West Ham 2-1 Wolves 

©IMAGO

A 2-1 defeat to West Ham on Wednesday night kept Wolves stuck in the bottom three of the Premier League table and piled more pressure on under-fire manager Gary O’Neil. The result now means that the club have lost each of their last three league games and won just two of their opening 15 fixtures of the league campaign. The Molineux side next face Ipswich on Saturday in what is already considered a must-win match for the club if they hope to stay in the English top-flight this season and for O’Neil if he hopes to keep his job at the club. 

“We gave ourselves a chance to take something from the game. You can see the lads are still 100 percent committed,” said the Wolves boss to Sky Sports after the match. “There are a lot of things that need to be done. They are a great group. They understand the situation at the club and that it’s difficult. But they are standing up and fighting. There will be moments where we are not showing the quality.” With just two wins and three draws from the opening 15 league games of the season, O’Neil’s record with Wolves in the Premier League this season stands at a rather abysmal 0.6 points per game. That average is less than half what he achieved with the club last season, as Wolves climbed to fourteenth in the league table with an average of 1.21 points per game. And as we can see in the graphic below, it’s also the club’s worst return since winning promotion back to the Premier League in 2018.

To understand why Wolves are doing so poorly this season, we need only look at the amount of goals O’Neil’s team are conceding this season. Last season, the club conceded 1.7 goals per game, but this time around that average has ballooned to 2.53 goals conceded per game. And it is clearly impacting the team’s ability to pick up points in the league campaign. This is perhaps most evident when we consider when Wolves concede their goals. Of the 38 they’ve shipped this season, 15 have come in the first half, which is the second highest tally among all Premier League clubs. When we couple that with the fact that no club has gone behind in the Premier League this season more times than O’Neil’s Wolves (14 times), it points to a team that routinely concede goals before they’ve even had a chance to score one themselves. Unfortunately for the West Midlands side, this also works the other way around too, with O’Neil’s side also conceding goals after they’ve managed to take the lead. So much so that of the six times Wolves have taken the lead in matches this season (second lowest in the league) they’ve gone on to lose 10 of the potential 18 points. 

Perhaps the most obvious reason behind Wolves’ inability to defend this season comes down to the sale of central defender Maximilian Kilman in the summer to none other than West Ham for €47.5 million. Not only was Kilman the club captain last season, but he was also the linchpin of O’Neil’s defence and finished the league campaign as the player with the most minutes played for Wolves in the Premier League. Not only was Kilman an excellent defender, but he was also crucial to how Wolves kept the ball and controlled games last season. The 26-year-old defender finished top of Wolves’ squad for total passes in the league last season, and also came fourteenth among all players in the English top-flight for completed passes according to FBRef. 

Another major blow to Wolves’ prospects in the Premier League was the sale of Pedro Neto, who moved to Chelsea for €60m in the summer. Although O’Neil’s team are actually averaging more goals this season, Neto’s speed and dribbling skills on the wing made him a constant threat on the counter attack and an ideal out-ball for Wolves when they were trying to relieve pressure in games. When we couple that with injuries ruling Hee-chan Hwang out for much of this season, it means that O’Neil has essentially had to rebuild his attacking line up with new faces this season, such as on-loan talent Jørgen Strand Larsen, which has also had a hugely adverse effect on how the team tries to win games and pick up points in the league.  

Whether O’Neil will have the time to rebuild his squad and do so before relegation is staring Wolves in the face remains to be seen. But anything but all three points against Ipswich on Saturday may force the club to seriously consider whether the 41-year-old head coach is the man to steer Wolves towards safety this season or whether a new appointment with fresh ideas may be needed to get the best out of a squad that has seen some major upheavel over the course of the last six months.