That's What He Said - Anyone can beat anyone in the Premier League

Blogger #18

Well hi there. Almost 6 months ago, #14 came out with this. And almost ten months back, I came out with this. Yes, we already did promise a return to regular blogging in our last post, and obviously we didn't live up to that. I can go on with reasons as to why it panned out that way, but I don't think you, our reader, are interested in that, and honestly, I can't come up with any good excuses either. So let's get right in to our 'comeback' article.

We thought we'll start something like a series, where we test the comments made by managers, commentators , players (yeah, we're going to call it 'That's What he Said') and anyone else mildly related to the football industry and see if the numbers line up.

Around two weeks back Jose Mourinho said "I am surprised with nothing here, in this country every team can take points [from each other] so, no, I am not surprised". He was talking about the English League, and continued about how competitive the PL is compared to top flights in every other country. Now, this got us thinking. The claim that the PL is the most competitive league has been a much touted one. But do the numbers back it up? Is the English top flight really that much tougher than its counterparts in the rest of Europe?

Now, there are numerous angles to answering this question. What defines a tough league? Is it the number of points required to win the league, or the number of points required to avoid relegation? Is it the quality of your mid table teams, or the number of teams competing for a Champions League spot? Now obviously the perfect answer would be an optimum combination of these factors . But while thinking about this, we remembered a quote that really struck home. "A team is only as strong as its weakest player", and that's the angle we've chosen to approach this from. A league is only as strong as its weakest teams. Yes, plural. You can't really punish the entire league for having one Derby County (2007-2008). So which country has the best of the worst?

Our idea was to compare a few metrics across the leagues to see if the PL stood out, or if it was at least marginally better (or worse) than the other leagues. To start with a little preliminary analysis, we looked at the average Points per Game (PPG) of the bottom 5 teams in La Liga, the PL, Bundesliga and Serie A (the top 4 leagues according to the UEFA coefficients) over the last 4 seasons. We chose the bottom 5 as the worst in a league as we didn't want to miss out on those teams that just escape relegation. 

PPG trends over last 4 seasons

Looking at this alone, La Liga looks pretty strong. Apart from a minor blip in the 10-11 season, on an average, the lower teams in La Liga have consistently scored more points per game than their counterparts in other leagues. While the other three leagues' teams seem to be more or less close to each other, the bottom ones in La Liga really seem to be that little better, looking at points per game. The Bundesliga presents an interesting case here, where the PPG for the weak teams seems to be on a constant decline. Increasing inequality? Possibly, but this could be a trend captured only by the seasons selected for the analysis here and could vanish if more seasons data was included. Now getting back to the point, you can argue that the top 5 in Spain aren't really as good as the top 5 in other countries and you might have a point. This would make it easier for the bottom teams in La Liga to score some points off the teams closer to the top.


To test this premise, we decided to look at points dropped by the top teams in each league, playing at home. This could be a proxy for top teams' strength, the logic being that good teams rarely drop points at home. Now this is hardly an assumption that always holds, but the results were quite surprising, even encouraging.

Over the past 4 years, the top 5 in La Liga were strongest at home, compared to the top 5 in other leagues. The table scrappers in La Liga maybe getting more points per game, but they sure aren't doing it at the expense of the big boys.

What's interesting here is that this graph is almost an exact replica of the previous one, just with an inverted axis. Again, the Bundesliga seems to be following a trend. Are the weaker teams declining every season cause the top 5 are getting stronger at home, as this plot suggests? That calls for a separate analysis of its own, as there's no sign of any trend whatsoever when we look at what the bottom teams have done at home.

Now this was all really frustrating. The PL wasn't standing out in any metric. We didn't really start on this article with the aim of proving Mourinho wrong, but this far in, it didn't look like he had much proof to base his claim on. The PL as a clean outlier would have been really pleasing to see, and who knows, maybe could have lead to Jose handing out copies of our article to 'prove his point'?

Determined to look for a different interpretation, we chose to abandon the points pathway, and look at goals, namely goal difference. Now, is it possible that the bottom teams in England don't really take more points off their more illustrious compatriots, but just make life that little bit tougher for them? It's quite common to see the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Bayern posting routine 5-0 and 6-0 victories over hapless teams. Isn't that the reason Messi and Ronaldo routinely clock 50 goals by Christmas? Maybe that doesn't happen that often in the PL. Maybe in the PL, the top teams win as often, if not more, against the bottom teams as the top teams in other leagues, but don't do it as comfortably? Now this could be a valid reason to suggest that the PL is tougher, because leading by smaller margins keeps the game open, thereby keeping Jose tense for longer periods.

GD for the top 5 against bottom 5

Not really isn't it? Apart from the 2012-2013 season, where the top teams seem to have had a real shocker in front of goal, the top teams in the PL seem to have a relatively easy ride (2nd easiest in fact) in front of goal. From the looks of it, you should be heading to Serie A for the nail biting games, and maybe even the Bundesliga (as this lovely article seems to suggest).

We're sorry Jose, we don't really see it. We didn't really think much about it when Martin Tyler harped on and on about it after every goal scored in the PL after the 85th minute, but when you said that, we had to investigate. But based on this evidence, we just have to agree to disagree.

P.S : @BabakGolriz came up with this a week ago on the same topic, and came to a similar conclusion. We're not suggesting our article is better, but why don't you read it for yourself and find out?