There is an index to our recent articles arranged by themes on the home page
By Tony Attwood
- What takes clubs up and down the league: attack or defence?
- Referee Extremism: the situation in Spain and in England
There are numerous factors that affect how well a club does in a season, and obviously, such factors as how good the players are, and pure luck, come into it. But we have been wondering if there is more to this than meets the eye.
So we have taken a couple of issues that Sky Sports have offered and then added some more of our own to see if we can discover how it all works.
Let’s start with days lost to injury for each club – these figures go up to 8 January, as we wanted to be able to compare like with like across several categories and not all figures were available for later dates.
To this we added games played by the club, and the number of players missing one or days to injury plus the total days lost to injury. And indeed the total days lost to injury is amazingly varied. Newcastle have lost over four times the number of player days to injury than West Ham.
Arsenal have lost 40% more player days to injury than Manchester City. Which raises the question, how have they done and how can we copy?
| Club | Games played by club | No of players missing 1+ games | Total days lost to injury | Players used |
| Newcastle U | 30 | 24 | 892 | 30 |
| Chelsea | 25 | 22 | 730 | 24 |
| Manchester U | 29 | 23 | 710 | 28 |
| Tottenham H | 20 | 20 | 625 | 25 |
| Arsenal | 30 | 15 | 534 | 20 |
| Liverpool | 30 | 16 | 510 | 20 |
| Manchester C | 31 | 14 | 445 | 25 |
| West Ham U | 30 | 10 | 200 | 20 |
There is no absolute rule here of course because there are far too many variables including the skill of the players, the attitude of the referees, the style of play dictated by the coaches.
But there are patterns.,
Chelsea:most fouls committed, second most days lost to injury, third highest number of fouls against and as a result of all that the fifth highest number of players used.
Tottenham are another team raking in the numbers. Most fouls against, third highest number of fouls committed and third highest number of players used, and fourth highest number of days lost through injury.
Arsenal are at the other end: fifth highest number of days lost through injury, sixth highest number of players used, sixth highest number of fouls against and sevnth highest number of fouls committed.
But probably the most unexpected find here is the link between the number of fouls committed by players and the number of days that are lost by that team. In short if players go out and commit fouls, it seems they will be fouled back, and are liable to lose some playing days to injury. That’s logical, but you’d think managers might have realised that.
The links is not complete but there is a tendency: commit fewer fouls and lose fewer days to your own players to injuries. The implication is that sometimes a nasty foul on an opposition player can be returned in kind.
Thus Chelsea commit the most fouls and have lost the second-highest number of days to injury. Manchester United commit the fifth-highest level of fouls and have the third-highest number of days lost to injury. Arsenal have lost the fifth-highest number of days to injury and committed the seventh-highest number of fouls.
The links are not straightforward, but they are there. The final table gives an illustration and the number after the dash is the position among all seven clubs examined.
| Club | Days lost to injury | Fouls committed | Difference |
| Chelsea | 730 – 2 | 12.6 – 1 | 1 |
| Manchester U | 710 – 3 | 10.5 – 5 | 3 |
| Tottenham H | 625 – 4 | 10.9 – 3 | 1 |
| Arsenal | 534 – 5 | 9.8 – 7 | 2 |
| Manchester C | 445 – 7 | 8.3 – 8 | 1 |
