I don’t need to tell you that the Big Five European leagues are pretty much decided, and have been decided for a while.  English Premier League, Spanish Primera, and German 1.Bundesliga are dead, dead, dead.  Serie A and Ligue 1 are still alive, but Juventus have pulled away and PSG are starting to do the same.  There is one exception, though, and it’s outside the Big Five: the Dutch Eredivisie.  Make that two exceptions — Turkey’s Süper Lig is tightening up as well.

So what are we seeing in the Pythagorean records of the Big 5 leagues?  I think it can be distilled in a few observations:

• England and Spain should be closer than they are.  If you look at the difference in expected points between Barcelona and Manchester United and their closest challengers, only two or three points separate them from second place.  In fact, both sides are playing at 10 and 14 points, respectively, above their statistical expectations — numbers we have not seen in a league-winning side since FC Twente in 2010. Neither side’s defense has been outstanding by their own high standards; Manchester United has the third-best scoring defense in the Premier League while Barcelona ranks fourth.  The difference in United’s case is that a number of challengers aren’t playing at a high level this season, while Barcelona’s offensive exploits (and especially Lionel Messi’s) more than compensate for its defense.
• PSG are ahead in Ligue 1, pretty much as expected.  PSG have been a perennially underachieving side for several years but thanks to Qatari billions they have a serious chance of winning Ligue 1.  Their -3 Pythagorean residual is within the range of uncertainty of the Pythagorean expectation.
• Juventus and Bayern Munich are the truly dominant sides in domestic competition.  Not only are both sides leading by large margins (Juventus by nine points, and Bayern by 20), their performances are also in line with their statistical expectations.  Their low Pythagorean residuals are the result of their defensive records; Bayern’s residual was 0 or +1 for much of the season thanks to their streak of clean sheets and high scoring.
• Eredivisie is a three-way race, but it shouldn’t be.  The Dutch top flight is going to be a fight between the Big Three teams (PSV, Ajax, Feyenoord) for the title, but if you’re going by goal statistics and expectations, PSV should be well in front.  They aren’t because of a significant difference in home and away performance and a strong performance by Feyenoord.
• Goal difference is a proxy for expected points.  The nice thing about the ResultsPage app is that one can observe the relationship between goal difference and expected points quite easily.  In almost all cases, sorting on goal difference would yield a league table in the same order as the Pythagorean table.

So who are the overachievers at this point of the season, on the basis of Pythagorean expectation?  In addition to Manchester United and Barcelona, I would include Marseille (+10), Feyenoord (+8), Stuttgart (+8*), Hamburg (+7), Olympiacos (+7), Lazio (+6), Getafe (+8), and Rayo Vallecano (+7).  The asterisk is attached to Stuttgart because their expected point total would put them in the relegation zone yet they are performing well enough to be safe.  The same applies to Bastia (+5) in Ligue 1.

Who are the biggest underachievers at this point of the season?  They would be Liverpool (-7), Saint-Étienne (-6), Troyes (-7), Eskişehirspor (-7), Mersin (-7*), AZ Alkmaar (-7), Roda JC (-5*), and Orduspor (-5*).  I attach the asterisks to Roda, Mersin and Orduspor because their expected point total would place them in a safe position yet because of their underperformance they are in the relegation zone.

And of course, you can check all of this out yourself at ResultsPage, our league results and table application (and guinea pig).

CORRECTION: There was an error in the database in which the names of Sochaux and Saint-Étienne were swapped.  I’ve corrected the database and the text above.

The primary motivation behind ResultsPage is to automate the Pythagorean tables that we’ve created since the early days of Soccermetrics.  Instead of having tables printed at four points during the season, you can select a matchday and view the results and tables at the end of that matchday.

We’re also including the conventional league table and the Cann table, which visually represents the point gaps between teams in the competition.  Another table that we will release in the near future is a Series table, which presents the competition as a combination of aggregate-goal series between competing clubs.

All of the data on the application are served through our own RESTful web APIs that supply match data and analytics.  So yes, we’re eating our own caviar here.

Now, is this application all that unique?  No, to be honest — there are tons of pages like this around the web.  But this app is useful to us as we understand how our APIs are used in practice, refine our product development processes, try out different features, and study the reaction of our users as they access and share various pages. And of course, it’s just plain fun!

Over time we’ll introduce additional functionality to the application such as in-season (or even multiple-season) comparisons of goal statistics, head-to-head matchups, and even some limited league projections.  We’ll include results and tables from other leagues and various types of competitions, whether knockout competitions like the English FA Cup, competitions with playoffs like MLS, or mixed league/knockout competitions like the UEFA Champions League.

We appreciate your comments and feedback, and we hope you enjoy using the application as we did building it.

(Caveat: One small warning about the match results page. You might get an error if you try to directly access the URL for a specific matchday as opposed to following a link. We’ll fix this in our next release.)

So here it is for J-League Division One, which finished its 34-round season on Saturday.  The universal Pythagorean league exponent of 1.70 is used.

At the top of the table, Sanfrecce Hiroshima fully deserved their maiden J1 title, and Vegalta Sendai remain one of the best stories in Japanese football over the last 21 months.  Perhaps Yokohama F-Marinos would have finished in the top three (Asian Champions League positions) had Urawa not overperformed slightly, but it could go down to marginal differences making the difference between continental football and nothing.  Nagoya Grampus played seven points better than their expectations — more so than any other side in the competition.

But the biggest story of the season was Gamba Osaka’s relegation.  Not only because  Gamba were former champions of the J-League (2005) but also because they had a goal difference of +2 this season.

The Pythagorean residual at the end was -11, which is a shockingly low number.  Hertha Berlin had a Pythagorean residual of -8 in the 2009-10 German Bundesliga, but I don’t recall a team that had a more negative residual.  It’s not everyday that you see a team with the best scoring offense and the 2nd-worst scoring defense simultaneously.  It’s clear that a team with those characteristics isn’t going to win the league, but shouldn’t Gamba have at least finished mid-table?  Were they “unlucky” as the Pythagorean would indicate?

A look at the league table throughout the season offers an alternative view of Gamba’s season.  (You can take a look at the J-League’s English-language site, the Japanese side has more data, not surprisingly.)  Gamba spent almost the entire season in the lower ranges of the J1 table, and at the halfway point of the season they had a goal difference of -12 (26 scored, 38 conceded).  By round 27 they had picked up the pace and were in positive territory on the goal difference (54 goals scored, 53 conceded), but they remained in the bottom three.

Further insight can be gained when you look at who Gamba scored against.  First, there’s the matter of everyone’s favorite punching bag in Consadole Sapporo.  Gamba beat Consadole 7-2 at home and 4-0 away, and if you remove those two scores from their total, their goal difference shrinks from +2 (67-65) to -7 (56-63).  If you choose to view the league as 17 home-and-away aggregate series against the other teams, Gamba won six of them, lost ten, and drew just one.  It would be interesting to know how their performance stacked up to the rest of the competition, but a 6-10-1 record isn’t good.

So even though Gamba scored more than enough goals to be competitive and even contend for an Asian Champions League place, their defense appeared to have undone them more than a few times.  They have the talent and the infrastructure to make their stay in J2 a short one, but they got themselves in this position not by poor luck, but poor performance that persisted throughout the season.

I’ve been saying for some time that the value of the soccer Pythagorean is to identify those clubs who are performing significantly different from their expectations, which should motivate further examination of their performance.  The Ligue 1 table provides a case in point.  Saint-Étienne have the most negative Pythagorean residual at -6. But if you drill down to their results in the league, les Verts lost three of their first five matches (9 scored, 5 conceded) but haven’t lost since (10 scored, 3 conceded).  One of those two losses was to Lille on a stoppage-time goal, and the seAcond was a bad home loss to lowly Sochaux.  So it’s possible that Saint-Étienne’s residual represents their recovery from a poor start to the season.  We’ll see if that’s right as the season progresses.

As for everyone else, it appears that PSG and Lyon deserve to be at the top, but Marseille are a surprise.  Reims have combined multi-goal wins with narrow defeats on their way to a -4 residual.  Other sides worth a closer look are Bastia, Montpellier, and Nice.

Bayern Munich have gone off to a hot start in the league to match their Champions League form, it probably won’t last if you look at their Pythagorean expectation but they deserve to be on top.  Dortmund stand out as the underachievers so far (-4 Pythagorean residual), and with two draws in which they held winning positions maybe there is something to that.  Freiburg is another slight underachiever (-3 residual), and Wolfsburg might be in for some relegation trouble this season.

With a little more than a quarter of the matches played, very few teams have exhibited significant performance in either direction.  Maybe Manchester United are getting a fortunate result or two.  The bottom three are a little worse, perhaps, but that’s typical with this expectation at the bottom of the league table.  And Spurs fans could take some solace that they are in a higher position than their goal statistics would indicate.

In contrast to previous seasons, La Liga appears to be a three-horse race between Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, and Real Madrid.  Barça and Atlético have put some space between themselves and Real, but who knows how long that will last with Pythagorean residuals of +6 and +5, respectively.  Other teams flying high at the moment include Betis, Levante, and Rayo Vallecano.  I’m particularly interested in Valladolid — the newly promoted side is mid-table but if you put any weight in the Pythagorean perhaps they could be even higher in the table.

A reminder that the Pythagorean table accounts only for points won on the field of play, so the table presented here does not include point deductions.  Four teams — Sampdoria (1 point), Torino (1), Atalanta (2), and Siena (6) — have points deducted because of their involvement in the most recent match fixing scandal.  (It’s become a habit in Italy, sadly.)

At quarter-distance, the championship looks like it’s a four-team race between Juventus, Inter, Fiorentina, and Napoli, and the Pythagorean expectations confirm that.  Milan should be in the mix as well, but they’ve been the major underperformer in Serie A so far. Atalanta have performed much better on the field than you might expect from their goal statistics (+5 Pythagorean residual), but the point penalty has cost them two places.  Siena’s point deductions have really hurt them, and they will have to significantly improve their play to have any chance of staying up.  A lot can happen in the bottom six or seven,  but if I were Genoa or Bologna I’d be concerned.

The San José Earthquakes completed a drastic turnaround from last season as they earned the Supporters’ Shield while improving their point total by 26 points.  Their season was right in line with their statistical expectations and although the Seattle Sounders should have challenged them, in the end no other team came close.  Sporting Kansas City finished second with a slightly overperforming record (Pythagorean residual of +5), while the rest of the top six performed a little better than expected, especially Chicago.  It’s possible that the Fire’s overperformance put them on the cusp of a first round bye instead of missing the playoffs altogether.  Seattle were the big surprise.  Perhaps they could have been a serious contender for Supporters’ Shield, but too many drawn matches left them third in the conference and outside the top six overall.

The big overachievers in the league this season were the Columbus Crew (+7 residual) and Chivas USA (+9 residual).  The Crew appeared to play over their heads this season and only failed to make it to the playoffs because of Chicago and perhaps Houston, and Chivas should have finished with the wooden spoon but didn’t. As you go toward the bottom of the table you are more likely to find poor teams that underperformed, and there are two in the New England Revolution (-7) and Toronto FC (-9).

Finally, if you look at the Pythagorean table there should have been more distance between the top six or seven with Seattle sandwiched between the Quakes and Sporting, but instead 3rd through 7th places are squeezed like an accordion.  Playoffs always create a randomizing effect, but if the same correlation between defensive goal variances and league championships hold then I would expect a Sporting KC – Seattle Sounders final.  I’ll explain later.

San José Earthquakes, Sporting Kansas City, and Real Salt Lake have maintained their distance from the rest of the league since the end of April.  The Red Bulls have played their way into the top four and are among the biggest overachievers of the season.  Vancouver Whitecaps have a +6 Pythagorean residual, the largest in the league.  At the other end of the performance spectrum are Colorado Rapids (-5) and New England Revolution (-7).  Chivas USA were among the league overachievers but have since become slightly overachieving, but in their case it means that instead of being poor, they’re merely mediocre.