Right then, let me tell you what I got up to recently. I got this idea stuck in my head about the Premier League, specifically how teams perform differently when they’re playing at their own ground versus when they’re traveling.
Getting Started
It all started after watching a match, you know? My team played brilliantly at home one week, then looked completely lost away the next. I got curious. Is it just my team, or is this a big thing across the league? I wanted to see the actual numbers, like a proper table showing just home results and just away results, side-by-side.
So, the first thing I did was hop onto my computer. I figured someone must have already done this, right? I poked around a few sports websites, the usual places you’d go for scores and standings. Found plenty of standard league tables, but the specific home/away split wasn’t always obvious or easy to compare directly in the way I wanted.
The Nitty-Gritty
I decided, alright, I’ll just track it myself for a bit. It sounded simple enough. I needed the results of all the matches. That part was easy, loads of places list the scores.
Then came the slightly tedious part. I opened up a basic spreadsheet program – nothing fancy, just the one that comes with the computer. I started listing the teams down the side. Then, I needed columns: Played, Won, Drawn, Lost, Goals For, Goals Against, Goal Difference, and Points. Crucially, I needed two sets of these columns – one for Home and one for Away.
I started going through the recent results I could find easily. For each match, I had to figure out:
- Who was playing at home?
- Who was playing away?
- What was the score?
Then, I had to carefully add the stats to the correct row (team) and the correct set of columns (home or away). So, if Team A beat Team B 2-0 at Team A’s stadium, I’d go to Team A’s row, add 1 to their Home Played, 1 to their Home Won, add 2 to Home Goals For, and 3 to Home Points. Then, go to Team B’s row, add 1 to Away Played, 1 to Away Lost, add 2 to Away Goals Against, and 0 to Away Points.
Man, it was fiddly! Especially making sure I put the goals in the right ‘For’ and ‘Against’ columns for both teams involved in each match. I definitely double-checked a few times because it’s easy to mess up when you’re just manually typing stuff in. I didn’t do the whole season, just enough fixtures to get a feel for it.
Looking at the Results
After plugging away at it for a while, I had my own basic home and away tables taking shape. It wasn’t perfectly up-to-the-minute like the live online ones, obviously, but it showed me what I wanted to see.
And yeah, it was pretty interesting. You could really see which teams were relying heavily on their home form. Some teams looked like world-beaters in their own stadium but picked up hardly any points on the road. Others were surprisingly consistent, home and away. A couple of the teams lower down the main table actually had respectable away records, better than some teams above them, but their home form was letting them down badly.
It definitely made me look at the standard league table a bit differently. You see the total points, but breaking it down like this really shows the where and how teams are getting those points. It explained a lot about my own team’s ups and downs too.
So, that was my little project. Took a bit of time, mostly just careful data entry, but it satisfied my curiosity. Gave me a different perspective on the league standings, just by splitting that one big table into two smaller ones.