Yellow submarine on the ascendancy | OneFootball

Real Madrid and Barcelona have had an especially strong stranglehold on Spanish football in the last two decades, only punctuated by the occasional Atlético de Madrid win. That makes it always interesting to see a new team look up for the challenge – something Villarreal are doing right now.

We're about a third into the 2025/26 La Liga season and a brief glimpse at the table shows Real Madrid and Barcelona top as always with some familiar clubs taking up the European spots.

However, Villarreal have started the season particularly well and their form deserves a closer look at the numbers behind it all.

Yellow wall

We'll start at the back, Villarreal have been defensively solid through the first part of this season, keeping six clean sheets in La Liga. Goalkeeper Luiz Júnior is tied with Thibaut Courtois at the top of the clean sheet rankings but has a high clean sheet ratio of 60% having played three fewer games than the Belgian.

Meanwhile, injury may have kept Santiago Mouriño out of the 2-1 win at home to Espanyol on Saturday but the Uruguayan is one of the best tacklers in Europe this season. Indeed, Mouriño has won 28 tackles in the league this season, behind only Gabriel Suazo of Sevilla (32) and Tottenham's João Palhinha (37) of players in the top five leagues.

Pépé in their step

Nicolas Pépé's time at Arsenal was no doubt weighted down by a high price tag but he is enjoying himself in Spain, even if he is yet to recreate that form he showed at Lille.

The 30-year-old remains an attacking threat though, ranking seventh in the league for key passes (25), third for passes into the penalty area (24), and fourth for expected assists (xA) with 3 – although he has only one assist so far in the league. Of course, Pépé is still not as clinical as we would hope a player of his talent could be (he had a big miss against Rayo Vallecano earlier this season from a yard out) but he continues to be a danger to opposition defences.

One man who is clinical so far is Tajon Buchanan. The Canadian has scored four times in the league this season, but that number would likely be higher if he had more opportunities with only Getafe's Borja Mayoral having a better goals per shot ratio (0.5) than Buchanan (0.44).

Error prone

One thing Villarreal's opponents have yet to fully take advantage of is how surprisingly frequently the team makes errors. In fact, only bottom-of-the-league Real Oviedo have more errors leading to an opposition shot (16) than Villarreal (15) – something manager Marcelino will want to stamp out.

One place they haven't been making quite so many errors is at home. Villarreal remain undefeated in the league this season at El Madrigal (six wins, one draw).

It's been a long time since Villarreal finished in the top three in Spain (second in the 2007/08 season) but should they keep up this form they could be in with a shout and (most importantly) should the big two drop a level then maybe they can dream of an outside chance of something even better.