Bath City FC stats
2024/25 season
Stuart Leeds
19 December 2024
Completed: 13 July 2025
Amended: 26 July 2025
Introduction
The 2024/25 season was my first one supporting Bath City FC, so it only seemed right to record it in my own way. Although we have lived in Bath for over a decade, the first opportunity to watch the football was taken when we moved to ‘the other side of the river’, and found ourselves within a twenty-minute walk to Twerton Park. We caught the last few home games of the 2023/24 season and listened to the away play-off matches on Bath City Radio. Before the end of that season, we had already purchased season tickets for this season and considered ourselves fans and supporters of our local football club.
The following is a basic record for the ups and downs of Bath City FC’s battle in the National League South for the 2024/2025 season, and is written with RStudio (Posit Team, 2024), and R, version 4.2 (R Core Team, 2024).
Descriptive statistics for pre-season, cup run and league results; including scores, position and attendance records are covered, with various charts* for each section. In some cases scatter-plots are duplicated as box-plots to give another perspective on the data.
Given the controversial management changes around mid-season there is a brief synopsis of the differences in team performance and results under each manager. I did not want to dwell on reasons for the changes since they were unknown to me and not widely published (as far as I could tell). Suffice to say the second half of the season was a huge improvement on the first half.
Most of the narrative is from memory, therefore exact details are missing (team members who left, dates and names of new signings, etc.) Numerical figures within the text are directly from the data, and references are given where necessary.
*A note on the charts: There are 13 of them! I figured that if a picture is worth a thousand words, it would save me a lot of writing! Though well representative, short reviews are given to help describe them. In some cases the idea was to show different perspectives of the data, hence scatterplots and boxplots - next seasons summary won’t be so busy
Data
The original data for the pre-season friendlies, cup and league matches are taken from the Bath City FC website (Bath City FC, 2024) using Rvest (Wickham, 2024), and manipulated with Lessr (Gerbing, 2024), Lubridate (Spinu et al., 2024), and other Tidyverse (Wickham et al., 2019) packages.
Key dates for 2024
18 November: After a poor start to the season manager Jerry Gill leaves the club by mutual agreement, after a seven year tenure (Howe, 2024a). Goal-keeping coach Lee Kendall and senior players take over whilst the search for a new manager goes on.
23 December: Darren Way is appointed as manager of Bath City FC (Howe, 2024b)! \(35\) days after Gills’ departure, and with a new manager, Lee Kendall is promoted to Assistant Manager.
26 December: After a 3-0 trouncing of Chippenham Town FC on Boxing Day, and a number of wins since 18 November, things are looking up for Bath City FC!
Pre-season
The pre-season matches against seven teams from various other divisions/leagues helped to bed the team in for preparation for the season proper (see Figure 1). With three teams from higher leagues I suppose expectations were low, but starting off by losing to Cheltenham Town and Bristol Rovers didn’t help, though a win against Port Vale must have boosted team spirits.
Drawing against Bristol City U21s may have been a bit disappointing especially with no goals scored, but the three other matches against teams in lower divisions all ended up as wins. However, though we beat Larkhall Athletic and Frome Town with convincing wins, we were to meet them again in the later (lower) stages of the FA cup run to a slightly different story!
Scott Wilson scored four of the 14 pre-season friendly goals (29%).
Highest home attendance: 1908.
Average home attendance: 730.
Figure 1: Pre-season summary
Cup run
Figure 2 shows the breakdown of scores, goals and attendance of the unspectacular cup run. It started off well with two 2-1 wins over Merthyr Town and Salisbury, though Aldershot saw us out of the FA Cup 4Q with the opposite score.
With the glory of FA Cup progression over, it was onto the Somerset Premier Cup (SPC) round 1. Larkhall Athletic gave us a run for our money - a pretty tense 2-2 draw ended with a penalty shoot-out that saw us win 4-2 in the end. Not that that really mattered as we lost out to Frome Town in SPC round 2. Hapless and luckless, no silverwear this year for Bath City FC.
In between the two SPC matches, we lucked out again in the FA Trophy 2nd round tie against Chertsey Town. A team we should not really have lost to, Chertsey played well and deserved the win - both our goals came from a great defender (Batton), which shows you have to get them where they come from. Two days later, Gill was gone!
Alex Fisher and Jack Batton scored two each of the 9 cup run goals (22% each).
Highest home attendance: 1230.
Average cup run home attendance: 711.
Figure 2: Cup run summary (SPC: Somerset Premier Cup)
League
It wasn’t just the cup run performance that aided Jerry’s departure. Our first match against Boreham Wood dumped us into the relegation zone with a 1-0 loss! Although we bounced back in the next game and reached the dizzy heights of 14th after match #7 (Truro City, [W1-0]), it was pretty much downhill from there for him. Figure 3 best shows the table positions over the whole season. Despite the overall average performance, you can see the mean-average ‘upward’ trend from the straight line, the curved line gives the trajectory of the average positions as they happened. Figure 4 is added as an alternative view of the position groupings. (A breakdown of manager performance comes later - see Figure 8)
Figure 3: BCFC NLS league table positions: 24/25 season
Figure 4: Distribution of league table positions: 24/25 season
Score performance
Our most frequent winning score at home as 1-0 (six times), and 3-0 away (three times) - see Figure 5. Losing 0-1 was also quite common both home and away, and higher scoring matches were less frequent, though our away wins achieved higher scores more times. No-score draws were also a common occurrence.
Figure 5: Distribution of scores (league matches & cup run), home and away
League only scores are shown in Figure 6. Not much difference between the two tables (not many cup matches, right?), but these scores accumulated the points for the league table - in some views, more important. Needless to say, although more matches were won at home it looks like higher scores were more frequent during away matches.
Figure 6: Distribution of league match scores, home & away
Scott Wilson was awarded the Golden Boot for scoring only 10 league goals (Figure 7), but still - the highest number this season! Brad Ash came third after scoring more later in the season. I expect he would have overtaken Jordan Alves if he had more chances early on. You have to get goals where they come from, as proven by our defender captain Keiran Parselle - not sure if it’s common for defenders to score, but without several strikers, needs must!
Figure 7: Score sheet - league & cup run
Top 3 goal scorers
\(Wilson\) \((10)\),
\(Alves\) \((8)\),
\(Ash\) \((7)\)
Season table summary at 26 April 2025
Played: \(46\) | Position: \(15\) | W: \(15\), D: \(12\), L: \(19\) | For: \(47\) | Against: \(48\) | Difference: \(-1\) | Points: \(57\)
Management stats (league only)
After Jerry Gills departure, Lee Kendall took the helm until the arrival of Darren Way. The table below summarises team performance under each manager. Needless to say, a marked improvement. Home attendances (average, minimum, maximum) under each manager are also included. I don’t think it’s surprising that each attendance statistic is higher during Jerry’s management, since he managed the team for around seven years so the team obviously had a good following, and future events were not predicted.
However, looking at the win rates and aggregated points it’s easy to see there has been a massive improvement in team/manager performance.
| Manager | Total Games | Wins | Win rate | Aggregated points | Avg Home ATT | Min Home ATT | Max Home ATT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jerry Gill: | 16 | 4 | 25% | 15 | 1386.12 | 1028 (Worthing) | 2259 (Torquay United) |
| Lee Kendall: | 6 | 2 | 33% | 7 | 947 | 771 (Maidstone United) | 1112 (Aveley) |
| Darren Way: | 24 | 9 | 38% | 35 | 1293.45 | 778 (Chelmsford City) | 2154 (Chippenham Town) |
Team performance under each manager
I though it would be interesting to show Bath City’s table positions under each manager. It seems clear looking at Figure 8 that if Jerry stayed and the team continued playing as they were, we would soon be back in the relegation zone and probably finding it difficult to get out.
Once Lee took over as interim manager his strategy must have been to keep us out of it, which he did (all credit to him and the players). Though, again, a downward trend may have pushed us back into relegation if things had continued as they were.
In comes our new full-time manager with Darren Way making a memorable entrance with a 3-0 win over Chippenham. Despite hanging around 17/18 for too long, the general mean-average trend line was an upward tick. One wonders if the first half of the season started with that performance, we would have reached the play-offs again, by effectively doubling Darren’s 35 point accumulation. But heigh-ho - that’s football.
Figure 8: League table positions for each manager
Figure 9: Distribution of league table positions for each manager
Summary of league positions for each manager
The tables below summarise the data from Figure 9. In each case, the first part shows home and away performance with number of games, and average, highest (min) and lowest (max) table positions for each.
The second part gives the number of times City were in each position, and proportion thereof (example: under Jerry Gill, City spent 25% of his time in position 17 (4 times out of 16); Darren Way, 11 times in position 18 (46%)).
Part three shows the overall position statistics. Example: mean average position during Jerry’s time was at position 18 ; Lee, 20; Darren, 17
Jerry Gill:
## HorA n na Mean Median SD IQR Min Max
## Away 8 0 18.375 18.0 2.264 3.0 15 22
## Home 8 0 17.125 17.5 2.532 4.5 14 20## POS n Prop
## 1 14 2 0.12
## 2 15 2 0.12
## 3 17 4 0.25
## 4 18 1 0.06
## 5 19 2 0.12
## 6 20 4 0.25
## 7 22 1 0.06## n na mean mdn min max
## 16 0 18 18 14 22Lee Kendal:
## HorA n na Mean Median SD IQR Min Max
## Away 2 0 20.0 20.0 0.000 0 20 20
## Home 4 0 19.5 19.5 0.577 1 19 20## POS n Prop
## 1 19 2 0.333
## 2 20 4 0.667## n na mean mdn min max
## 6 0 20 20 19 20Darren Way:
## HorA n na Mean Median SD IQR Min Max
## Away 13 0 17.385 18 1.502 1.0 14 19
## Home 11 0 17.182 17 1.168 1.5 15 19## POS n Prop
## 1 14 1 0.04
## 2 15 2 0.08
## 3 16 3 0.12
## 4 17 4 0.17
## 5 18 11 0.46
## 6 19 3 0.12## n na mean mdn min max
## 24 0 17 18 14 19League attendance statistics
For a National League South team (and bearing in mind I’ve only followed Bath City for one season), I would suggest that an average home attendance of over 1000 is pretty good!
As seen in Figure 10: League and cup attendances home and away, are pretty close. However, if that massive outlier (5202 at Torquay, away) was removed, the figures would be even closer.
Figure 10: League attendance, Home and Away (inc. cup run)
## n miss mean sd min mdn max
## Away 25 0 1246.640 964.425 451.000 921.000 5202.000
## Home 27 0 1183.259 433.476 369.000 1139.000 2259.000
##
## NAHaving said that, breaking down attendances home and away for win/lose/draw (Figure 11), you can see in the summary below the chart that the highest average attendances both home and away were at games we lost! Even drawing at home, more attended the games than the ones we won.
What does this mean? Are higher crowds numbers more intimidating for the team? Do they feel under more pressure to perform in front of a higher attendance, therefore make more mistakes? If there is an expectation to win, do the team feel guilty for not winning in front of a large crowd? Are they more comfortable playing for a smaller crowd. As is often the case, correlation doesn’t mean causation, but it might be something to address - how, who knows?
Figure 11: League attendance home and away, win, lose, draw
## HorA WLD n na Mean Median SD IQR Min Max
## Away D 6 0 953.667 786.5 472.504 694.50 451 1547
## Home D 6 0 1318.500 1335.0 314.195 161.25 771 1727
## Away L 11 0 1465.091 921.0 1340.803 757.50 586 5202
## Home L 8 0 1485.250 1319.0 496.131 660.25 1020 2259
## Away W 6 0 982.500 894.0 447.577 521.75 518 1716
## Home W 9 0 1034.667 1063.0 189.162 227.00 778 1360Home attendance for league matches only is impressive. Again, averaging over 1000 (1265) for the season, see Figure 12; and Table 3 (which also gives away match figures). The “Index” on the x-axis of Fig.12 represents the match number played (example: 5 is the 5th league home-game).
Figure 13 shows the distribution of home attendance figures where it can be seen in the table below that in 39% of home games, the attendance was between 1000 and 1200 (9 out of 23 matches).
Figure 12: Home attendance, league matches
Figure 13: Distribution of home attendances in league matches
Distribution of home game attendance (League)
## Bin Midpnt Count Prop Cumul.c Cumul.p
## -----------------------------------------------------
## 600 > 800 700 3 0.13 3 0.13
## 800 > 1000 900 1 0.04 4 0.17
## 1000 > 1200 1100 9 0.39 13 0.57
## 1200 > 1400 1300 4 0.17 17 0.74
## 1400 > 1600 1500 2 0.09 19 0.83
## 1600 > 1800 1700 2 0.09 21 0.91
## 1800 > 2000 1900 0 0.00 21 0.91
## 2000 > 2200 2100 1 0.04 22 0.96
## 2200 > 2400 2300 1 0.04 23 1.00Summary of 2024/25 season
A brief summary in table format - the title of each one explains the content.
| Distribution | Proportion | |
|---|---|---|
| D | 12 | 0.261 |
| L | 19 | 0.413 |
| W | 15 | 0.326 |
| Drawn | Lost | Won | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Away | 6 | 11 | 6 |
| Home | 6 | 8 | 9 |
| Played | Remaining | Min | Max | Sum | Mean | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Away | 23 | 0 | 451 | 5202 | 27733 | 1206 |
| Home | 23 | 0 | 771 | 2259 | 29105 | 1265 |
| Team | Away | Home |
|---|---|---|
| Torquay United | 5202 | 2259 |
| Chippenham Town | 1716 | 2154 |
| Dorking Wanderers | 1404 | 1727 |
| Weston Super Mare | 1547 | 1644 |
| Enfield Town | 782 | 1479 |
| Hemel Hempstead Town | 709 | 1468 |
| Weymouth | 518 | 1368 |
| Farnborough | 1227 | 1360 |
| Chesham United | 1066 | 1302 |
| Eastbourne Borough | 921 | 1275 |
| Hampton & Richmond Borough | 722 | 1193 |
| St Albans City | 1552 | 1159 |
| Hornchurch | 614 | 1139 |
| Aveley | 451 | 1112 |
| Tonbridge Angels | 791 | 1073 |
| Welling United | 586 | 1063 |
| Truro City | 1537 | 1055 |
| Worthing | 1224 | 1028 |
| Boreham Wood | 732 | 1020 |
| Salisbury | 646 | 885 |
| Slough Town | 612 | 793 |
| Chelmsford City | 877 | 778 |
| Maidstone United | 2297 | 771 |