With the "Fürther Flachpass" you knew it a little earlier. In episode 73 of the podcast with the beautiful title "The Quantification of Luck and Bad Luck", the makers put forward one or the other thesis that seemed a bit steep at the time. "The table," it said, "always lies." And that "underlying metrics" showed that the Fürthers - unless you look at this lying bitch of the table - are not the worst team in Bundesliga history. That was at the beginning of November, the unfortunate "Kleeblatt" had actually lost 1:2 against Eintracht Frankfurt, the ninth defeat in a row.
But what should be encouraging was the statistics, specifically: those of the "expected goals" and "expected points", i.e. the goals and points that could actually be expected based on the game performance. So if you didn't look at the mean results, so the argument in the "flat pass", but at the probability of the result based on the number and quality of chances, the Fürth should not have had one, but between ten and thirteen points in their account: fifteenth place in of the alternative table, "at least".
Admittedly, this thesis (the seriousness of which was confirmed by the fact that their representative is otherwise passionately devoted to 1. FC Nürnberg) was put to the test in the games that followed: 0: 4 in Mönchengladbach, 3: 6 against Hoffenheim , 1:7 in Leverkusen.
But since then something has happened that hardly anyone in football Germany would have thought possible, especially not in football-Franconia, which is prone to fatalism: After the 2-1 win against Mainz, the Fürth team are now with nine points from the past six games only better than the Stuttgart (four), Augsburg (six) and Wolfsburg (one) placed directly in front of them, but also than the European ambitious Leverkusen, Freiburg and Hoffenheim (eight each).
Scorn, mockery and Tasmania Berlin
All in all, this speaks more for a daisy mentality in the Bundesliga today-so-tomorrow-so than for a significant probability that the "cloverleaf" will still reach the class goal: if you arrive too late, you still have to leave again in the end. But if the trend doesn't evaporate just as quickly, there might be something comforting in it for the people of Fürth.
Keeping calm as much as possible, while scorn and ridicule and the inevitable comparison with Tasmania Berlin rain down on you, not giving up even in a situation that is becoming more hopeless from week to week, but continuing in the knowledge that you owe something to yourself - these are no small things Achievements, especially not in view of the difficult personnel situation that coach Stefan Leitl had to deal with before and during the season. In the case of the Fürth pros, hope is germinating again even when looking at the real table. "That's how it looks," said Jeremy Dudziak when asked if nothing was impossible with a view to the relegation zone.
Meanwhile, statisticians have long been working on the next hot thing, a category called "expected threat."
It's possible that you'll feel it a bit in Wolfsburg and Berlin, with the next opponents in Fürth.