Better late than never, here are the timeline graphics from the opening round of League 1 fixtures. I had planned to upgrade these over the summer but this has been delayed, so they’ll probably change suddenly at some point over the next month or so.

A quick explanation

You can skip this if you’ve seen these before.

As usual, here are timeline graphics for the latest round of matches. There’s a full explanation of these here, but in a nutshell they track how each club’s expected goals tally (the number of goals that the average team would have scored from the chances that they created) increased over the course of the match.

This allows us to get a better sense of how each game played out than from just watching the highlights. Every jump in a line is a shot, with bigger jumps corresponding to more promising chances (at least as far as I can tell from the limited data available at this level).

There are two numbers next to each club’s name: the first is how many goals they scored and the second (in brackets) is how many goals the average club would have scored from their shots. The latter number is what the lines track, with dots on the lines denoting the goals they actually scored.

Individual matches

Southend made short work of pre-season title favourites Blackburn while Bury look as though they could have beaten a flat Walsall side by a more comfortable margin. Wigan stunned hosts MK Dons but the third relegated side, Rotherham, could only stumble to defeat at Fleetwood.