Background Info

The 2007-2008 season of the Barclay’s Premier League resulted in Manchester United being crowned champions. The top four teams in descending order were Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool. Their total premier league points, in this respective order were 87, 85, 83, & 76.

Question

Statistically, did the Champions of England, Manchester United, perform exceptionally well compared to the other teams in the top 4?

Data Explanation & Method to Answer the Question

In order to create a single table with information on the top four teams of the Premier League in 07/08 I scraped four separate tables from the web, one for each team. I then combined the four separate tables into one. The data provides information regarding players, the teams they play for, player stats (goals, assists, cards, etc…), and more. I intend to use these individual player stats and group them by their teams in order to compare each teams overall stats.

Data Cleaning

As I explained above, I took four separate tables from the same web source, so they all had the same amount of variables which made it easy to combine them. The data itself was very clean, but I did make a few adjustments. First, I added a column for each player that specified what team they played for. Second, I got rid of a column called “Matches” because it was providing no useful information. Lastly, I changed the data type for most of the variables from character to numeric in order to analyze the data.

Data

Below is a data table with the scraped & clean data that I will use for analysis.

Analysis

Given this bar chart, we can see that the Champions scored the most goals out of the top 4. This would suggest that there is a positive correlation between winning games/gaining points and goals. While this is true for Mancehster United, this isn’t the case for the other teams. Chelsea, who finished in second, scored fewer goals than third place Arsenal, and the same amount as fourth place Liverpool. With this being said, I would say there is still a correlation between amount of points and goals scored since they all scored a good amount of goals. But it would make sense that United scored the most since they won the league.

Given this bar chart, we can see that three out of the top four teams in England had at least 50 assists over the course of the season. This time, we see that Arsenal had the most assists during the season, with United and Chelsea in joint second, and Liverpool in fourth in terms of assists. With this being said, background information is necessary in order to understand these numbers. During this time period, Arsenal played a very possession and ball sharing brand of football which results in more assisted goals. While under Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United played a more direct style of footy and had players who could make individual plays in order to score goals. Given this information, we can infer that there is a still a positive correlation between assists and points earned, but that Manchester United didn’t necessarily need the most assists to win the Premier League.

## # A tibble: 4 x 2
##   Team              `Cards Earned`
## * <chr>                      <dbl>
## 1 Arsenal                       58
## 2 Chelsea                       71
## 3 Liverpool                     47
## 4 Manchester United             53

This table shows the total cards (red + yellow) earned for each team during the season. I wanted to see if discipline played a role in the success of Manchester United and how they compared to the other teams in this category. As you can see United had the second fewest cards earned at 53, following four place Liverpool who had 47. With this being said, cards earned doesn’t seem to have a correlation between how each team finished in the Prem.

## # A tibble: 4 x 4
##   Team              `Average Age` Oldest Youngest
## * <chr>                     <dbl>  <dbl>    <dbl>
## 1 Arsenal                    23.1     37       17
## 2 Chelsea                    26.8     34       18
## 3 Liverpool                  24.5     33       18
## 4 Manchester United          25       36       19

I was curious to see if age played a factor in the success of each team. In football, it’s important to have a mix of experience and youth in your team. Manchester United’s average age of 25 years old is a great average to have, as it’s around this age that players are in their prime. They also have a good range between their oldest and youngest players. Their youngest isn’t too young, and their oldest player isn’t terribly old either. Their average age of 25 was important to their success, as it is a prime age to play football athletically but also shows that they have the necessary experience to win big games.

Overall, the only statistic that Manchester United really outperformed their competitors was in goals scored. They also had a good average age of their squad, but the other three teams had somewhat similar ages as well. Other than that, they weren’t first in assists or cards earned.

Statistical Method - Regression

If I wanted to gain a more in depth idea on how soccer stats influence a teams place in the standings, I could take the top 5 leagues in Europe and gather each leagues statistics in whole. I could then run regression for each league to see if there are similarities between each league.