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Phube

Crazy Stat Time!

By Phube, in Leicester City Forum

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kushiro

kushiro

Posted
Posted

I've seen a couple of commentators mention that out points total was quite low for champions. Is that true? Well, not if you take a detailed look at the history of the top flight.

 

We got 81 points from 38 games, an average of 2.13 points per game. Since it was expanded in 1905/06, there have been exactly 100 top flight seasons of 38 games or more. It's quite revealing to look at those seasons decade by decade.

 

In the graphics below, the parts marked yellow and blue tell quite a story. Yellow is for teams winning the title for the first time, blue is for points per game higher than Leicester's 2.13. Let's look first at the decade leading up to the World War 1:

 

               champions                             points per game

1906_15_2.png

 

And now the decade after the World War 1 (when it became a 42 game season):

 

1920_29_up.png

 

This is what the top flight used to be - a fairly level financial playing field. No team could buy the title. There's no blue numbers yet - i.e. no title winner in these two decades had a better points per game record than Leicester's 2.13 (converted from two points for a win to three).

 

Here's the decade up to World War 2:

 

1930_39.png

 

Finally a blue figure - Arsenal are the first southern club to win the title, with a record points total.

 

Here's the ten years after WW2:

 

1947_56_up.png

 

To summarise - 39 of the 40 title winners so far had a points per game record inferior to Leicester's. But then things start to change...         (more to follow)

 

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kushiro

kushiro

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Moving on...

 

 

1957_66_3.png

 

The Busby Babes raised the bar, Billy Wright's Wolves and Tottenham's double winners responded. In 1963 the maximum wage is abolished, and richer clubs can start attracting more of the better players:

 

1967_76_uodate.png

 

First time title winners are becoming less and less common:

 

1977_86.png

 

After Forest, several clubs have a decent stab at becoming first time winners - Swansea (1982), Watford (1983), Southampton (1984), West Ham (1986) Palace (1991) and Norwich (1993) all played at least a minor part in the title race. But after the first year of the Premier League, no-one even comes close:

 

1987_96_decade.png

 

And as we enter the 21st Century, with the Champions League expanded to include the top four, a tiny group of rich clubs with a huge financial advantage are dominating:

 

1997_2006_decade.png

 

... it seems that all romance has been extinguished from the title race...

 

2007_2016_decade.png

 

So - what's the overall picture? If you look just at the Premier League era, 81 points isn't so high, but it's still better than many, including Wenger's 1998 champions and Fergie's treble winners. If you take a longer view and compare us with a time when money couldn't buy the title, our performance ranks very highly. 

 

Combining all the 100 title winners shown above, we come in the top 30 (Danny Drinkwater's equaliser at Chelsea lifted us above Forest):

 

all_time.png

 

But this is still only tellling part of the story. No team before us has ever won the title from such a position of financial disadvantage (that's part of the reason for the 5000 to 1 odds, of course).

 

This graphic's worth another look:

 

table.jpg

 

If someone could come up with a table like that covering the whole history of the league, it's pretty likely we'd be the all-time number 1.

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st albans fox

st albans fox

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I imagine the introduction of 3 points for a win has also skewed things somewhat. the obvious value of taking a risk to get the win over the draw. to be honest, your assessment (well done btw- a lot of effort) is very revealing as to the value of Jimmy hill's gift to the game.

And it shows that we shouldn't be dissed because all our challengers were shite

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kushiro

kushiro

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I imagine the introduction of 3 points for a win has also skewed things somewhat. the obvious value of taking a risk to get the win over the draw. to be honest, your assessment (well done btw- a lot of effort) is very revealing as to the value of Jimmy hill's gift to the game.

And it shows that we shouldn't be dissed because all our challengers were shite

 

That's a good point. I'd been wondering what factors might skew things and I had a look at a few seasons either side of the switch to three points for a win to see if the number of draws decreased, but it would need a much more extensive analysis. Jonathan Wilson discusses it a bit here:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2009/feb/05/question-jonathan-wilson-three-points

 

Yeah - the 'all our challengers were shite' charge doesn't stand up. An interesting comparison would be Derby in 1975 - Liverpool lost Keegan for 2 months because of his fight with Bremner, Leeds had just lost Revie and appointed Clough, Man U were in division 2 with their revival on the way, and Ipswich, who should have won it, were hampered by cup commitments. Derby were lucky to sneak home with a very low points total. If we'd squeezed home with 72 points this year you could have said the same about us - but we romped home 10 points clear.

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Woof

Woof

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I imagine the introduction of 3 points for a win has also skewed things somewhat. the obvious value of taking a risk to get the win over the draw. to be honest, your assessment (well done btw- a lot of effort) is very revealing as to the value of Jimmy hill's gift to the game.

And it shows that we shouldn't be dissed because all our challengers were shite

There is a section in the book "Soccermatics" by David Sumpter on this.  If you look at the six seasons before the change in 1980 and the six seasons after, the five seasons with the most draws came before and the four seasons with the least draws came after.  There was also a slight increase in the goals per game after the change.  He also shows that there is a good probability argument for the lesser clubs to play more attacking football after this change and comes up with the rule that you should attack unless your opponent is not more than twice as likely to win than you are.

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Captain...

Captain...

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Crazy stat for you, surprised it hasn't been mentioned, we won the Premier League by 10 points (that isn't it) we won the championship by 9 points and League 1 by only 7 points. Of our 9 league titles, this is the greatest winning margin, in the hardest league of them all in the toughest era. 

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Carl the Llama

Carl the Llama

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Crazy stat for you, surprised it hasn't been mentioned, we won the Premier League by 10 points (that isn't it) we won the championship by 9 points and League 1 by only 7 points. Of our 9 league titles, this is the greatest winning margin, in the hardest league of them all in the toughest era. 

Whaaaaaaat

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Hitesh

Hitesh

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Wasn't Chelsea finishing 9th the worse title defence ever? We need to finish 8th or above next season.

Correct... Blackburn and Utd are the second worst by finishing 7th. Would be interesting to do it by points gap between top and where teams have finished defending their title.

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Facecloth

Facecloth

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Posted

Not or sure if this ones been posted before.

 

* Leicester accrued 41 points in the 2014/15 season. They amassed 81 this season, representing a seasonal rise of 40 points. This is the greatest year-on-year rise by any team in England’s top flight in the three-point era.

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Dan LCFC

Dan LCFC

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2 hours ago, Facecloth said:

Not or sure if this ones been posted before.

 

* Leicester accrued 41 points in the 2014/15 season. They amassed 81 this season, representing a seasonal rise of 40 points. This is the greatest year-on-year rise by any team in England’s top flight in the three-point era.

No-one's bettered that in the two point era surely?

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Wolfox

Wolfox

Posted
Posted (edited)
2 minutes ago, StanSP said:

First free-kick scored since April 2014 (Knockaert vs Sheff Weds).#

 

First win in European football since 1961, when we beat Glenavon in the Cup Winners Cup.

I was wondering when we'd last scored from a free kick...  I knew it'd been a while....

 

plus only English team with a 100% record in the champs league!!!!

Edited by Wolfox
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