Experimental 3-6-1

Introduction

You may remember from last year that I developed a simple algorithm to visualise each team’s fixture list for the coming season. It works like this:

1. Quantify each club’s relative strength using a simple proxy measure: in this instance I’ve chosen Bet365′s current promotion odds (appended at the foot of this post). Even if I don’t fully agree with them, ‘market forces’ should be less controversial than my own opinion.
2. Factor in how home advantage affects each team. I do this by taking the ratio of points earned at home vs. away last season.
3. Combine these two numbers to assess the difficulty of each fixture for each team. The relative strength is obviously more heavily weighted than the home vs. away rating.
4. Rank each team’s fixtures in order of difficulty and colour code them (red = harder, yellow = average, green = easier) to produce a heat map for the season, allowing fans to pinpoint particularly winnable or tough spells for their team.

The Heat Map

Clicking will open a full-sized version in a separate tab:

While your eyes adjust to the technicolour horror, here’s an example of how to read this:

• Brentford have a very easy start (at least on paper). Their first 6 matches all look very winnable, suggesting an early surge towards the top of the table. However, they may stumble in November when they face a frightening run of tough games. They’ll then need to make the most of some kind fixtures in January and February as late March and early April look frankly horrible: they actually play 3 of their 4 toughest games in this period.
• Stevenage and Notts County also have relatively winnable opening fixtures, the odd banana skin or two aside, with the latter also having a very benign February.
• Bournemouth have a tough start, but Bury‘s looks even worse: they’ll have to wait until October before their first ‘easy’ game. The good news for the Shakers is that late October and early November comprise a much more winnable run for them, and on paper they have the division’s easiest end-of-season run-in.

Hopefully this gives you the general idea. I will probably update these as the new season draws nearer and the relative strengths of each team can be gauged with more accuracy.

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Appendix – Bet365′s current promotion odds (decimal)

Just for the record, I think some of these are way off and will surely move significantly between now and mid-August:

Sheff Utd 2.62
MK Dons 3.5
Swindon 3.75
Bournemouth 4.33
Preston 4.33
Brentford 5
Coventry 5
Doncaster 5.5
Notts County 5.5
Crawley 6
Portsmouth 8
Stevenage 9
Carlisle 10
Scunthorpe 10
Colchester 11
Tranmere 13
Crewe 15
Hartlepool 15
Shrewsbury 15
Bury 21
Leyton Orient 21
Oldham 21
Yeovil 21
Walsall 34