Myths about winners and what we need to get to the top

Many from the small circle of Swedish football experts make the same inaccurate statements over and over about what makes a team win the championship. The most common one is probably "to win you have to have a striker that scores 15 goals".  I have looked at the champions over the past 10 years and can now say "to win you have to have a striker that scores 12-14 goals".

But that is not all.  If we want to summarize, we might say that:

• You better be the team that wins the most if you want to win the title (hardly a surprise although in 2007 it was not the case).  Winning the most is far more important than losing the least.  Out of the last ten champions, only two won on the "do not lose" policy, Elfsborg in 2006 and IFK Gothenburg in 2007
• You better be the team that wins the most away from home (this is more important than being the most prolific team at home, and it is more important than winning the most points away).
• You better have a keeper that keeps the most clean sheets (up to half of the games)
• You better not have the player that wins the combined goals+assists league.

The last one may look odd.  But in fact never in the last 10 years have the winner of cmobined goals+assists come from the champion.  Otherwise the picture is positive: most of the time, and particularly in the later years, it is the team that goes forward and dares to dominate also away from home the wins the championship.

In more detail:

You typically need 2.03 points per game to become champion, although the trend with 16 rather than 14 teams is that the average should be slightly higher than that.

Örebro obviously need to improve here, last year's average was 1.73.

A pretty normal way to achieving an average of 2 points per game is to win 60% of the games, draw 20% and lose 20%.  At home, you should win around 2/3 of the games, still draw around 20% and lost one or two games tops.  Away, you should win a bit more than half of your games and not lose more than 25% of the games.

Örebro won just over half their games last year, and did not have many draws.  But losing 10 games is certainly not on, no champion over the last 10 years have lost more than 6.

At home, we won 11 out of 15 which is good enough.  Losing 3 is at least one too many, though.

It is away that we need to improve, and in particular (i) on natural grass and (ii) against the better sides.  On astroturf away from home, Örebro won three, drew one and lost none last season.  On natural grass we had the terrible record of two wins, two draws and seven defeats.  But maybe even more importantly, our record away against the bottom six teams of the table was five wins, one draw and no loss, whereas against the other top 10 teams we managed two draws (including a last-minute equalizer against Elfsborg) and lost seven.  I will come back to that at some point, but there is where we really really need to improve.  The last four champions have won 8 away games.

In terms of goalscorers, rarely is the top scorer from the champion (twice in the last ten years, and one of those years the title was tied).  What you need (Elfsborg in 2006 being the exception) is a player that scores about 12-14 goals.

Örebro have struggled to find a prolific goalscorer since Pålsson scored a lot in the early 2000s. This has been a reason why the top results in the 90s (with Kubistzal and then Sahlin, we had a goal guarantee of 10+ every year).  Larsen in the autumn of 2008 looked like he could be the next one, but last year with a top goal scorer with five was pathetic.  Haddad has scored seven in just a few friendlies, and he looks to fit the bill absolutely perfectly.  We will be ok here this year.  I am sure.

So in the end, the only thing we need to prove is: do we have the strategy and quality that it takes to win a few of the big away games? Can we pull back just a little and still keep a clean sheet, and still be lethal of counteracttacks?

At home, we need to learn to be calm.  When we score the first goal we win, when we don't we lose.  That was the story last year and that is dangerous.  I want to see us gain points also in games when we are down 1-0 this season.