Does fouling a lot and scoring a lot always take a club up the league?

 

 

• Why Arsenal’s Performance Is So Hard to Predict (and How to Crack the Code)
• An evening with Arsenal Legends and that missing London League Table

By Tony Attwood

Recently we had a look at whether a club’s league position directly relates to having a top goal scorer.  The answer seemed to be, “sometimes,” but there is no guarantee.   Liverpool, it is true, score the most and have this season’s top scorer.  But Newcastle have the third top scorer, but are half way down the table when it comes to goals scored.

This tends to suggest that there needs to be a balance in the team between a top scorer and others who also knock in goals.

If we now look at things the other way around and look at fouls committed and the position of clubs in the league we can find out some more.  The first column on the left gives the position of the club in terms of the number of fouls committed (with the highest at the top) and the last column on the right is the clubs’ league position.

And what we can see, there is precious little relationship.   Clubs can get up near the top of the league by fouling their way through match after match, as in the style of Chelsea, but fouling quite a lot can also be part of taking a club down as we can see with Southampton who foul the third most and are bottom of the league.

 

 

In short, a pattern is emerging that shows that there is no magical combination of attributes that takes a club up or down.

Scoring goals is obviously helpful if a club wants to be near the top, but although Liverpool score the most, and Manchester City the second highest (albeit they are fifth in the league), Tottenham have this season scored the same number of goals as Manchester City and yet managed to pick up 14 fewer points.  So goals and points don’t always go hand in hand.

 

Pos	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Liverpool	29	21	7	1	69	27	42	70
5	Manchester City	29	14	6	9	55	40	15	48
14	Tottenham Hotspur	29	10	4	15	55	43	12	34
2	Arsenal	29	16	10	3	53	24	29	58
4	Chelsea	29	14	7	8	53	37	16	49

 

In fact even if we take goals scored and goals conceded into account to give us the goal difference, there is still no direct relationship with the position in the league.  Tottenham are 14th in the league but have the seventh-best goal difference. This compares with Liverpool who are top in the league and top in terms of goal difference.  Likewise, Arsenal are second in the league and have the second-best goal difference.

What this shows in fairly stark terms is that teams need to balance their ability in both scoring and defending – and written out like this that seems blindingly obvious.  And indeed looked at this way it is no surprise that Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton have goal differences that match their positions in the league – they are the bottom three in both measurements.

All of these point the finger at teams that have a goal difference which is out of line with their league position and Tottenham are a perfect example here.   They are the second-highest-scoring team in the league but have the eighth-worst defence in the league which of course drags them right down.   It seems rather obvious to try and create a balanced team in this regard

Arsenal have the fourth-best attack, just two goals behind the second-best, and the best defence.  Not a perfect match but close.