From crisis to clarity – The stats behind Wolves’ remarkable turnaround under Vítor Pereira

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Unbeaten in six games 

©IMAGO

To consider how far Wolves have come in the past five months, fans of the Premier League side only had to consider their manager’s comments after an impressive 1-0 win over Manchester United at Old Trafford on Sunday. Rather than celebrate the club’s second win at the famous ground in three years, Vítor Pereira instead noted what his team could have done better. “It was not our best match. Technically and tactically, we know that we can play better,” admitted the Wolves boss, before offering some praise to his players. “We played with our souls, with our spirit and that is what I saw in the game. The supporters believed and the moment that we had a chance, we scored.”

Such are the high standards of the relatively new Wolves boss that he’s not only dragged the club away from the very real threat of relegation, but now expects them to be competing against some of the bigger clubs in the division. After taking over in December when the club were languishing in nineteenth place, Pereira has overseen no less than nine wins and two draws in the club’s last 17 league games, which has dragged Wolves out of the bottom three and projected them into mid-table. “We have quality in the squad,” said the Portuguese tactician after Sunday’s match. “The confidence was not at a high level when we arrived but we started to give them confidence and in the end the results helped to build something. We are building something good for the future. We have to go into the next game and believe and with our supporters we can do it.”

Indeed, Wolves have looked like a completely different team since Pereira replaced Gary O’Neil and begun to implement his own tactics at Molineux. Whether it be cancelling the club’s Christmas party soon after joining in December, stripping Mario Lemina of his captaincy in favour of Nelson Semedo or by simplifying the team’s tactics to a basic 3-4-3 formation that can counter-press teams with relative ease, Pereira has quickly rebuilt the squad he inherited and made it his own. And a look at the stats would suggest that the Premier League is still struggling to find a way of stopping Wolves and their new manager. 

Since making the move to Molineux at the end of last year, Wolves have picked up a rather remarkable 29 points from 17 league games. In that same period of time, only five other clubs in the Premier League have won more points than Pereira, whose team sit level with high-flying Nottingham Forest in the table above. In no uncertain terms, Pereira has enjoyed a new-manager bounce like no other in Wolves’ history and while the club may be some way off their seventh-place finish in 2019/20, the start that Pereira has made over the course of the last five months is somewhat unprecedented for the English side. 

As we can see in the graphic above, Pereira is currently enjoying an average of 1.71 points per league game in the English top-flight. That, unsurprisingly, is a 68 percent increase on his predecessor’s record in the Premier League, but some Wolves fans may take some unexpected delight in learning that Pereira’s record also far exceeds what successful managers such as Bruno Large or Nuno Espírito Santo achieved at the club not that long ago. Naturally, it only makes sense that Pereira’s average will eventually settle down to something more akin to a mid-table club, but for now he leads the way among Wolves managers in the English top-flight and currently holds a record that no previous Wolves manager can come close to since the formation of the Premier League in the early nineties.