Burnley are on course to shatter defensive records this season in the Championship. We document what those are, and how Scott Parker has built such a resilient side.
They’re not doing it in glamorous fashion, but Burnley are on track for a record-breaking season.
Scott Parker’s side sit third in the Championship and have an excellent shot at earning promotion straight back into the Premier League. The Opta supercomputers certainly likes their chances of doing so, giving them a 48.3% chance of finishing inside the automatic promotion spaces.
If they do end up securing promotion, it’ll likely be thanks to a defensive record that is not just outstanding, but potentially historic.
Forty-one different teams in the Premier League and the EFL have scored more goals than Burnley this season. Yet only five have more points.
That’s because in 30 league games in 2024-25, Burnley have conceded just nine goals, 10 fewer than any other side in England (Leeds United – 19) and five fewer than any team within the top two tiers in Spain, Italy, France and Germany.
In fact, Burnley have conceded the fewest goals of any team in Premier League and EFL history after 30 matches. Their current record even surpasses José Mourinho’s famously stingy 2004-05 Chelsea side, who had conceded 10 goals after 30 games on their way to a Premier League record low of 15 goals conceded in a season. It’s widely thought that is one of those records that’ll never be broken.
Well, Burnley are giving it their best go, albeit at a level below that Chelsea side. Although the fact that they’ll play 46 games in the Championship this season means they’re likely to go over Chelsea’s 15-goal mark, on a per-game basis at least, the Clarets are currently the best defensive side in English Football League history.
That rock-solid defence has seen them keep 21 clean sheets in those 30 games. Continue at that rate, and Burnley will register over 32 shutouts in their 46-game season, which would smash the current EFL record of 27 clean sheets set by Wigan in League One in 2017-18.
But what’s been the secret behind their success?
A major factor has been James Trafford’s resurgence in goal.
It’s no secret that Trafford struggled in his first season at Turf Moor. To be fair, most of the side had a season to forget in 2023-24, as Burnley slid out of Premier League at the first time of asking. Trafford had one of the lowest save percentages of any goalkeeper last campaign (63.1%) on his way to conceding 62 goals. Similarly, of keepers to have started 10 or more games, only fellow relegated shot-stoppers Wes Foderingham (2.7) and Thomas Kaminski (2.2) conceded more often than Trafford’s 2 goals per game.
Yet this season, Trafford has transformed that part of his game. One only need to look at his heroics against Sunderland – when he saved two penalties to earn Burnley a point – to see that. Trafford’s save percentage of 86.8% leads not only all goalkeepers in England, but everyone in Europe’s top five leagues, too.
Save percentage can be a somewhat misleading figure if taken in isolation, though, as not all saves are created equal. It’s far easier to stop a dribbled, weak effort from outside the box than a bullet header from close range.
We can use expected goals on target (xGOT) to better quantify the chances that goalkeepers face. This season, Trafford has faced shots on target worth 18.0 xG in the Championship but conceded just nine times. That means he’s let in half the number of goals the average goalkeeper would expect to given the quality of efforts on target faced. Furthermore, his nine goals prevented is a tally only Viktor Johansson at Stoke can better (15.4).
But considering Stoke face almost seven more shots per game than Burnley, Johansson gets far more opportunities to save shots and therefore ‘prevent’ goals than Trafford does.
We can use goals-prevented rate to adjust for the volume of shots a goalkeeper faces. A goals-prevented rate of one means a goalkeeper is conceding exactly one goal for every goal they’d be expected to concede. Go above one and you’re performing above expectation. Below one and you’re not.
Trafford’s goals-prevented rate this season is 2.0, which leads all goalkeepers in the division. That number basically tells us that he’s performing at twice the level of a standard Championship goalkeeper: for every goal Trafford has actually conceded, we’d have expected him to concede twice that number.
Trafford is of course aided by a robust defence in front of him. It certainly helps that Burnley have had a very settled centre-back partnership, with CJ Egan-Riley and Maxime Estève starting 22 games together. Only Swansea (27), Leeds (24) and Blackburn (23) have had a more frequent centre-back pairing. An experienced duo of Joshes (Cullen and Brownhill) screens in front of the back four.
Unlike what the top-line numbers might allude to, this isn’t a side that sits deep and absorbs pressure. At 43.1 metres from their own goal, Burnley start their own passing moves the seventh-highest up the pitch of any team in division, and are the least direct team in the Championship when they win the ball back.
Out of possession, they press quite aggressively but mainly do so in the middle third, happy to sit in a mid-block that makes it hard for the opposition to play through them.
But what Burnley do an extremely good job of is protecting their own six-yard box. Although they concede a surprisingly high percentage of shots from inside the box (68.4% – seventh highest in the Championship), those shots are often from wide angles that are more difficult to score from.
The below graphic shows that in another way. The non-penalty xG value of the average shot Burnley have conceded this year comes in at 0.08; or roughly an 8% chance of being scored. That’s the lowest rate of any team in the division. Combine that with opponents finishing under expectation at just 3.1% – partly due to Trafford’s form and partly due to profligacy in front of goal – and you get a scatter plot as lopsided as this one.
Burnley’s clean sheet last weekend in a 0-0 draw – stop us if you’ve heard that scoreline before – at Portsmouth was their eighth in a row in the Championship.
That is one of just 34 runs of 8+ consecutive clean sheets in Football League history. The last side to record a longer run was Ipswich Town in April 2024, when they registered nine straight clean sheets. Burnley can match that record at home against Oxford United tonight.
The all-time English football record belongs to Manchester United, who went 14 consecutive games without conceding between November 2008 and February 2009. During that run, Edwin van der Sar famously kept his goal intact for 1,310 minutes, or almost 22 hours of football.
What makes Burnley’s season all the more statistically remarkable is that they’re not scoring very often themselves, either. They are one of just five Championship sides to average fewer than 1.0 non-penalty expected goals per game, while aside from Blackburn (34), they are the lowest scorers in the top half of the table.
Combine a lack of goal-mouth action at both ends of the pitch, and Burnley’s league games this term are currently seeing the joint-fewest goals per game in a season in English Football League history.
Despite their lack of attacking threat, only Liverpool (1) have lost fewer games in England’s top four divisions than Burnley (2). This isn’t exactly rocket science, but it’s simply extremely hard to lose football matches when you don’t concede many goals.
Getting back to the Premier League will be more of a priority than being exciting to watch for the vast majority of Burnley supporters. Keep up this defensive record and they will certainly be fighting for the top two positions come the end of the season.
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