I was crawling deep through the early-season data as one does on a Champions League Wednesday and found something a bit odd that deserves a little investigation. First, I had broken up the pitch into 9 zones, seen below:

I was looking at how teams move from zone to zone as they build-up before they get deep into the box, basically from the back until they get to zone 3. There were standouts on both ends: Man City and Liverpool’s efficiency and Cardiff and Newcastle’s hopeless bashing but Huddersfield around zone 5 stood out oddly. Here a few graphs to show what caught my eye:

Most teams play more passes from Zone 5 than Zone 6, Huddersfield play about half as many. So I looked back at what was going on in Zone 6 a bit:

and found that Huddersfield simply aren’t trying to move the ball forward from Zone 6 at all. Man City and Chelsea are 2nd and 3rd lowest in this list but when they do attempt to progress the ball they are the 2 most efficient teams at it (93 and 86%). Huddersfield is 16th at 67%. I wondered if this was a problem just completely across the back so I looked at passes starting in Zones 7 and higher to see if a similar trend continued.

And no it did not. Huddersfield aren’t trying a play it around the back type Chelsea/Arsenal/Man City strategy, but something odd is going on once they get it just off the back into zone 6. Sample size wise, there are 369 passes starting in Zone 6, so it’s not like we are looking at shot-level scarcity here in the data.

So why is the ball “sticking” in Zone 6 for Huddersfield? To investigate I looked at each teams main two passers in that zone. These were mostly center backs but there were a handful of central midfielders sprinkled in (Xhaka, Gosling, Doucoure, Stephens, McDonald, Noble, Milivojevic, Ralls, and Diame were the 9 midfielders with the remaining 31 being center backs). I charted how often they attempted to progress the ball into a forward zone vs how successful they were at it:

Of the 40 players, Christopher Schindler is the most conservative. Under 30% of the time he attempts to move the ball forward (average is 45%) while he is also one of the least successful passers. Only Diame, Gosling and Holgate complete a noticeably lower% of passes. Terrance Kongolo, the other Huddersfield centerback, you can see is also one of the most conservative and least successful players.

So any answer as to why Huddersfield can’t get out of zone 6 has to include Christopher Schindler. I wondered if it was a tactical tweak that led to his numbers being thrown all out of whack, after all we are just 5 games into the season. Huddersfield played a back 3 vs Crystal Palace, Chelsea and Everton while have gone back 4 vs Cardiff and Man City. Maybe the back 3 vs back 4 numbers look starkly different. They don’t look any different for Schindler really: 20% of time he tries a Zone 6 pass he successfully progresses the ball forward no matter if he’s been in the back 3 or back 4. No matter if it’s been a back 4 or 3 however, Zanka has not had the problems that Schindler and Kongolo have…he is moving the ball forward basically where you see Doucoure on the graph above. He’s conservative but only slightly, while succeeding more than the average. The evidence seems to point to the fact that Huddersfield are putting too much on Schindler and Kongolo’s plate, and they simply aren’t good enough passers to move the ball forward into Zone 5.