Visualising the 2015/16 League One fixtures
Today the Experimental 3-6-1 blog has published visualisations for the difficulty of League One fixtures. Using the average of the eight leading bookmakers’ odds, Ben Mayhew has ranked each club’s strength and then provided a visual analysis of the difficulty of the allocated fixtures.
As for Swindon Town, Ben’s analysis has revealed Town have been dealt a relatively kind run of fixtures. Following a tough start at home to Bradford City, Town’s toughest period is likely to be October with games against Peterborough, Millwall, Coventry and Wigan. Of all League One sides, Swindon have one of the ‘kindest’ festive fixtures (behind Doncaster) against the division’s weaker sides. With the re-run of the October fixtures in late February and March, Town will then enjoy a favourable final group of games, playing one of the division’s top six sides only once in the last eight games. With any early predictions of the league these must be treated with caution until the shape of the division takes hold from October.
To view the fixture difficulty visualisations for the Premier League and Football League please click on the links below.
League One difficulty analysis – LINK
Full article – LINK
Now that the fixtures have been released for the top four English divisions, I thought I’d crank out updated versions of my fixture difficulty visualisations. The idea behind these is to categorise each club’s fixtures by the strength of their opponent to pick out particularly easy or tricky runs of games over the season. I’ve simplified things slightly this year: rather than trying to apply a correction for home and away matches, I’ve just taken an average of eight leading bookies’ title odds as a proxy for ranking each club’s “strength” and then divided each division’s clubs into four quarters based on the bookies’ implied ranking. I’ll provide some observations for each division to give you the idea, and you can click on each image to bring up a full-sized version.
- It looks like Sunderland should be able to start well, playing three of the five worst-rated sides in their first six matches, but a…
View original post 251 more words
The Washbag 
I saw these on Twitter yesterday. A great little insight into how it could look after the first few games, even though we all know it doesn’t work out like that! We (Walsall) could get off to a good start, which is what we need if we’re going to hit targets of the play-offs rather than chasing all season long.
LikeLike