With the regular Swedish season being over and Norrköping crowned champions, all that’s left now is to decide who’ll get the last spot in next years Allsvenskan. In this qualification play-off, Sirius finishing 3rd in Superettan is pitted against Allsvenskan’s 14th placed Falkenberg in a two-game battle.

Let’s have a look at some stats for the teams, compared to both the teams in Allsvenskan (blue) and Superettan (red):

From this graph, Sirius actually look really good with especially a strong defensive, even when compared to the Allsvenskan teams, while Falkenberg’s defence looks really poor. However, this doesn’t say much about how the teams compare to each other since Falkenberg has had to face far tougher opponents in Allsvenskan.

Looking at the xG maps what again stands out is the defensive performances of the teams. While Falkenberg have conceded a massive 415 shots, almost 14 per game, Sirius have only conceded 241 shots or about 8 per game. Not only that, Sirius’ xG per conceded attempt is 0.111 while Falkenberg’s is a staggering 0.154, meaning they concede shots in quite bad (for them) situations – not a good thing.
Looking at individual players we can se how Sirius’ Stefan Silva is the big overperformer here with his 12 goals almost doubling his xG numbers. Also, Falkenberg seem to have more goalscoring options with three players over 6 goals while Sirius only have Silva.

As always, I’m not willing to present any prediction for individual games, but here I had hoped to show the results of a simulation covering both play-off games including possible extra time and penalty shoot-out. I have run such an simulation, however I’m not happy with the results as my model seems to be favouring Sirius too heavily. This is almost certainly due to the different leagues involved, making Sirius look way better than they would be against an Allsvenskan side. Since I only came up with writing this post this morning, I haven’t had the time to look into a possible league strength variable to use in the simulation.

But if I had to guess, I’d say that Sirius looks like a real strong side and should possibly be considered favourites for promototion here, mostly due to Falkenberg’s nasty habit of conceding a lot of shots with high goal expectancies.