Attacking and defensive efficiency: Championship

You may remember last season that I produced some insanely lengthy graphs of attacking and defensive efficiency, where I used two ratios to rank each league team:

Number of shots taken for each goal scored
Number of shots faced for each goal conceded

To avoid tiresome scrolling and to make comparisons easier, I thought I’d try and plot these against each other. Click the image to blow it up to full size:

I’ve centred the axes on the averages for each ratio, which allows us to split the clubs into 4 roughly equal quadrants depending on whether their attacks and defences are over or under average. The top left box is where you’d ideally want your team to be, obviously; anyone in the bottom right is potentially in a spot of bother.

I’ll make a few quick illustrative observations and then leave you to enjoy it in peace:

Hull’s promotion bid has to a large extent been built on their miserly defence but could potentially be derailed by their wasteful finishing
Ipswich are pretty competent in front of goal, but unless they tighten up their back line they’re going to struggle to climb much higher in the table
Steve Cotterill has a lot of work to do to Nottingham Forest up

I’m intending to churn out versions of this for Leagues 1 & 2 in the near future.

Note: These are by no means perfect or absolute measures of efficiency. The defensive metric is the slightly less useful of the two, as an effective defence probably prevents as many shots as it repels. However you could also argue that a good defence will force opponents to attempt their shots from less advantageous positions.