Introduction

In the past six days, a lot has been said about the outcomes of the 14 matches that were played between Tuesday and Sunday. 12 matches ended in draws and only two matches had winners. A total of 21 goals were scored.

Most of these talks are justifiable in terms of what is expected from the PSL’s players. Before the past week’s matches, the last time there was a PSL match was on the first of November, were 5 matches were played and 10 goals were scored. Only one match ended in a draw. The soccer loving people seem surprised and shocked by the number of matches drawn this past week. While others were complaining that the standard of play has dropped and others complained at the lack of scoring as one of the issues contributing to the high number of draws. Are the past week’s results the worst in a week for PSL since 2002? And does this make November 2017, to be the worst month in the process?

This time around I set out to answer these two questions.

Draw History

I have been collecting the PSL results from 2002 and there have been 3686 matches played until 2017-11-26. Out of this, there were 1124 (30.5%) matches that ended in draws.

Here are the different types of draws since 2002.

The table above shows that there has been five types of draws since 2002. Let’s see how many of these draws have been played in each season. Please remember, in each season there are 240 matches played. The 2017 season is still in progress and only 86 matches have been played. The following plot shows the total number of matches that have ended in draws per season and you can see that there are four seasons which had over 80 matches ending in draws (2005, 2009, 2012 and 2016). An interesting fact about these four seasons, at the end of the November they all had over 30 matches drawn, you will see this later on.

37 matches have ended in draws in 2017, out of 86 matches, with one more match to play in November.

Now, let’s rank the total draws per season and see how each season compares with each other. From the ranking plot, 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 154 more matches to go.

We have now seen the total number of draws from the previous seasons. I’m interested in knowing, how the other seasons compared to the first four months of the 2017 season. In short, I want to see how the other seasons did in their first four months (Aug, Sep, Oct and Nov) of the league compare to the 2017 season.

The next plot will show this but in other for me to do that, I will need to embed another plot on top of the plot showing the total number of draws per season. You will also get any indication as to the progress of draws from December of each season to the last day of the league. You can see from the plot that 2017 has already passed the total number of draws in 2016 and there’s still 1 more game to play on the 29-11-2017. By looking at the plot, you can see that all the seasons with over 80 matches drawn at the end of the league, had over +30 draws before the beginning of December. We can therefore, make an assumption that by the end of the current league season there will be over +80 drawn matches.

We are now going to take the total number of draws before December a bit further. We are now going to split this into different months, namely; August, September, October and November. If you looks carefully, you will realise in 2005, September had 18 matches drawn. But this is not the worse month ever, the title belongs to February 2009, which had 19 draws (I will show this later on). There are other months which are worse than November 2017. The focus here is on the first four months of the seasons.

We just viewed a comparison of draws for the first four months of all seasons since 2002. The plot gave us a summary for the first four months per season.

Now, let’s turn our attention to viewing the draws by the different types of draws per month.

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

Most Draws in Week and Month

In this section, I’m going to show the week and the month with the most draws. The past week, produced 12 draws in a space of six days. Farouk Khan tweeted this on the 25-11-2017. This excluded the two matches from Sunday. One ended in a draw and this bought the total to 12 draws and 2 wins in 14 matches. I did reply to Farouk’s tweet.

Here is a plot below that shows the weeks with 5 or more draws per season. I have used the calendar week number to indicate the week in which the matches were played. The plot below, shows that “Week - 47” of 2017 has the record for most draws in a week. What was the previous record for most draws in a week? The answer is “Week - 5” of 2009 with 10 draws. You can see this on the plot.

Remember I had said earlier that the month with the most draws was February 2009 with 19 draws? Here are the draws for the month.

The table below shows the week with the most draws “Week - 47” of 2017.

The table below shows all the draws details in full from 2002 to 2017 by month and by game week.

Kings’ of Draws

Finally, in this section 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 managed to get their first point from a draw.

The table below shows the 2017 season.

The table below 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, while others have played in all seasons. 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.

Next Analysis

The next analysis will focus on the goals.

Tools Used

This data analysis was done on RStudio (R version 3.4.2 (2017-09-28)) and using the package for authoring technical documents called rmarkdown. Other R packages used in doing this analysis were:

I hope people find this data analysis enlighting and interesting.

Data was sourced from the following sites: KickOff http://www.kickoff.com and Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org