Here’s something a bit lighter than yesterday’s 3,000 word yawn-fest on manager tenure. I saw this article on the BBC Sport site which highlighted that you can make a continuous loop using this season’s Premier League results so far, where “Team 1 beat Team 2 who beat Team 3 etc” including all of the teams in the division and beginning back where you started:

It got me wondering whether this is true for the Football League divisions and how hard it would be to find out. It turns out not very, because I was able to do it.

I wrote some code which finds these chains by randomly walking through sequences of fixtures and discovered that both League 1 and League 2 are also sufficiently unpredictable to make one of these graphics, as follows:

Every team in this graphic has been beaten by the one immediately clockwise of it this season. For example, starting in the top left, Bradford lost 2-0 to Peterborough who lost 3-2 to Wigan who lost 1-0 to Burton and so on.

There are actually quite a few ways in which you can string all 24 clubs together in this way based on this season’s results so far: this is just the first one I found.

Here’s the same graphic for League 2. Again this is just one of many ways in which the clubs can be combined using this method:

It’s therefore not just the Premier League where anyone can beat anyone else, although the additional number of combinations made possible by having 24 teams instead of 20 means that these “complete loops” are more likely.

Given that I could easily find these loops for two of the three divisions I doubt that there’s anything special about them or that their existence “proves” anything in particular. However, I expect that the more different ways there are of making them for a given division after a given number of matches, the more open the division has been.

EDIT 1: I was openly wondering why I couldn’t find a complete loop for the Championship, but then the reason was pointed out to me…

… which made me realise that sometimes you can spend so much time chasing down the more esoteric numbers that you forget about the basic ones.

EDIT 2: I’ve added a version for the National League too: