convert their chances at least at the same rate as their expected goals suggests they should, and the overall performance will improve as Rangnick has more time to work with his players and figure out his best lineup.

The response to that: “They ain’t played nobody.” Just two of their nine games under Rangnick came against teams in the top half of the table: Wolverhampton, whom they lost to, and West Ham, against whom they needed a 93rd-minute goal to defeat. United still have to play Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal on the road, and then they have home matches against Tottenham and Chelsea. Even the remaining matches against Southampton and Brighton will be tougher than the majority of the games they’ve played thus far.

Perhaps Rangnick’s style will work better against better teams. Klopp’s early press-heavy Liverpool teams struggled to break down the sides that sat deeper, and they won a lot of games against the best sides in the league because there was more space for them to attack into during transitions. Counterintuitively, it might also be easier to press effectively against the top teams in the league because they’re more likely to try to play out of the back. That still might be true to a degree, but the league has had more than enough time to adjust to and understand how to play against a press since Klopp first arrived.

The Godfather of Pressing is just over a third of the way into his interim stint in the Premier League, and he’s already had a material effect on the way Manchester United plays. They’re different and they’re better than they were before he showed up, but are they good enough to break back into the top four? We’ll probably find out in early March, when they play Manchester City, Tottenham, Atletico Madrid, and Liverpool — all in a row.

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