An open drive by the Manchester City
Football Club to crowd-source ideas on the use of season data for
predictions and insights has been a boost for the use of analytics in
sports. As someone who follows football but is not that much passionate
about the sport, I was able to come up with a few preliminary insights
on the season that was – 2011 EPL, thanks to the complete Opta Sports
data set that MCFC Analytics provided access to as a part of their MCFC
Analytics drive.
Let us start with the eye-ball catchers.
The ones that even pedestrian football followers can relate to – The
Strikers! We know that Robin van Persie scored the maximum no. of goals
in the season. But was he the most successful converter of shots to
goals? No! The scatter shown below pits players against each other in
terms of their shots to goals conversion.
It is significant to note that Papiss
Demba Cissé has the best conversion rate scoring 13 goals off 35 shots
at a staggering 37%.
To their credit, RVP and Rooney have
decent conversion rates of 21% and 22.5% respectively considering they
scored a lot more goals. It is also interesting to note that Torres and
Suarez were not trolled for no reason. Their conversion rates are a
meagre 12% and 10% respectively.
The non-open play goals come next.
Though goals are often scored by most teams when on open play, some of
the crucial game changers come via corners, penalties and the likes.
Here’s a visual to show how the top 5 teams scored such goals.
Points worth
noting are that Manchester City are the strongest from corners.
Manchester United scored more than twice the number of goals via
penalties than their nearest competitors. No wonder supporters of other
clubs consider referees to be United-friendly! Chelsea have been pretty
good by scoring through set plays.
Do fouls matter when it comes to topping the table? A close look doesn’t show so. Here’s a stack of top teams and Swansea (who’ ve been the neatest in terms of fouls).
All the top teams
have conceded more fouls than Swansea (check the blue baseline in the
graph) and have won a lot less fouls than Swansea! (The rankings of
teams in net fouls won is shown in the bracket by the side of teams’
names). The topping clubs from Manchester: City and United, ranked 13th
and 9th are among the most deviant from Swansea – showing neat play is
not all that significant. The yellow line indicates the number of
penalties each of these teams have won in the season by fouls committed
by opposition. This clearly shows what I said above. The yellow line
shoots up more than twice its height at the United Skyscraper!
What’s football without the Goal-keepers? Here is a chart depicting the number of saves the top goalies have made during the 2011-12 EPL season.
It shouldn’t come
as a surprise that Wanderers’ Hennessey has top honours of saving the
most shots. Being the goalkeeper of a weak team is a huge
responsibility, ain’t it?! Goalkeepers of top teams are somewhere in the
middle among those towers. The red line running across the towers
indicates the % of saves each of those goalkeepers has made from inside
the box. The squares for top teams are highlighted. One look at it
shows, among keepers of top teams, Arsenal’s Szczesny had to bear the
brunt of saving a much higher % of goals from inside the box than his
counterparts at Tottenham, Chelsea and the Manchester Clubs.
That leaves us with the midfielders.
How well have teams tackled their way through in the league last year?
Here’s a look of a scatter of tackles made to tackles won by
defenders/midfielders with more than 40 tackles in the season.
The likes of
Lescott, Bosingwa, Formica and Fellaini come up trumps in tackle
percentage whereas a relentless tackler like Cabaye hasn’t been all that
successful with his tackles. Stoke City’s Whelan has been the
inefficient of prime tacklers and at 66% success rate, Arsenal’s Ramsey
has not done all that well. One major highlight for City this season was
the combination of Lescott, Kompany & Toure all of who had tackling
success of more than 80%: 91%, 80% and 82% respectively.
Some of the more
interesting patterns emerged as I tried pitting style of play of teams
against different teams and looked at Home & Away patterns. More of
that will follow as I progress further. In the meanwhile, comments and
suggestions for angles to look at are welcome! To get access to the full
data-set for yourself , follow the instructions on Manchester City’s
Analytics webpage
here.
