| STATS 🤓 09:10 - May 6 with 385 views | ROTTWEILERS |
WHO WOULD BE THE TOP PLAYERS IN AN EFL FANTASY LEAGUE, 2018/19?
Posted on May 6, 2019 by Experimental 3-6-1
Out of curiosity, I’ve applied the official Premier League scoring system (which can be found here under Rules > Scoring) to each of the three EFL divisions to see what the best possible squad would be. Just like the official game, I’ve picked the best-scoring combination of two goalkeepers, five defenders, five midfielders and three forwards (hopefully without putting anyone into the wrong category), although if this were a real game you probably wouldn’t be able to afford to put all of them in the same team.
The only element of the scoring which I haven’t been able to apply is the bonus points, as these include stuff like tackles and passes for which there isn’t data available (at least to me). Also I think the FPL rules are a bit more generous around assists, but overall I think it gives a reasonably accurate impression of what would happen if they rolled it out across the EFL.
The team here is dominated by the sides who secured automatic promotion — Luton and Barnsley have five and four representatives respectively, with Hatters’ right back Jack Stacey the top-scoring player of all thanks to plenty of goal contributions to go along with all their clean sheets. Nobody else has more than one player, but it’s interesting to see that the midfield contains a player from a relegated side — Ruben Lameiras of Plymouth — and the top-scoring midfielder is from Accrington who flirted with the drop (although having said that, over half the clubs in the division did at some point).
The best-performing forward — Ian Henderson of Rochdale — also had a brush with relegation and scrapes ahead of the division’s top goalscorer James Collins by virtue of three more assists, a slightly better disciplinary and appearance record, plus Collins missing two penalties. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 09:12 - May 6 with 380 views | ROTTWEILERS |
EFL “GAME STATES”, 2018/19
Posted on May 6, 2019 by Experimental 3-6-1
Here’s another quick end-of-season round-up that I always find quite interesting. What I’ve done below for each of the three English divisions is to measure how long each club has spent in each of the three main “game states” — i.e. winning, drawing and losing. I’ve then converted these into percentages because I include added time, which means that every club will have a slightly different total number of minutes played. I’ve then ranked clubs by the difference between the share of time they’ve spent winning versus losing, which feels like the fairest way to do it (and also gives you the nice smooth graphs below).
This graph’s a lot more boring unfortunately. The top two here are the teams who secured automatic promotion in the actual league table — both Luton and Barnsley spent over 40% of their time on the pitch this season in a winning position — and the rest of the top seven is the (slightly shuffled) actual top seven. Three of the four relegated teams are at the foot of this list too — Plymouth are the exception and can therefore feel a little hard done by — so the league table conforms unusually well to the share of time each team has spent winning versus losing. Southend only avoided relegation on the final day but their balance of time spent winning and losing wasn’t all that unhealthy, so perhaps they’ll fare better next season. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 09:16 - May 6 with 378 views | ROTTWEILERS |
SCATTER GRAPHICS: LEAGUE 1, 2018/19
Posted on May 5, 2019 by Experimental 3-6-1
Now that the regular season is over, here’s a final batch of the scatter graphics, which compare the attacking and defensive performances of every team in a division. Each of the four graphics is explained briefly below and at length here.
Shot dominance
First of all, here is how the number of shots taken by each club compares with those they face in return. The average number of shots taken per match is on the horizontal and the average number faced is on the vertical, so bottom right (take plenty, allow few in return) is good while top left (take few, allow plenty) is bad. The stripes are like contours: the greener the stripe, the better the performance (and vice versa for red).
Barnsley were comfortably the most dominant side in raw shot terms, although champions Luton also stood out from the crowd. Interestingly five of the remaining six sides in the ‘dominant’ bottom right quadrant finished outside the play-off places. Peterborough have been an enigma this season, creating a relatively average number of chances and allowing a seemingly unhealthy amount in return, so it’s not surprising that their promotion bid faltered.
Attacking effectiveness
Now let’s look at attacking alone. The horizontal axis stays the same as in the graphic above, but now the vertical shows the average number of shots needed to score each league goal. Therefore bottom right is good (taking lots of shots and needing fewer efforts to convert) and top left is bad:
Wimbledon left it late to secure their survival and their attack was their main problem this season, having created the fewest chances and being among the most wasteful finishers. Bristol Rovers had a pretty frustrating time in front of goal themselves, having created more chances than Charlton and Sunderland but needing around four to five more attempts on average to find the net.
Defensive effectiveness
Next let’s look at the defensive situation — basically take the above chart and replace the word “taken” for “faced” on both axes. Now top left is good — facing fewer shots and able to soak up more per goal conceded — and bottom right is bad:
Not only were Charlton among the division’s most ruthless finishers but they also proved the most difficult side to break down at the other end, having soaked up around four more shots for each goal conceded compared to the average team. While the likes of Burton, Oxford and Shrewsbury allowed their opponents relatively few chances this season, it usually didn’t require that many attempts to breach their defences.
Expected goals
Finally here’s an attempt at correcting the first graphic for the quality of chances created and allowed, using the same “expected goals” values that power my shot timelines (explained here). The reason for doing this is that the results tend to correlate more strongly with performance than when we treat all shots equally:
When we adjust for shot quality it looks like the correct teams finished in the automatic promotion places: Luton and Barnsley are almost inseparable in the bottom right corner. Burton can be disappointed not to have made the play-offs and Shrewsbury can legitimately hope for better than 18th next season. Fleetwood look to have been impressively solid at the back but perhaps at the expense of their attacking output. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 09:17 - May 6 with 375 views | ROTTWEILERS |
LEAGUE 1 TABLE “FOOTPRINTS”, 2018/19
Posted on May 4, 2019 by Experimental 3-6-1
As is traditional, here’s an end-of-season look at how many days each club spent in each league position. This graphic works as follows:
The clubs are listed down the side, in the order they finished in the final league table
Each row shows how many days that club spent in each league position
The season is considered to run from the date of the first match to the date of the last and excludes the play-offs
I’ve added dividing lines in both directions to indicate the automatic promotion places, the play-off zone, the division between top and bottom half and the relegation zone
There are also fainter outlines around each club’s final league position
The idea of this is that you can see the “footprint” that each club left in the table this season. Some stayed up one end, others bounced around a lot more etc. This isn’t supposed to be anything particularly profound, but when I ran it I was surprised to see how much time certain clubs spent quite a long way from their final position and how far most travelled over the course of the season.
Barnsley only spent two weeks outside the top six all season and were one of five clubs in the top seven who never dropped into the bottom half of the table. Only two teams failed to occupy a top half spot at any point and neither were relegated: Bristol Rovers and Shrewsbury.
Portsmouth spent more time in the top two places than anyone else — a total of 161 days — but now have to contest the play-offs. Meanwhile Scunthorpe went down despite eight other clubs spending more time in the relegation zone than their 27 days. One of those teams was Wimbledon, who were in the bottom four for longer than anyone except Bradford but survived on goal difference.
Oxford had very strange season: they finished in the top half despite spending 151 of their 274 days were spent in the bottom four. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 09:28 - May 6 with 373 views | Lala |
Bloody hell Rotts, great work as always but I need some time with my thinking cap on 
The boys will be along to make more sense of it all soon.
Great work though  | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 09:38 - May 6 with 372 views | ROTTWEILERS |
Copy and Paste job innit.
Not a single name-check for us in any of the articles - kinda shows how boring we've been. Only one thing stood out for me and that is the graph on attacking threat. Apparently we are fairly clinical but a little lazy upfront whereas I'd have guessed it would be the other way around - busy but wasteful. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 10:14 - May 6 with 368 views | BringBackTheRedRoom |
Cheers ROTTS. | |
| ‘Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair’ |
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| STATS 🤓 on 10:25 - May 6 with 364 views | spell_chekker |
Your fantasy team would be competitive in the Champions League. There are 15 players in it!! | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 19:20 - May 6 with 346 views | spell_chekker |
A cunning ploy from Rot.
Setting his team up as 2 - 5 - 5 - 3.
You've got Guardiola over a barrel there mate. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 20:53 - May 6 with 337 views | BringBackTheRedRoom |
Had a shocker with my Fantasy Premier League Teams this season.  | |
| ‘Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair’ |
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| STATS 🤓 on 22:09 - May 6 with 335 views | spell_chekker |
Sorry Red, but you should have had 15 players in your team.
You missed a trick. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 19:05 - May 8 with 327 views | BringBackTheRedRoom |
ROTTS
Out of curiosity, do you know of any stats/tables that show chances created to goals ratio, for League 1? | |
| ‘Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair’ |
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| STATS 🤓 on 20:18 - May 8 with 307 views | ROTTWEILERS |
Explanation
These are adapted from a very similar design by the excellent Swedish blogger Zorba138 intended to track a club’s long-term performance and whether this was an underachievement or an overachievement based on the balance of chances created.
There are two lines:
The blue line shows the rolling average of a club’s goal difference over the last 10 league games;
The red line shows the rolling average of their expected goal difference, based on the quality of chances they’ve created and faced.
Comparing these two allows us to see not only how a club’s performances have changed over time, but also whether there were any differences between the balance of chances created (a useful measure of underlying performance) and goals scored.
These are shaded as follows:
Blue shaded areas are where goal difference is higher than chances created, suggesting an overachievement;
Red shaded areas show the reverse, where the balance of chances was healthier than the actual goal difference, signalling underachievement.
Over the long term we’d expect the two lines to converge unless there’s a significant difference in a club’s attacking or defensive skill compared to the average for the division. We can’t tell from the data alone whether skill or luck is the cause, but the longer a difference persists the more I’d suspect the former.
Club-by-club graphics
Blackpool started brightly but it’s been pretty much downhill since then, with a less steep version of the same trend at Southend. Heading into the play-offs, Doncaster‘s performances are slumping at an inopportune time, while Sunderland — who I was initially suspicious of due to the extent they were overachieving by — have really pushed on in the last few months. Fleetwood will be interesting to watch next season as they also really stepped up in the latter half of the season. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 20:22 - May 8 with 303 views | ROTTWEILERS |
SQUAD AGE PROFILES: LEAGUE 1, 2018/19
Posted on May 8, 2019 by Experimental 3-6-1
Continuing today’s onslaught of end-of-season graphics for League 1, here’s an updated version of the squad age profile graphic.
These are intended to give a quick visual overview of the age of players that each club has fielded in league matches using a technique very similar to “population pyramid” graphs, although I’ll freely admit that they’ve come out with shades of the Rorschach test (or as someone observed on Twitter, the Habitat lighting range).
Explanation
Hopefully they’re fairly self-explanatory, but here’s a quick summary anyway:
For each club I’ve added up all the league minutes played by every player this season and calculated the percentage accumulated by players of every age, rolling up “18 and under” and “35 and over” for neatness’ sake.
Each vertical “step” on a club’s chart is a year, with the major age milestones denoted by slightly thicker lines (as per the labels on the left). The width of the coloured graph at each step corresponds to the percentage of minutes accounted for by players of that age.
I haven’t labelled the percentage values as the graphs were already getting pretty busy and I figured that the general shape and proportions were sufficient to compare teams against each other. I may revisit this (and a few other tweaks) later in the season once I’ve done a bit more tinkering.
I’ve also calculated the average age of each club’s starting line-ups this season and used this to sort all the clubs in a division from oldest to youngest.
Hopefully that’s enough to give you the idea, so let’s dive in.
Wycombe‘s starting line-ups were the division’s oldest on average at around 28 years old — it’s not that they don’t pick young players, just that they also field a lot of old ones. Almost 38% of the Chairboys’ minutes went to players in their 30s, second only to Burton — along with Rochdale they were the only clubs with more than a third of their playing time being accumulated by players past their 20s.
Coventry were the youngest side with an average age of below 24, even edging out Barnsley and their impressively strict “nobody over 26” policy. The Sky Blues managed this by giving just over 40% of their minutes to players aged 21 or under, which was the highest in the entire EFL. | |
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| STATS 🤓 on 09:55 - May 9 with 291 views | BringBackTheRedRoom |
Cheers Rotts. | |
| ‘Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair’ |
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