Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Points Per Game

It seems to me that ordering the football league tables by the average number of points per game is a better indication of how a team is doing than simply by points scored, especially when the variance in number of games played by each team gets beyond one or two. Teams generally go through the season getting the same average number of points per game (or, to put it another way, it takes a big change in form to achieve any significant change in the average).

I've got fed up figuring it out manually so I've done a little web site where you can look at any English or Scottish division ordered by points per game. I'm thinking of adding to it so only home or away results can be shown as well as the total.

The tables are scraped from the Guardian website, so fingers crossed they don't change their format. Edit: site changed

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree - I have always thought this - it's much fairer and more representative. There was a time a few seasons ago when Rochdale had a run in one or more cups and there were cancelled fixtures and stuff and at one point they were four or more games behind everyone else. They were in the relegation zone but winning all their games in hand would have put them near the play-offs as I remember. Fair play to you - I will be using your tables in future.