Match Trends - A dig into History

[AustinP0027]

I’m a week into the league, and it’s clear I need three main things at the moment.

First, to understand the league. Teams, levels, players, stats, all of it
Secondly, in support of the first item, is understanding the APIs. There’s a wealth of data but pulling it means understanding how to grab it from the APIs.
Finally, and probably most importantly, I need money! Seeing that seasonal training slider sitting idle and not maxed out causes my eye to twitch.

So in search of all three, ssl-chat had a question that triggered a thought, which triggered some actions. The question was “What was the highest amount of goals in one single game so far?”

With that in mind, I went searching for data.

To start out, I pulled all the matches. Every Majors and Minors match from S1 till now. Then I started trying to identify patterns, trends, or just interesting data. NOTE: Halfway through writing this, I realized that the Majors/Minors split didn’t appear until S12. Before that it was just Division 1 and Division 2. Categorizing when it has flipped like that is rough, so I have just bundled all games based on where a team exists now.

Most Goals in a Match
To answer this question, you have to decide if what you wanted as Most Total Goals (meaning combined between two teams) OR Most Goals By A Single Team in a Match

For the former, there were 3 different matches across Majors and Minors that put up 15 total goals.

Season	Team 1	Score	Team 2	Score
7	Seoul MFC	12	Red Star Laos	3
13	Inter London	11	Cairo City	4
22	Montréal United	13	Inter London	2

For the latter, the highest goal total a single team has had was 13, scored in a S22 Minors Match between Montréal United and Inter London. Montréal scored 13 goals as the home team to Inter London’s 2 goals scored.

In that game, Montréal had 6 different players score, with Aimo Silakka leading the way by scoring 5 goals all by themselves.

Blowouts
Seeing that lopsided score had me then go look to see, how often are blowouts like that happening?

Here’s a view from Majors and Minors that breaks apart each season to see the range of Close games, Solid Wins, and Blowout Wins.



In Majors, S17 had the highest number of Blowout wins with 22. This is particularly interesting because looking at the S22 data, the average goal differential was 2.16.

Within those 22 blowouts, you had 3 different 12-0 games. With Schwarzwälder FV, Reykjavik United, and CA Buenos Aires each beating União São Paulo. Yes, all 3 games were against one team. União São Paulo did not have a good S17. As you would expect, they did not record a win (or even a draw) that season and lost all 14 of their games, with a -91 Goal Differential.

In Minors, S22 had the highest number of Blowout wins with 26. Again this doesn’t show up when you look at the average goal differential, which was 2.74. However, the average number of goals scored was 5.21, so while there were some close games, there were a lot of goals being scored across the board.

The spread of those 26 blowouts had the game that answered the question above of the highest number of goals from a single team, but it also had 3 different games where the total goals scored was 12.
AF Masques Sacrés vs. Inter London (10-2)
Inter London vs. Krung Thep FC (3-9)
AS Paris vs. Inter London (11-1)

Similar to the Majors blurb above about UPS, Inter London did not have a good season, going 0-1-21 with a -117 Goal Differential.

Seasonal Goal Averages and Differences

Since we just talked about Blowout Wins, let’s take a moment to look across the seasons to look at Average Goals and Average Goal Differential




Obviously we ignore S25 as the season isn’t complete.

Interestingly enough, there is no pattern over the seasons between Goals and Goal Differential.

For Majors:
- S3 had the lowest Avg Goals at 2.25 and the lowest Avg Goal Differential of 0.92, but it also was only 12 games, so a very small sample size.
- S17 had the highest Avg Goals with 4.95 and the second highest Avg Goal Differential with 3.13 (only behind S1’s 3.5)
- At the same time, S11 had a high Avg Goals with 4.5, but was on the lower end of Avg Goal Differential with 1.78

For Minors:
- S13 and S22 were tied for the highest Avg Goals with 5.21 in both seasons. S13 just barely beats out S22 for highest Avg Goal Differential with 2.79 (vs. 2.74)
- S12 had the lowest Avg Goals with 2.73, but it’s Avg Goal Differential of 1.54 wasn’t the lowest of all season (though it was close)
- The lowest Avg Goal Differential goes to S1 with 1.43 (again, only 14 games so tiny sample size)

What does this data tell us? Well, honestly, not much. Avg Goals doesn’t seem to have any correlation with Avg Goal Differential. One can move up or down independently of the other.

Team Strength Ratings

Shifting directions, I wanted to look across all the seasons to try and rate Team Strength. Essentially, try and find a team that was the strongest compared to everyone else but acknowledging that you can’t do that directly because different leagues mean different player attributes.

As I pulled down all the team records, I realized that I needed more than just wins and losses. Those tell the story of that specific season, but not across all seasons. Next, I included Goals and quickly saw that Goals needed to be Goal Differential to be included. Goals For individually brought some teams up the ranking that shouldn’t be there because while they scored a lot, they also let up a lot of goals themselves and they should be appropriately penalized for that.

Where I landed was a combination of Win Percent and Goal Differential, leaning more heavily into Win Percent and allowing Goal Differential to act as almost a tiebreaker to nudge teams over one another.

That looks like this:


Your top team in terms of team strength: S15’s North Shore United. Winning 13 matches, with 1 loss, their Win Percent was 92.86%. What carried them higher was their Average Goal Differential per Match was 3.64. This is the highest Average Goal Differential per Match across all seasons, with S16’s North Shore United coming in with the second highest Average Goal Differential per Match with 3.5.

The second place team in Team Strength is S22's AS Paris, who won 20 Matches, lost 1, and had 1 draw. Their Average Goal Differential per Match was 3.36.

The other end of the Strength chart is no surprise, as they were mentioned in the Blowout section above. S22’s Inter London comes in last with a 0 Team Strength rating, losing 24 of 25 Matches and have a -5 Goal Differential per Match. Just above them is the other team mentioned above, União São Paulo from S15 through S17. Only S16 USP achieved a team strength rating above 0.

Something @FuriousChicken asked about lead me to create this


Those are your teams who won their league championship but are on the lowest end of the Team Strength rating (amongst Champions).

At the bottom? CA Buenos Aires with 7 wins, 3 losses, and 4 draws. A 50% win percent and an Average Goal Differential per match of 1. Good for 114th place, but still a Champion.

Summarizing this by Majors/Minors, you get the following:


Minors clearly leads the way with 8 teams who fall in the Top 10 in Team Strength, and 14 of the Top 20. I’m going to chalk that down to the TPE variance you’ll find in Minors versus how players conform to a certain level in Majors. Remember, this is by season, so that’s 8 Minors teams across all seasons.

Here is a look at Majors and Minors to see what seasons have what Team Strengths.




Rivalries

Finally, now that I’ve looked at Goals and Strength, I want to look at teams playing each other and see what jumps out in terms of win/loss rivalries (I’m sure rivalries exist outside of this, but again, I’m new!)

To try and get this, I used all the pulled matches to compare when two teams played each other, and what the result of those matches were.

When looking at the results, I then limited everything to more than 15 matches played against each other. It’s not a real rivalry if one team beat the other team that one time they played.

Minors
Let’s take a look at Minors Matchups



Lots of matchups across the board, and a lot of close/even pairs.

Some that stand out:
- North Shore United has Athênai F.C.’s number, beating them 24 times to only 2 losses
- North Shore United also has the upper hand on Inter London with a 20-3 W/L record
- Sydney City takes the crown for “better city” with 11 wins and only 1 loss to Cairo City

In general, it looks like North Shore United should be most teams' rival, as they have a winning record against everyone but CS Rova Mpanjaka. Outside of that, there are little rivals like Sydney City and Cairo City, and F.C. Kaapstad and Krun Thep FC.


Majors
Now let’s look at Majors Matchups



A couple that jump out:
- Reykjavik United has the edge over most teams, with only Liffeyside Celtic FC having a winning record against them (and Xelajú Cósmico FC with an even record)
- Schwarzwälder FV probably isn’t getting any support from A.C. Romana, CA Buenos Aires, CF Catalunya, or Tokyo S.C.
- I’m guessing Hollywood FC likes to point out the joint record to CF Catalunya repeatedly

A couple good rivalry candidates here in Majors where things are tougher. Some villains at the top, but most orgs have a team that they’d really like to see go down.


Alright, that’s a lot of data and summaries for what started as a single question. Stay tuned as all of this has given me ideas about looking at the data on a player level, so that’s probably the next big project.