Barclays Premier League Stats - Chelsea Deserved the Title Last Season

With the new Barclays Premier League just around the corner, a few people at my workplace have challenged ourselves to build and develop a model to predict Premier League scores and results each weekend. The models are allowed to change as often as we like, the only rule as such is we are not allowed to use 'Gut Feel' - only data. It should be an interesting challenge for us, and one that hopefully will see us learn some new data geekery over the course of 9 months.

So naturally we found some pretty interesting datasets on our quests to build our models, not least from football-data.co.uk, which I have made an attempt to visualise below. It's obviously not in Tableau-friendly format, so I've had to rework it a bit. There were some really interesting insights within the data, that should lead some EPL fans to worry about their team's prospects.

The name of the game is to score lots and concede few, something that Chelsea seemed to get down to an art form, grinding out boring victories towards the latter end of the season, it's fascinating to see the data reflecting that.

My favourite stat hidden in the data is this: 1 in every 7 shots against Newcastle is a goal, whilst 1 in every 13 against Chelsea is a goal.

Here's the visual, enjoy!