Following a successful trial earlier this season, I’ve produced an animated minute-by-minute league table for the Conference.

The way it works is as follows:

• Each graphic cycles through every club in descending order of their final league position (on an infinite loop with each frame lasting 2 seconds).
• The line shows what the highlighted club’s league position would have been in an imaginary universe where every match in the division finished early, for each scenario from finishing after the 1st minute all the way through to the 90th (as per the scale at the top).
• I’ve chopped the time up into 5 minute segments to make it easier to read, and for simplicity’s sake I’ve rolled all injury time into the 45th and 90th minutes.
• This means that the last dot (under the 90) on each line is just each club’s normal league position, and the list of clubs on the right is in the same order as in the real table.

This is mostly intended as a bit of fun, but does allow you to identify clubs that perform particularly well or badly at various points during matches compared to everyone else, and get an idea for how much this affected their final league position.

Without further ado, here’s the animation along with some observations. Clicking the graphic will bring up a full-sized version in a new tab that can be paused and rewound if needed:

• There are only 4 minutes out of the 90 – all in the early stages – when you could stop the clock and not find Barnet as the best performing side, although even then they’re second.
• In each of those 4 it’s mid-table Lincoln who would have topped the table had matches finished that early, with the Imps’ performances in the first half an hour good enough for at least play-off place. Unfortunately as matches wore on they tended to lose their grip on proceedings, with the ten goals they conceded in first and second half stoppage time combined the highest in the division.
• It was a similar story – and with more painful consequences – for relegated Alfreton, who actually performed pretty well compared with the rest of the division up until the 25-minute mark thanks to scoring the division’s highest share of goals in the first 15 minutes of matches (24%). Things tended to deteriorate rapidly from around the half hour mark however.
• Sometimes it goes the other way, such as in the case of Macclesfield who performed dismally in the first 13 minutes of league matches this season and didn’t really display any promotion credentials until about half an hour in. If they’d been able to start matches slightly better, they may well have made the play-offs.
• Torquay‘s plot is particularly interesting: poor starts to matches saw them struggle in the first 20 minutes, but a rapid improvement mid-way through the first half saw them leave the field at the interval as one of the division’s better performers. They tended to lose their grip in the second period though, and drift down the table as full time approaches.

I’ll churn out one of these for other divisions as their seasons come to a close.