How to win the Premier League? (Part 1) Play well against mid table teams

For the last 10 years or so, every weekend, I spend a few hours watching the English Premier League (EPL). Whether or not, the EPL is the ‘best’ league is up for debate but it is definitely an entertaining product. In my opinion, what the EPL does best is ‘selling’ the competition and creating insane hype around games. No where is this more true, than in games between the traditional Big 6 (Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspurs). You have ‘reporters’ (mostly pundits, usually working for Sky) taking helicopters to the game, touring the city and building the game up as the ‘most important game’.

Often, when a team loses one of these matches, they come under intense criticism from the famously hostile British press. Everything seems doomed for the losing team and their title chances are taken down several notches. I have long suspected that the results in these ‘Big 6’ matches are overblown and in fact other games might be more important for deciding the fate of your teams season.

In fact, when I analyzed the data, I found this was indeed true (see the plots below). Results against ‘mid table’ teams had a much stronger correlation (0.74) than results against ‘big 6’ teams (0.47). If you are interested in learning more details, please see below the plots. This leads me to believe that rather than calling the top of the table clashes to be most important, we should call the clashes versus mid table teams most important.

Teams which do well in EPL typically perform better against the mid table teams than their rivals

There is not a strong correlation between playing well against ‘Big 6’ teams and final league position

Here’s what I did exactly. I wanted to look at results of the teams versus Big 6 opposition and compare it to their results versus mid table teams. I looked at games from 2013–2014 season to 2016–2017 season and defined mid table teams as the 7 teams other than the Big 6 teams which finished the highest in the league table at the end of the season. Here are the mid table teams for each season I analyzed:

13–14: Everton, Southampton, Stoke City, Newcastle United, Crystal Palace, Swansea City, West Ham United

14–15: Southampton, Swansea City, Stoke City, Crystal Palace, Everton, West Ham United, West Brom

15–16: Leicester City, Southampton, West Ham United, Stoke City, Everton, Swansea City, Watford

16–17: Everton, Southampton, Bournemouth, West Brom, West Ham United, Leicester City, Stoke City

I got the results for each game in every season from Wikipedia and compiled the results manually. Once the results were compiled, I analyzed and visualized them in R. The raw data and code can be found on my GitHub.