Manchester United: EPL Goals Analysis
Manchester United is one of the top teams in the Premier League and a team that has garnered many fans through the years. But as a fan, have you ever wondered if there was a pattern behind the team's playing? Some pattern behind the noisy cheers, jeers and "referee kayu"s?
Let's take a look into the past 10 seasons of the team's statistics to see what we can uncover.
We can see that Man United tends to end the game with one goal. But does this really help us analyse the team's performance? Hmm, not really, right?
What will help us then? Perhaps if we could see how well Man United scores in relation to its opposition. For every match. For every opposition. For the past 10 seasons. Now that may help us see a pattern.
The heat map above shows the distribution of the exact score combination of Man United against its opponents in the past ten years. Mousing over the grids allow you to see the exact percentage of each different score combination. A quick glance reveals that red clusters tend to congregate close to the y-axis, which shows that Man United has been consistently able to subdue its opponents' scoring ability.
So.. what can we learn?
First things first, this post is only scraping the surface of what football data can uncover. There are many more tests that can (and have) to be done to ensure consistency before we can even act on the data. And even if these tests prove significance, we cannot be sure that future matches will be similar to past ones. We have to assume all matches are independent events.
But with that said, there has been a trend in historical patterns that suggests that scores definitely aren't as random (nor as independent) as coin tosses. Firstly, we can see the difference between Man United's scoring pattern against that of Everton's. Man United tends to win its opponents with a score of 1-0 and 2-0, while Everton tends to lose 1-0. (scores here represent team-opposition - not the commonly represented home-away. we do this because we are interested in scoring a team's performance against all opponents, as opposed to scoring the home against the away team)