Frattesi posted -21 and he is right. But the number that explains Lazio is a different one

On Sunday night, after the 3-0 at the Allianz Stadium, Davide Frattesi posted an Instagram story with two characters in it: -21.

Nineteen points on the board, forty the traditional safety line, twenty-one in between. It was an answer to everyone who in August had filed Lazio among the sides who would be fighting relegation, and as an answer it is faultless. Those predictions were wrong, and they were wrong back then.

The trouble is that the way this Lazio side is being described today uses exactly the same method, just pointed the other way. So it is worth putting the numbers down.

19 points, 11.58 earned

Lazio are top, level with Inter. In the expected points table, the one that adds up match by match what a performance is actually worth, they are seventh.

Nineteen points against 11.58, a gap of 7.42: the widest in Serie A. Behind them come Cagliari at 6.97 and Frosinone at 5.58, which is to say two teams nobody is writing rebirth stories about.

Inside that gap, though, there is something interesting. The attack has almost nothing to do with it: 14 goals scored against 12.07 expected, a plus 1.93 that over seven matchdays is background noise. Everything else, which is to say almost everything, sits at the other end of the pitch.

Four goals conceded out of 9.52

In seven matches Lazio have faced 87 shots, conceded 9 big chances and let in 4 goals, against 9.52 expected goals conceded.

Five and a half goals saved, the second highest figure in the league behind Cagliari. And here something needs saying straight away, because it does not mean the defence leaks: 9.52 expected goals conceded in seven matchdays is roughly what Inter have allowed, 9.64, and what Milan have allowed, 9.18. Lazio concede as much as the sides above them, and let in half the goals.

The name of that half is Christos Mandas.

The Greek goalkeeper was as good as gone in June. Tiago Pinto would have made his move permanent at Bournemouth, but the English club would not guarantee him the shirt; Fiorentina and Juventus both circled. He stayed because Gattuso blocked the sale and convinced him that staying would make him a protagonist. At the Penzo, with the game goalless, he saved a penalty from Yeboah. After six matchdays only Cagliari's Caprile had conceded fewer.

This is not a criticism of Lazio, it is a description. A goalkeeper saving more than expected is a real advantage and produces real points, which stay on the board even when the level comes back down. It is simply the thing that, out of everything a team does, comes back down fastest.

The part nobody expects: Gattuso says it himself

Here is what makes this piece less unkind than it looks.

After Venezia-Lazio, won 2-0 in a match where the home side had produced 1.85 expected goals against 1.77, his own manager said this: «Today we also got lucky, because we read the game wrong. If Venezia had gone in at half time 2-0 up they would not have stolen anything. We were very fortunate». And this: «We were too stretched and every time we lost the ball we were played through».

There is no statistical model on earth that would have put it better. The manager of the league leaders, in the week of his first place, described exactly the mechanism our numbers measure.

It was not the only time. «The table means nothing today. If we want to surprise people we have to do things properly», he added on the same occasion. When he was reminded that the bookmakers had him as the first manager in Serie A who would be sacked, the reply was just as dry: there are people who put headphones on in front of a screen and feel like journalists, the important thing is to read nothing and believe in what you are doing.

What is not luck

It would be dishonest to stop there, because inside this start there are three things that were built, not stumbled upon.

The first is the left-hand chain. Gattuso claimed it after Turin with a precision managers rarely allow themselves: eight goals have come from there, we prepared it that way. Nuno Tavares starts at full-back and comes inside, Zaccagni holds the touchline, and the first goal against Juventus comes from a cut-back corner by Zaccagni while the second carries Tavares's signature. Two goals out of three from the lane that was designed for exactly that.

The second is Davide Frattesi, the man of the -21 himself. He has 3 goals from 10 shots, from positions worth 1.91. He is the team's top scorer, and he is precisely the kind of player needed by a manager who has asked his side to fill the box with as many bodies as possible: not the finisher, the runner arriving from deep once the ball is already in there.

The third is the work done on the players who were already there. Belahyane, whom Gattuso moved from ball-winning midfielder to deep-lying playmaker, spent the first days of pre-season coming to his office to apologise because he could not stay on his feet. Noslin, who had become a supporting forward, is today a striker who roams. Tavares is having the most consistent season since he arrived in Italy. None of those three things is a coin tossed in the air.

And there is one figure that sums them up: of Lazio's 14 goals, 12 come from open play. This team does not live on set pieces and moments, it scores by playing.

So what do the numbers actually say

That Lazio, right now, are worth 1.65 points per game, which over thirty-eight matchdays makes 63 points.

Sixty-three points, last year and in the years before, is the European places. It is not the survival fight people talked about in August and it is not the title people are talking about now. It is a good side, assembled without money, playing above its squad, with a goalkeeper in form.

The prediction we are putting our name to, and will come back to check, is this: over the next seven matchdays Lazio will concede more than 4 goals. Probably between 8 and 10, if the volume of shots allowed stays where it is. It is not a wish, it is how the thing works: 87 shots faced with 4 goals conceded is a rate nobody holds for a season.

Look at the first column of the chart. At Bologna, on the opening day, Lazio won 1-0 a match worth 0.47 expected points: Bologna had produced 2.06 expected goals against 0.81. Three points taken where the football gave half a point. That single matchday is worth a third of the entire surplus.

And if they are the ones who are right

The opposite reading exists, and it deserves space rather than being quietly ignored.

Expected goals measure two things badly, and they happen to be the two this Lazio side is good at: balls thrown into the box over and over, where the value is built on chaos rather than on the individual shot, and a team's ability to defend its own area with bodies. Nine big chances conceded in seven matches is a low number, and nobody saves those if you have not prevented them first.

Then there is an argument that is not statistical and counts anyway. A club that has lost its best players for three years running, with two thousand season tickets renewed out of thirty thousand and the curva empty in protest, is winning six matches out of seven. Gattuso has said that without all that mess he would never have come to Lazio. That kind of thing, in football, moves results no model can see.

So: the prediction above stands, but if in December Lazio are still there with 4 or 5 goals conceded, the problem is our model's and not theirs.

The -21 needed writing

Frattesi is right to take the mickey, and we are on his side about one precise thing: whoever wrote Lazio off in August was not looking at the numbers, they were looking at the balance sheet and at the faces.

The point is that whoever hands them the title today is making the same mistake in reverse, and in six months those two groups of people will have swapped places without noticing.

On Saturday at 20:45 Parma come to the Olimpico. The quickest way to understand how much of this Lazio will last is to watch one thing only: how many shots they allow and how many Mandas saves. Because so far, in seven matchdays, it is 87 and 26.

T.L.

The match by match verdict is in the Meritometro. For those who want models and not headlines, there is the Nerd Zone.