Aston Villa – Statistically Not As Bad As It May Seem

As a follower of sport I try to analyse the objective things I know, while staying away from the subjective things that perhaps get most of the attention. While I don’t have the mathematical and statistical background and competence to develop my own analytical metrics, I can usually comprehend and appreciate the work of others who are smarter than I.

One such statistic that I found on www.baseballreference.com while looking at league standings is a statistic called GBsum. Essentially you add the sum of how far behind a club is for every team ahead of it in the standings. This was an easy enough statistic for me to get my head around that I can easily apply it to Aston Villa. Sadly, we are more concerned with avoiding the drop than winning anything of signifigance so we will be inverting the Premier League table.

At the moment Sunderland is in the drop zone at 18th on 24 points. Villa are only four points ahead of Sunderland. That is clearly a narrow enough of a gap to concern any of us. However that gap alone does not give any weight to the number of clubs between us and the drop.

One crucial difference between the standings in baseball and a football league table are the points awarded for wins and draws in football, as opposed to baseball where there are no draws and the standings are only based on wins. Three points for a win makes it easier to move up the table. West Ham was practically in crisis and had a humiliating cup exit, but after just a few good results are up to 11th. That the bottom half is so tightly bunched together is no mystery. I thought about adding an additional point for superior goal difference, but that can be fluid so I left it alone. Not unlike the Cann table, I think this is a different way to conceptualize the table.

For those who may be curious here’s the top of the table:

Brendan Rogers is probably right to play down Liverpool’s chances for the title. And the race for 4th:

David Moyes will need a miracle.