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S18 Statistic Roundup
#1
Season 18 for the Majors is in the book. Let’s take a look at some of the statistical results to get a read on the season. Unlike prior seasons I’ll try to focus less on an analytical lens, but focus on providing the tables that might be useful going forward for statistical predictions.
 
Start with the points table. As many would have expected Schwarzwalder and Reykjavik separated themselves at the top, but the Black Forest brethren take the crown home this go around. Reykjavik was able to amass the largest goal differential, but were less able to secure the draw when needed in this season of the draw. Other big movers were USP who moved into the solid middle replacing AC Romana who slid into the bottom pair along with Catalunya.

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The first major metric we’ll look at is goals allowed. This is the area where Schwarwalder really differentiated themselves, giving up less than a goal per match. Reykjavik’s performance fell into the to top of the middle of the pack a relatively thin range which holds a majority of the teams, with only Catalunya standing out as an outlier. The statistic we were asked to predict was clean sheets, but this of course is highly correlated and this goal level granularity may be more useful for predicting future season performances. For this season it was Schwarwalder who kept 7 clean sheets, one surprising miscalibration between goals allowed and clean sheets was Cataluna who gave up the most goals over the course of the season, but showed the ability and inclination to park the bus with 2 of their last 4 matches ending in 0-0 draws, maybe that will persist into the next season.

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One of the bigger changes this season is the propensity to foul by club. In the past Reykjavik was most frequently the only club in the ~200 fouls made range. This season more clubs were willing to get stuck in and Schwarzwalder found a way to take it to an entirely ‘nother level. Is this higher defensive intensity part of why they were so successful suppressing goals? It didn’t work out quite as well for AC Romana who allowed the second most goals in the league.
 
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For the offensive metric we’ll look at expected goals for, this may be the most useful for forecasting purposes if you are interested in predictions for future seasons, there were some fairly large deviations between xG and actual performance for a handful of clubs, Reykjavik and CABA stand out as teams that outperformed their xG, while USP, Hollywood and AC Romana underperformed their xG mark. One of the big takeaways is this is the avenue that Reykjavik differentiated themselves, generating significantly more xG for than any other team in the league.

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Two of the more analytical views attempted in the past looked at shot quantity and corner goals by club. We do see again that this was a contributing factor to Reykjavik’s offensive dominance, with a clearly higher number of shots taken and clearly the most dominant squad on corners.

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One of the statistics we are frequently asked to predict relate to possession and passes completed. These are two metrics not necessarily dominated by our top of the table duo. In previous seasons we’ve seen them at or below the 50% possession mark and that occurred again this year. CABA is the outlier for pass completion and has the possession dominance to show for that as well. But I think its worth noting that isn’t necessarily correlated to team performance and may be more of an aesthetic choice some teams might prefer. It is interesting to note that one of the significant moves upward were seen this season by USP who adopted a three at the back and more heavy possession strategy moving from 44% last season where they earned 0 points to this season where they finished second in possession with 53% and saw a jump cleanly into the middle tier of teams.
 
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Hopefully this survey is useful. I think it was a very interesting season. Where we saw some trends like our top two performers stay the same, each clearly excelling in one area, but performing more mid-ly in the other. We also some movement with USP in particular shining as a team that figured something out. Across the massive middle we saw a number of draws and somewhat surprising results which I think portends even more parity and hilarity moving forward.
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