When you’re sitting in the pub with your mates, picking your favourites of the Premier League, the one position that has to be the hardest to choose a winner for is the right-back. It is not in any way as easy as left-back, with Ashley Cole usually taking that spot, and Leighton Baines coming through [...]

Teams that can hit you on the counter attack at any moment are incredibly hard to defend against, especially when speed merchants such as Gareth Bale and Theo Walcott are running at your defence. So which teams have impressed in the counter attack and how have they been so successful? We can start to answer [...]

It is a sight no football fan wants to see.  The dreaded ‘R’ next to your club in the league table. It is incredibly difficult for fans to prepare themselves for the emotions that they go through when relegation from the Premier League is sealed.  Anger, frustration and even relief are just some of the [...]

As I get older I am finding that I am becoming less interested in the players at clubs and much more interested in the managers.  What do they do?  Are they worth the money?  Are they actually needed at all? Once the team is picked and the tactics discussed, is there anything that a manager [...]

I read a very interesting article by Ben Pugsley which looked at the scoring percentage and shooting efficiency of the top ten strikers in the Premier League this season. I thought I’d use the shot placement data from EPLIndex to see if it could explain a couple of points in the article, as well as digging into the improved goal [...]

With the Premier League now entering the last 10 games of the season it is the perfect time to use statistics to draw conclusions about why your team produced success/failure. Last week my focus was on chance conversion rate. This week the focus is on crossing accuracy. The table directly below portrays the total crosses performed [...]

A fairly dull and uninspiring game between two teams who should avoid any brushes with the relegation dogfight this season. Newcastle eventually edged the game with a injury time winner. This game was never likely to figure highly among the purist’s must watch games of the season but it provides another example of how teams [...]

Of course, I don’t need to tell you that the more chances a team creates the more likely they are of scoring. But do the teams creating the most chances score the most goals? The stats below show the chance conversion rate for each individual team. Not surprisingly, top of the league Manchester United also [...]

It is not all that long ago that Gareth Bale had an unwanted record – he had never finished on the winning side in a Spurs shirt. If you were told that stat once existed now, you would never believe it. He is the driving force behind Spurs’ push for Champions League football next season [...]

English players have become premium assets in the transfer market. The cause may be the influx of foreign players or the small reserves of real British talent, but overvaluing our compatriots is not a recent phenomenon. A remnant of the ‘golden generation’, the English fans and media tend to hail the arrival of a new [...]