“Manchester City had 32.8% possession in their 1-1 draw at Arsenal last month, the lowest of Pep Guardiola’s career,” begins Graham Murphy. “Do any managers have a higher lowest-possession figure in the English top flight?”
That figure of 32.8% was the lowest for Guardiola in a league game, as mentioned in last week’s column. We can’t compare him to every Premier League manager, mainly because possession stats were only recorded from the 2003-04 season onwards. Instead, we asked our friends at Opta to deliver the statistical goods on selected managers, past and present.
At least five have a higher lowest-possession figure, though two of them – Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger – are subject to that 2003-04 caveat. For the last decade of Ferguson’s career, the lowest possession that a Manchester United team had in a Premier League game was 39.4% against Arsenal at Old Trafford in May 2009. United needed a draw to seal their 18th league title; a 0-0 draw got the job done.
Ferguson is top of our list, a nose ahead of one of his successors: Louis van Gaal, who was often accused of prioritising possession over penetration in his two years at Old Trafford. An exception was United’s first away win under Van Gaal, a 2-1 victory at the Emirates in November 2014 when they had a modest 38.6% possession.
There are a couple of recurring themes on this list: the first is that each manager’s lowest possession often came in a victory or at least a draw. The other is the involvement of Arsenal and one of the Manchester clubs. Arsenal’s lowest possession under Wenger (from 2003-04 onwards) came against Manchester City at the Etihad in January 2015, when Arsenal won 2-0 with 35.3% of the ball, finding a less-is-more template for dealing with the toughest away games.
The other two managers with a higher figure than Guardiola, Arne Slot and Enzo Maresca, are only in their second Premier League season and thus have a much smaller simple size. But both recorded their lowest percentage possession during a win – Slot against Guardiola’s Manchester City in February, Maresca against Slot’s Liverpool in May.
Here’s the top eight, in table form:
And selected others:
28.8% Unai Emery, Aston Villa 2-2 Chelsea, April 2024
24.2% José Mourinho, Liverpool 2-1 Tottenham, December 2020
19.6% Mikel Arteta, Manchester City 5-0 Arsenal, August 2021
18.0% Eddie Howe, Bournemouth 0-1 Manchester City, March 2019
Drawn-out campaigns
“Motherwell have drawn their first five league games, apparently a Scottish record,” points out John McAlpine. “What’s the record for consecutive league draws, both from the start of the season and overall?”
Motherwell’s attempt to make the record books ended with a disappointing 2-0 victory over Aberdeen last Saturday, giving them a Scottish Premiership record of P6 W1 D5 L0 Pts 8. We say attempt because, as Chris Roe points out, five consecutive draws at the start of the season isn’t a record across the four main Scottish leagues: Dumbarton started their 2024-25 League One campaign with six draws in a row. (And, as Mad Mac writes, Motherwell also started 1975-76 with five league draws.)
Chris and his magic database also spat out two English teams whose new-season optimism was dulled by six successive draws: Stockport County in 1973-74 (Fourth Division) and Leicester City in 1976-77 (First Division).
The record for consecutive draws at any stage of a season in England’s top four divisions appears to be eight in a row. That’s shared by seven teams, starting with Torquay United in 1969-70 and continuing through to Swansea City in 2008-09.
Real Zaragoza managed nine in a row in Spain’s Segunda Division in 2021-22, a run matched by Woking in the 2002-03 Football Conference. Woking’s season was a sequence spotter’s wildest dream. Between November and February, the Cards had a win-loss-win-loss run that lasted for 12 games; then, after a couple more defeats to mix things up, they drew nine games in a row. Here’s the full sequence from 23 November 2002 to the end of the season, with the Knowledge-tastic bits in bold: WLWLWLWLWLWLLLDDDDDDDDDW.
We did find one example of a team drawing 10 league games in a row. This came from an unanswered Knowledge question from Sean DeLoughry in November 2005.
Dundalk have now notched up an impressive 10 draws in a row in the Irish first division. Is this a record for the most consecutive draws?
Sean, apologies for the slight delay in getting back to you, but we think it might be.
Some people are on the pitch …
“Last week, St Mirren’s fans celebrated their Scottish League Cup quarter-final win at Kilmarnock with a pitch invasion. Has there ever been such a large-scale pitch invasion so early in the season?” wonders Rohan Back.
The answer may depend on your interpretation of the phrase “large scale”, but we reckon this is worthy offering from Ken Foster. “In the 2023-24 National League, promotion favourites Oldham equalised at Chesterfield in added time for a 1-1 draw. Hundreds of Oldham fans invaded the pitch and the game never kicked off again. That was in the fourth match of the season on 19 August.”
Supporters of both clubs fought on the pitch and Oldham were eventually fined £5,000 by the FA. Chesterfield eventually got over losing two points at the last. “We won the league,” continues Ken, “and finished 35 points ahead of Oldham.”
Knowledge archive
“Last week’s Knowledge touched on the subject of football magazines recording hard shots, long throws and other niche feats,” we wrote in 2020. “Alex Murphy may have witnessed the longest throw ever for a magazine series he worked on in the 1990s.
“I don’t know if Shoot! covered the subject as well, but the magazine I worked on as features editor – Total Football – had a long-running obsession with long throw-ins,” wrote Alex. “One day we trotted down to St Andrew’s with a photographer and a 50m tape measure and invited Birmingham City and Wales midfielder, Andy Legg, to attempt a new world record. Despite suffering from an ankle knock, and amid complaints about the wet surface, Legg hurled a football the entire width of the pitch.
“The feat was officially witnessed by myself and Blues midfield ace Paul Tait (he of the infamous ‘Shit on the Villa’ T-shirt) and our signed affidavits were accepted by a surprisingly lax and unquestioning Guinness Book of Records. Legg’s feat was duly recorded in the following year’s volume. I recall with shame that our headline on the feature was: ‘What a tosser!’
“A few months later we invited legendary Tranmere Rovers thrower-inner, Dave Challinor to take on Legg’s mark. He did it with ease, and took his place in the next edition of the book. Alas, the carefully chosen headline on this feature announced: ‘What an even bigger tosser!’ We were young and foolish.”
Since then Challinor has lost his world record, which is currently held by American flip-thrower Michael Lewis, who hurled a ball 59.17 metres in Frisco, Texas in April 2019 (that’s well over the halfway line). Here he is showing off his skills in 2015.
Can you help?
“Long throws are all the rage these days,” begins Ed Warren. “Who, if anyone, pioneered the use of the long throw into the six-yard box?”
“Sitting through Brentford v Manchester United on Saturday, it became clear that regardless of personnel, Ruben Amorim will not shift from his 3-4-2-1 even if the pope were to force him,” notes Paul Vickers. “This got me thinking: has there ever been a case of players actively defying a manager’s instructions, not by downing tools and giving up, but by taking up self-devised, alternative tactics and positions that they consider better suited to their abilities and the needs of the team? And what was the outcome of any such defiant player self-management in terms of the immediate result and then the subsequent fate of the manager and the players?”
“Saturday’s win at Accrington, combined with results elsewhere, ensured that Walsall finished September and began October at the top of League Two,” explains Darren Fellows. “This means they’ve topped League Two in January, February, March, April, September and October. Has there been another club to have led the same division (over two consecutive seasons) for at least six separate months?”
“Yeni Malatyaspor lost 45 consecutive matches across all competitions before finally holding on for a draw on Sunday. Has any professional club ever had a longer loss streak?” asks Ben Nem.