I listened to a podcast about Martin the other day. The basic gist was that Martin is a detail-oriented manager who goes by the numbers, and who believes that if his team can routinely create more chances than average while giving up fewer chances than average then they will eventually end up on top. I can see that in Martin, but it's lunacy to expect a team to play to the figures. Football is a game of emotion and artistry, it is too unpredictable to pin down to numbers.
So far, Swansea are 11th best in XG and 3rd best in XGa, although the comparatively few chances Swansea do give up are almost always clear-cut scoring opportunities.
@CroJack has talked about these figures a lot before.
Mathematically, Martin's idea is sound. He aspires to create a "set-and-forget" football system in which the players will follow the same detail-oriented plan every game to achieve consistent XG and XGa numbers in the belief that over the long haul superiority in those metrics will show up in the table.
If only football was played by mathematicians. I would argue that while football is played by humans and not robots, Martin's aspiration to football-strictly-by-numbers is an impossible and lazy dream.
Impossible because when a team is demoralised by a defeat, it is hard for the players to see the big picture in terms of fractions of XG and XGa which supposedly means everything will be ok in the end. In the heat of the moment, a player is more likely to forget the detail in their head and follow their heart instead. Clearly these players hate the detail, as evidenced by all the brain-fart goals against and Martin's never-changing press conference frustration about players not executing the detail properly. And what better way to stifle creativity and create hesitation by making sure your players have a ton to think about in every moment during every game?
Martin's approach is lazy in that he seems to want to play the same way every game. The art of management, at least on the tactical side, is to assess the opposition, set out a team capable of undermining the opponents strategy, and make timely and insightful changes on the fly during the game to ensure your team wins. Sure, there's "having a style", but you can be tactically flexible and still retain some basic core values. "But we dominated possession" is a meaningless whine after the fact and does not excuse a 33% win percentage. There is no easy option managing in a division as competitive as this one. It requires either a deep tactical understanding with the ability to communicate complex ideas to an entire team (sometimes mid-game), or confidence-building bravado so even if the tactics stay simple, the players feel like world-beaters and will always go the extra yard for their manager. Confidence counts for a lot in every walk of life, and it can win football matches. Teams with managers who can't do at least one of these things do not get promoted.
Also, Martin's claim that his team play well between the boxes is tragic. You know why his team play well between the boxes but poorly in either? Because all the other teams know that the game will be decided on what happens in the boxes, not so much in between them. They sit back and let Swansea pass themselves tired in harmless areas but when the play moves into either box, the opposition step up their game, and suddenly Swansea can't handle the challenge. It's self-inflicted rope-a-dope football almost every week.
I've said before I'd have canned Martin at the end of last season so a new guy had a full summer to make changes. What progression will we have seen at the end of this season's lower-mid-table finish to justify having kept him?