Which part of the league table has the most goals? Top or bottom?

My thesis was that top teams of a league account for the majority of the big wins during a season, and the bottom teams the majority of big losses. And the approach should be something like this: Take top 3 (or 5) and bottom 3 (or 5) of each years end league table, sum goals for and goals against to obtain a total goal count for each team, remove goals scored in matches between the selected teams and analyze the distribution of the remaining goals for the top and bottom sides.

I chose to analyze the English Premier League, and I experienced that a great deal of the teams with high total goal counts actually was middle teams. It was of course not surprising to see some middle teams with high total goal count, but the number of occurrences was to great to neglect. Therefore, I took a different approach: Take the top 6 total goal counts of each season and analyze the league positions of these teams (in case of ties between the 6th and the 7th highest total goal count, I brought in both teams to the data).

Here's the 2011-2012 data.

Pos.	Team	GF*	GA*	GT*
19	Blackburn Rovers	48	78	126
3	Arsenal	74	49	123
18	Bolton Wanderers	46	77	123
1	Manchester City	93	29	122
2	Manchester United	89	33	122
20	Wolverhampton Wndrs	40	82	122

*GF=goals for, GA=goals against, GT=goals total

The table shows that Blackburn finished 19th in the league table, scoring 48 goals and conceding 78 made them the team with highest total goals of the season. The top-6 total goal positions were this year top-3 and bottom-3 in the league table.

Collecting corresponding data for the 17 seasons between 1995 and 2012 gives following distribution of top-6 total goal occurrences for each league table position (the parabola forms the best 2nd degree fit).

The result is not surprising. It simply states that top and bottom teams more often has the highest total goal count than the rest of the league table.

If we re-categorize (sum) the positions in to 3 groups (top, middle and bottom), we obtain measures that are easier to compare in order to answer the initial question. As suggested above, I look at top/bottom-3 and top/bottom-5. The aggregated results are following.

Category	Occ.	Average TG
Top (1-3)	25	117,48
Middle	56	109,32
Bottom (18-20)	24	113,96

Category	Occ.	Average TG
Top (1-5)	35	115,31
Middle	37	109,84
Bottom (16-20)	33	111,9

As we can see from the aggregates, the number of top and bottom occurrences are almost identical, indicating that on average, the same number of top and bottom teams is in the top-6 of total goals for the season. The Average TG column indicates that the top of the table on average accounts for more goals than bottom, but Tukey corrected confidence intervals for pairwise differences between the 3 groups (top, middle, bottom) shows that average of top and bottom don't differ significantly (p-value of 0.2840 and 0.2346 respectively). That is, we can assume that top and bottom accounts for the same number of goals (middle is significantly different from top).

The source of the data is www.statto.com, and the highest total goal counts since 1995 are following.

Season	Pos.	Team	GF	GA	GT
1999-2000	1	Manchester United	97	45	142
2009-2010	1	Chelsea	103	32	135
2010-2011	19	Blackpool	55	78	133
2001-2002	3	Manchester United	87	45	132
2010-2011	11	West Bromwich Albion	56	71	127
2007-2008	11	Tottenham Hotspur	66	61	127
2002-2003	2	Arsenal	85	42	127
2011-2012	19	Blackburn Rovers	48	78	126
2001-2002	4	Newcastle United	74	52	126
1995-1996	14	Wimbledon	55	70	125

Stating that top-teams so far accounts for 3 of 4 or 5 of 10 of the overall highest total goal counts since 1995 in the English Premier League.

Are midfielders more likely to become managers than other players?

Is it right to assume that midfielders have more tactical knowledge than the rest of the team? And is it right to assume that there is more manager potential in a midfield player?

It is a hard task to find out what position current managers preferred to play in their professional playing careers. But I have done the research on the English Premier League Managers of today's teams. Most of the data is from Wikipedia.

Team	Manager	Highest League	P.P.	Captain
Arsenal	Arsene Wenger
Aston Villa	Paul Lambert	First div. Germany	CDM	Lower league
Chelsea	Roberto Di Matteo	First div. England	CDM	No
Everton	David Moyes	Third div. England	CD	No
Fulham	Martin Jol	First div. England	OCM	No
Liverpool	Brendan Rodgers
Manchester City	Roberto Mancini	First div. Italy	F	No
Manchester United	Sir Alex Ferguson	First div. Scotland	F	No
Newcastle United	Alan Pardew	First div. England	CM	No
Norwich City	Chris Hughton	First div. England	LD	No
Queens Park Rangers	Mark Hughes	First div. England	F	No
Reading	Brian McDermott	First div. England	RM	No
Southampton	Nigel Adkins	Third div. England	GK	No
Stoke City	Tony Pulis	Second div. England	CD	No
Sunderland	Martin O'Neill	First div. England	CM	National team
Swansea City	Michael Laudrup	First div. Spain	OCM	National team
Tottenham Hotspur	Andre Villas-Boas
West Bromwich Albion	Steve Clarke	First div. England	RD	No
West Ham United	Sam Allardyce	First div. England	CD	Lower league
Wigan Athletic	Roberto Martinez	Third div. England	CDM	Yes

*P.P. is short for preferred position. Managers without p.p. have no or very short professional playing career.

The expected proportion of midfielders should be calculated in order to do any comparison. A simple (and perhaps not right) way to do this, is to take look at the most preferred playing systems and count the midfielders. Without any references, I have chosen following systems (4-4-2, 4-5-1, 3-5-2, 4-3-3), which I hope is representative of the game 10-30 years ago.

I have calculated the expected proportions without weighing the systems. For example, the expected proportion of midfielders is summed over the systems (4+5+5+3)/44 = 0.3864.

Position	Count	Percent	Expected
Goal Keeper	1	5,88	9,09
Defender	5	29,41	34,09
Midfielder	8	47,06	38,64
Forward	3	17,65	18,18
	17	100,00	100,00

A proportion test, 8 of 17 being equal to 0.3864 gives a p-value of 0.6428 (CI: 0.2386-0.7147), clearly accepting the hypothesis of equal proportion, which means that midfielders aren't more likely to become managers than other players.

Proportion test of the 4 counts against the expected proportions is done with Pearson's chi-squared goodness of fit test, and gives a p-value of 0.8927, indicating that the playing position distribution is highly expected. The sample size is of course too small to draw any final conclusions and the assumptions of the test is not really fulfilled, but the results so far, give very strong indications.


What about captains? Are they more likely to become managers than non-captains? The expected proportion of captain players I will set to 1/11, other estimates are very welcome. Proportion test, 5 of 17 being equal to 1 of 11 gives a p-value of 0.0127 (CI: 0.1138-0.5595) indicating that captains are more likely to become managers than non-captain players.