Pages

Sunday, August 19, 2012

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment