Burnley have gatecrashed Premier League top four on sixth of Arsenal wage bill and squad costing less than Paul Pogba
The Clarets beat Stoke at Turf Moor and are ruffling feathers at the top of the Premier League after selling their best players in the summer and paying average wages of £18,000-a-week
They left it late, needing an 89th-minute winner from substitute Ashley Barnes, but Burnley’s 1-0 victory over Stoke City at Turf Moor on Tuesday night saw the Clarets break into the top four of the Premier League.
Games in hand for Arsenal, Liverpool, and Tottenham Hotspur mean the Lancashire side’s stay in the Champions League qualification places is likely to be short, but that shouldn’t detract from the fact Sean Dyche’s men are greatly exceeding expectations this season.
On a shoestring budget compared to their rivals, Burnley’s rise up the Premier League ladder is nothing short of incredible.
And our friends at Football Whispers have taken a deeper look at the Clarets’ remarkable progress.
Burnley’s current Premier League standing defies much of the English top flight’s conventional wisdom.
For example, their success has been built on a solid defensive foundation, conceding only 12 league goals in 17 matches this term.
Yet, according to the expected goals (xG) metric, which places a value on every shot taken based on the statistical likelihood of it being scored, they could have shipped a lot more – the quality of chances Dyche’s side have conceded totals 21.96 xG.
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No goal in the Premier League is shot at more regularly than Burnley’s (16.4 times per game), but no other team blocks as many efforts as the Clarets (5.6 per game).
Dyche’s unique defensive system is less concerned with stopping the opposition shooting than it is with forcing teams to aim for goal from unfavourable angles, and with more defenders between ball and goal.
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The former Watford boss knows his determined backline will put their bodies on the line for the cause and has constructed a style in which this becomes a huge weapon.
Likewise, in attack they are defying statistical analysis.
With 16 goals scored against an xG of 10.84, only champions Chelsea are outperforming their xG by a greater margin, demonstrating Burnley’s clinical finishing, making the most of the chances they create.
When it comes to money, too, Burnley are subverting the norm.
In this era of elaborate transfer market spending, the Clarets are one of only four teams to have turned a net profit in the summer window.
And of those four sides (Swansea City, Stoke and Tottenham being the others), only the struggling Swans turned a greater summer profit than Burnley’s £15.2million.
With such a restricted budget, it is to the immense credit of Dyche and his scouting staff that the sales of key players like Michael Keane (sold to Everton for £30million) and Andre Gray (Watford, £18million) did not have the catastrophic effect many feared, replacing outgoing stars with cheaper alternatives or players already on the books.
Perhaps even more than market spending, a club’s wage bill is often used as a benchmark for performance, with the league table usually more or less reflecting the order of salary expenditure.
But again, Burnley are smashing this convention. Their £29.1million wage bill is less than a third of the size of Tottenham’s and roughly a sixth the size of Liverpool and Arsenal’s, all teams currently below the Clarets in the league.
The lion’s share of the credit for Burnley’s rapid development is rightly given to Dyche, who took over at Turf Moor in 2012, and has stayed loyal to the Lancashire club through some difficult circumstances.
After earning promotion to the Premier League in 2014, Dyche stayed with Burnley when they were relegated back to the Championship a year later.
Through savvy spending and careful planning, he took his side right back up to the top flight and consolidated their Premier League status with a 16th-place finish last term.
"Football is about realities but also about dreams," Dyche said after the Stoke win.
With European qualification now a distinct possibility, Burnley are certainly in dreamland.