Simon Burnton
Some teams have had harder starts, some spent more money, some sneaked results they never should have. We crunch the key numbers to produce the Premier League table of justice
Liverpool are still top of our revised Premier League table, and Chelsea are second but Burnley shoot up from ninth to fourth while Arsenal drop below Hugo Lloris’s Spurs. Photographs: Getty Images. Composite by Jim Powell
Liverpool fans are no doubt finding the Premier League table extremely attractive but the truth is that at this stage of the season it remains deeply flawed, skewed as it still is towards teams that have had favourable fixtures and a couple of flukey results. Thankfully, though, we have been able to right some of these wrongs, allowing one side to make an incontrovertible case for the title of great overperformer if not, in the end, dislodging Jürgen Klopp’s entertainers from top spot.
The biggest problem with the real table is that, in these still early days before every team have played every other team, it does not reflect the quality of opposition each side have faced. This can make quite a difference and quickly alter perceptions of teams’ relative merits. So Swansea’s plight, marooned as they are in 19th place in the table, appears less dreadful with the knowledge that they have had by a distance the most difficult opening 11 games of all top-flight teams. They have already played eight of the top 10, including all the top four, while West Brom have played only four top-half sides, three of them at home.
Conversely Pep Guardiola’s impressive start to the season at Manchester City loses some of its lustre with the realisation that his side have probably had the easiest opening run. They alone are yet to play any of the top four sides (obviously being one of them reduces their chances of doing so), and they have beaten only one of the four top-half teams they have faced. Elsewhere, whereas Liverpool are top despite having already visited Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham, Arsenal are yet to play an away game against a team ranked higher than Watford’s eighth place.
To illustrate the difference in fixture difficulty, Swansea’s first 11 opponents have won 194 points this season and have an average current league position of 7.9, while Manchester City’s have won 140 and sit a lowly 12.3. Probably the fairest way of differentiating between the difficulty of fixtures so far played is to use the total points won by each team’s opponents excluding games in which that team have played, by which metric Swansea, Liverpool, Tottenham and Leicester have had the hardest starts and Stoke, Manchester City, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth the most straightforward.
The 'real' Premier League table
In an attempt to make the table more reflective of the quality of opponents faced, we weighted points according to the quality of the teams they were won from, making a victory wrested from one of the top teams significantly more valuable than a similar result against, say, Sunderland, who until this weekend had been handing points out like lollipops on Halloween. In this reimagined table Liverpool remain top and Sunderland bottom but City drop from third to fifth, Stoke from 12th to 16th and Burnley rise from ninth to sixth.
Of course, not all results this season have been deserved, which brings us on to the somewhat vexed issue of Expected Goals. To reach this statistic Opta “measure the quality of a chance and the likelihood a particular shot is scored based on distance to the goal, angle to the goal, whether or not it was a header, whether or not it was assisted and a variety of other factors”. It is regularly dismissed by some commentators, presumably because it sounds patently ludicrous, but has proved an unusually good indicator of actual performance.
Having done their sums and simulated all matches played this season 250 times, Opta have found that some teams should really have considerably more points than they do and others have taken more than they really should have. To make our table more reflective of what is properly fair, but without totally redrafting the league based on something that makes Craig Burley terribly angry, we have added or subtracted half the number of points Opta believe each team should or should not have won.
This gives us a more reasonable reflection of actual achievement this season to date but no sense of who are achieving more than they really should be. This is where money talks. Obviously one would expect those sides that have spent most heavily on their squads to be the most successful on the field (wages are generally a more reliable indicator but this season’s remain unavailable). Using figures from the CIES Football Observatory we ranked teams by the cost of their current squads and awarded them an additional half a bonus league point for every position away from the top of the profligate table they sit. While most of the top six survived this change, spendthrift Manchester United were sent spiralling down to 13th and bargain basement Burnley suddenly hit the top four.
Sean Dyche’s side have had one of the toughest starts and faced it with the division’s cheapest squad, yet they continue to harvest points with rare abandon. In those metrics that tend to mirror fairly closely the quality of the teams who earn them, time and again Burnley stick out for the wrong reasons. So, for example, the Premier League’s real-life top six are also the six teams with the most touches in opposition penalty areas and are all in the top seven teams ranked by average possession and by the difference between the number of shots taken and shots conceded.
Burnley find themselves 19th, 20th and 19th on those tables, their abject performance rivalled only by Hull (20th, 17th and 20th). And still they are soaring. They say the table does not lie but occasionally, and for all sorts of reasons, it can be economical with the truth.
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