Fulham are four points off the top four and very much in contention for European qualification. Marco Silva has built a formidable team who can beat anyone on their day.
Quietly, Fulham have snuck into Champions League contention.
They’ve done it in spite of some quite wonderfully inconsistent form that makes it very difficult for them to achieve much of note.
Marco Silva’s team have not strung together a run of more than two Premier League wins all season. And they have only managed back-to-back wins on three separate occasions. Every time they take a couple of steps forward, there’s at least one step back.
It’s a frustrating statistic that also extends all the way back through last season and into the first half of 2022-23, their first campaign since promotion from the Championship under Silva.
The last time Fulham won three games in a row – and the only time since that promotion – was when they won four on the bounce straight after the mid-season break for the 2022 World Cup. And even then, it wasn’t exactly the most impressive of four-game winning streaks. The first victory was over a Crystal Palace side reduced to nine men before an hour had been played; the second and third were over two soon-to-be relegated teams in Southampton and Leicester City, and the fourth was against a 10-man Chelsea side enduring their worst season in recent memory.
Silva – who oversaw his 200th Premier League game as a manager in Sunday’s 2-0 win over Tottenham – has turned Fulham into a very good Premier League team, but their consistent inconsistency has prevented them fulfilling the potential they regularly show with impressive wins over big teams.
They are capable of pulling off some really surprising results – both good and bad. This season, they drew consecutive games with Arsenal and Liverpool, and then in their next game became one of just five teams to fail to beat a Southampton side who are proving to be one of the worst teams in Premier League history. Soon after, Fulham won away at Chelsea just before slipping up against both Ipswich and West Ham.
It’s been a frustrating theme of Silva’s entire reign and means Fulham have only managed to finish 10th and 13th in their two seasons since their return to the top flight, despite being able to beat just about anybody on their day.
This season, though, a combination of factors – including the inconsistencies of others – have turned Fulham into contenders for a return to Europe, and possibly even an improbable adventure in the Champions League. They are also into the last eight of the FA Cup, and have a genuine chance of winning that competition with so many big teams already out.
Arguably most important is the fact that, although they don’t string many wins together, Silva ensures his side rarely suffer long barren runs. Fulham’s longest winless streak all season has been three games; across the whole Premier League, the only team whose longest run without winning is shorter is runaway leaders Liverpool (two games). Fulham don’t often endure a rot they struggle to stop.
That’s because Silva has made Fulham incredibly difficult to beat. Only four teams have lost fewer Premier League games this season than them (eight), and that is largely a result of their stingy defence.
Typically for a team of Silva’s, Fulham don’t concede many chances. Only the top two sides, Arsenal (23.4 xG) and Liverpool (24.6 xG), have allowed their opponents non-penalty chances worth fewer expected goals this season than Fulham (31.9 xG). In open play, they also have the third best record behind the top two, having conceded just 22.8 xG in open play in their 29 games so far – an average of just 0.79 xG per game.
From the outside – and particularly with those numbers in mind – it can appear as though Silva is a defence-first manager. One who, much like José Mourinho, the only Portuguese manager to oversee more Premier League games (363) than Silva, prioritises defensive solidity above all else. However, that is not the impression that the players, who train with him every day, are given.
“He is on every detail. He is a perfectionist” Fulham midfielder Andreas Pereira told Opta Analyst exclusively earlier this month. “We practise the tactical side of things every day and it might look from the outside [like he puts defence first] because we are defensively very solid and so well set up, but we do lots of work with the ball. He always wants us to keep hold of the ball because it means that we have to do less defending. He wants our attackers to be creative.”
Defending well, Pereira says, comes easily to this group.
“Defensively, because we’ve been playing together for three years now, we already know our roles really well.”
However, while there is clearly intent to dominate the ball and be an attack-minded team – Fulham rank sixth in the Premier League this season for possession (52.7%) – while they have invested heavily in creators in the last couple of years, they struggle to balance that impressive defence with a fluidity in attack.
They rank 11th in the Premier League this season for goals scored, and 12th for non-penalty expected goals (37.3 xG). They have only scored more than two goals in two games all season, last doing so on 5 December.
They tend to sit on leads and protect them rather than push to kill the game off, and while they rarely lose, that cautious approach has hurt them this season. Holding on to a narrow lead is inherently risky, and only Southampton (23) have dropped more points from winning positions in the Premier League this season than Fulham (22).
Late on in games, Fulham have performed pretty well, and Silva has had a significant impact with his changes from the bench. Fulham’s substitutes have scored more Premier League goals this season (13) than any other team, and only Bournemouth (17) have scored more goals in the last 15 minutes of games than them (15).
Rodrigo Muniz is the top-scoring sub in the division, with five goals, the most recent of which came in Sunday’s win over Spurs. After that opener, Ryan Sessegnon then came off the bench and took just 63 seconds to put the result beyond doubt with yet another substitute goal.
Spurs aren’t having the best time at the moment, but Fulham made them look completely ordinary at the weekend. Silva’s side aren’t a nice team to play, ranking third in the top flight this season for duel success (51.2%), and Tottenham’s players didn’t appear to enjoy themselves at all. The sight of Calvin Bassey flinging Cristian Romero to the floor was illustrative of a gulf in physical capabilities between the sides. Silva has built a team that nobody looks forward to playing.
That, and their results against the top teams, should give them confidence ahead of a tough-looking run-in. Now just three points off the top five, Fulham appear to have a very decent chance of getting back into Europe for the first time since 2011-12. However, based on the average Opta Power Ranking of each team’s remaining opponents, Fulham have the most difficult remaining fixtures of all Premier League teams in 2024-25.
But given they have proved so many times under Silva that they can mix it with the best, perhaps there should be nothing to worry about when it comes to the quality of their opposition. Maybe it is the games that look more winnable that should cause them more concern.
But on the anniversary of arguably the greatest European night in their history – the 4-1 Europa League win over Juventus on 18 March 2010 – it’s fair for Fulham to dream of a return to continental competition.
The truth is that, at their best, Silva’s Fulham are good enough to get the points they need in the remaining weeks of the season. In the likes of Alex Iwobi, Antonee Robinson, Raúl Jiménez and Emile Smith Rowe, they have the attacking verve to trouble anyone. In Bassey, Joachim Andersen, Sasa Lukic and Sander Berge, they have a robust core. And in Muniz, Harry Wilson and Adama Traoré they have plenty in reserve. This Fulham team are a formidable force.
Silva has now made it to 105 Premier League games in charge of Fulham, putting him second behind Chris Coleman (152) for most games managed at the club. He has the highest win rate of any Fulham manager (38.1%), the best points-per-game record (1.37) and is the only one to manage more than a season’s worth of games (38) and boast a positive goal difference.
It’s easy to forget that Fulham only came up from the second tier three years ago and, as a result, easy to overlook just how good a job Silva has done.
But for his team to complete the task at hand and make it back into Europe, they could probably do with, at some point, stringing three wins together.
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