We present the Pythagorean table for the 2011-12 Spanish Primera División season, for matches played up to 15 January 2012. The standard league Pythagorean exponent of 1.70 is used.

Real Madrid and Barcelona maintain their huge gap between themselves and the rest of La Liga, but Barcelona’s performance has dipped a bit since October (although I think it really fell after their return from the Club World Cup). Levante (+4), Granada (+5), and Osasuna (+7) are the overachievers in Primera at the halfway mark. Levante are a contender for a Champions League place but it remains to be seen if they fall off the pace as Espanyol did last season. Granada should be mired in the relegation zone but are just beating the drop. Osasuna’s Pythagorean residual is a bit misleading as they have suffered heavy defeats against Barcelona and Real Madrid (0-8 and 1-7 respectively) and decent results against everyone else. It’s interesting to observe that none of the teams are performing significantly below expectations at this point of the season, which indicates that the Pythagorean is not a zero-sum metric. It is possible for all teams in a league to outperform their statistical expectations and still finish at the top, middle, or bottom of a league.