Injuries and league position is there a link? – Part 1

By Walter Broeckx

Funny how things sometimes go. You start with one article about the injury record we have this season and then you see the link with the ref reviews and then you can show that being kicked unpunished a lot results in more injuries. This is what I have shown in those articles.

In this article the topic is still injuries and I want to try to see how having more injuries is affecting the final league table. Now I know it cannot really be taken at face value. Because having 5 regular starters out is worse than having 5 players out who would sit on the bench if they were fit. But going that far would take us too far. We will just assume that an injury is an injury no matter who the player is. And after all we could say that any player in the PL should be a rather good player. After all this is the best league so should have the best players in it.

Now let us start with the season 2010-2011 and then we get this table. It is ordered in the injury league position. We then have the number on injured weeks lost and then the average number of players out each week. And finally in the last column you see the final position in the league table.

 

	2010/11	Injury total	Average/week	PL table
1	Tottenham	234	6	5
2	Arsenal	230	6	4
3	Sunderland	210	6	10
4	West Ham	203	5	20
5	Newcastle	198	5	12
6	Fulham	172	5	8
7	Man United	171	5	1
8	Blackpool	149	4	19
9	Wolves	149	4	17
10	Bolton	143	4	14
11	Aston Villa	141	4	9
12	Everton	128	3	7
13	Birmingham	126	3	18
14	Liverpool	126	3	6
15	Blackburn	125	3	15
16	Man City	120	3	3
17	Chelsea	108	3	2
18	Stoke	94	2	13
19	West Brom	75	2	11
20	Wigan	58	2	16
	Average	148	4

 

If we look at the top we see that both North London teams had most of the injuries in that season. Arsenal finishing 3 points behind Manchester City and Chelsea who had only half the injuries that Arsenal suffered. Would having the same low injury numbers as those two teams have resulted in Arsenal getting more points?

It sure wouldn’t have helped Arsenal having the double of injuries compared to those two teams.

When we look at the league winner that was Manchester United we see that they had a slightly higher number of injuries than the teams in 2^nd and 3^rd.

When we look at the teams going down we see that West Ham who finished last that season also had a terrible injury record. That might have contributed a lot to them going down. If my memory serves me right it was the days before Sam Allardyce and maybe still a time when they tried to play football in style with what they call their tradition.

Blackpool also went down but was right in the normal zone of injuries. Birmingham was on the low side of the injury league but still went down. I think it was the curse of winning the League cup (and the investigations into their finances) that got them that season. But if you look back at the earlier article about does a  kicking team gets less injuries than a team that plays the ball this is further evidence to that.

Blackpool were in a bit of a different situation as they were new to the PL and went down again after one season.

If we look at the numbers of Wigan we see that they managed to save themselves, and if we look at their very low injury record it might have got them over the line by the end of the season.

Based on that season we could conclude that it isn’t helpful when you have lots of injuries for your league position. Or maybe we could say that having a low number of injuries does help you to get higher in the league table or to avoid relegation.

But we will try to have a closer look at the next seasons and see if we can find the same pattern again.

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