An Analysis of PSL Draws

Introduction

Over the past 24 hours, a lot has been said about the outcomes of the seven matches that were played between Tuesday and Wednesday, this week. Six matches ended in draws, out of these, four matches had a stalement (0-0) and the other two ended in a 1-1 score-line.

Most of the talks are justifiable in terms of what is expected from the PSL’s players. Most of the teams had been on an international break, I guess most people were expecting the players to come back and produce. The soccer loving people seem surprised and shocked by the number of matches that ended in draws this week, especially, the 0-0 score-lines. While others were complaining about how the standard of PSL has dropped and the lack of good strikers. Is it possible that there are worse results in terms of draws compared to what happened this week?

Draw History

I have been collecting the PSL results from 2002 and there have been 3679 matches played until 2017-11-22. Out of this, there have been 1118 matches that ended in draws, which translated to 30.4% of the total matched played since.

Here are the different types of the draws since 2002.

You can see that there are only five types of draws in the PSL since 2002. From here I wanted to know per season, how many draws have the teams played. Please remember in any given year, there are 240 matches played. Since the 2017 season is still in progress, only 79 matches have been played. The following plot shows the number of matches that have ended in draws since 2002. You can see that there are four seasons which had over 80 matches ending in draws. Namely; 2005, 2009, 2012 and 2016.

Summary of draws per season

The 2017 season, already has 31 matches ending in draws. There are still 8 more matches to play in November.

Now, let’s rank the draws per season and see how each season compares to the other seasons in terms of draws. The plot below shows the ranking. It looks likely that 2002 will be the year with the smallest number of draws by the end of the 2017 season. The 2017 season still has 161 more matches to play.

Summary of draws per season

We already know the summary of each season in terms of the number of matches ending in a draw. Now we are going to look at other seasons’ and see how many draws had been achieved before the month of December. The next plot will show this and it will also embed another plot on top to indicate the summary of draws for a given season. This shows the progress of draws from December on-ward until the last matches of the season. You can see from the plot that 2017 looks identically to 2016’s draws. But you need to remember that there are still 8 more matches to play before December. From looking at the plot, all the seasons with over 80 matches ending in draws at the end of the season, before December, they had accumulated over 30 draws. Therefore, there’s a big chance that the 2017 season will reach over 80 draws.

Number of draws before December and at the end of the season

We just got a view of how many draws were played in each season and another view that shows the number of draws before the month of December. We are going to take the number of draws before December a bit further. We are now going to look at the numbers of draws per season and per the months before December. If you looks carefully, you will realised that 2005, had a worse performing month, with 18 draw. November 2017, doesn’t look too bad compare to other months.

Compare draws for the first fours months per seasons

We just viewed a comparsion of draws for the first four months of a season. The plot gives a summary for each month per season.

Now, let’s turn our attention to viewing the draws by month and by the final score-line. So far, the worse month is September 2005. If you look careful you will realised that September 2005, has the most 0-0 score-lines for a month when compared to the first four months of other season.

Compare draws by full time score-lines

The table below provides a detail summary view of the above plot.

Kings’ of Draws

Finally, we are going to look at number of points won from draws by each team that has played in th PSL league since 2002 and we are also going to view the 2017 season and see which team has played in most draws. Mamelodi Sundowns doesn’t appear below as they haven’t had a draw so far.

The table below shows the 2017 season.

The table shows the overall league for draws. We want to see which team has played the most draws since 2002. Please remember some teams only played one season in the PSL. It’s a bit of a surprise that Orlando Pirates are the kings of draws.

Please note that the following teams were docked points for fielding ineligible players. In a match between Hellenic and Jomo Cosmos, played on the 8th of Febrary 2004 (2003/2004 Season), Hellenic fielded a suspended player and had their 1 point gained in the match deducted. The final 1 point deduction, happened after Platinum Stars fielded an ineligible player on the 8th of August 2015. I have also deducted points for these teams.

An Analysis of PSL Draws

S’busiso Mkhondwane

11/23/2017

Introduction

Draw History

Kings’ of Draws

Tools Used