Game Day Trends - Part Deux

Game Day Trends, The Follow up.

Hello Football Fans, you may remember an article I wrote all the way back in Game Week 9, on Game Day Trends, well this is the end of season follow up to that article. Back in GW9 after watching a handful of 'Bore Draws' I wondered if there was any pattern occurring relating to results on certain week days or if it was just my bad luck having just watched these games in the previous weeks.

After investigating the first 8 game weeks of the season I noted some surprising trends, at the time I wasn't sure if they were anomalies, so suggested that it would be appropriate to have a look at these details again, toward the back end of the season when the data set was larger.

From GW9 the 3 main points I picked out were:

i) Saturday, on average, means roughly a coin flip between a home win and any other result…ii) Sunday was the next best chance to guess a result: a draw is on the cards.iii) The swap in fortunes: A Saturday game means a home win is most likely. A non-Saturday, well the stars have re-aligned and now a home win is least likely!


Come Game week 37 and the surprising anomalies seem to have smoothed out. Saturday is still the best day to guess a result, Home win please. But the 'balance of expectation ' a Home Win, followed by  Draw and then Away win seems in line with 'expectation' across all days, (i.e. you would always expect a home win would to have great probability than and Draw followed lastly by an away Win. The large data set seems to make logical sense.) There is also a clear indication that there is greater chance of seeing a draw on a non-Saturday although this has come down from approx 20% to around 10% from GW9 to GW37, at least across all categories a chance of a draws come down (infer the season got better for viewing, not as many draws.)


Right so where do we go from here? I intend to go back at least one year & see if last season results were roughly similar.... I'm think it might be worth also collating teams in to Homogeneous Groups, i.e. Champions League Teams, Relegation Battler's etc and see if there are any nice grouping trends. I'm also beginning to wonder if there is a strategy for betting here (& of course a Fantasy angle, not that I'm a gambler,) but if it turn outs that the two season are similar in game day trends, then at points in the season such as GW9 we could hedge our selves predicting where the results will shift too.

Looking at the above table, the most obvious thing to do would be to start betting on Home Win's on a Sundays*, or structuring fantasy sides to have more player from team that play at Home on Sundays over the next few week. I need to give further consideration to the Balance of 'Expectation' assumption (as mentioned above) by checking this holds true for past seasons (watch this space.)


*Granted I have worked back word's here, i.e. GW37 data is not know before GW9 but the prior seasons data will help, hopefully there may be some consistency. 

@Mattistician