Hover over (or if you’re on mobile, click) the bars to view the relevant match details. This is best viewed on a desktop browser. Switch to landscape if you’re on mobile for a better viewing experience.

team,oddities,points,l2w,l2d,w2d,w2l Arsenal,6,42,0,0,3,3 Leicester,12,40,5,5,2,0 "Man City",7,39,0,1,2,4 Tottenham,12,36,2,3,6,1 "Man United",10,33,0,0,6,4 "West Ham",17,32,7,3,5,2 "Crystal Palace",11,31,5,3,1,2 Liverpool,13,30,2,3,3,5 Watford,10,29,4,4,1,1 Stoke,16,29,7,4,1,4 Everton,13,27,2,4,5,2 "West Brom",10,26,4,5,0,1 Southampton,13,24,2,1,5,5 Chelsea,13,23,0,2,3,8 Norwich,11,23,3,4,1,3 Bournemouth,12,21,4,3,3,2 Swansea,10,19,1,2,5,2 Newcastle,9,17,3,3,2,1 Sunderland,6,15,2,3,0,1 "Aston Villa",9,8,1,3,2,3

#Some analysis The ‘predicted’ result is simply the result that had the best odds. An interesting observation was that bookmakers rarely (or in this case, never) gave the best odds for a draw result. There’s a fascinating science behind this, but that is outside the scope of this post.

I thought it was interesting how the bar-heights almost define a bell curve. There were fewer unexpected results for teams at the top (Arsenal, City) and the bottom of the table (Sunderland, Villa) because they either consistently won or lost their games as expected. Meanwhile, it’s been difficult predicting results for the mid-table teams.

West Ham and Stoke are like wildcard giant-killer teams this season. West Ham managed to defeat Arsenal, City, Chelsea, Liverpool and drew with United. Stoke stole points from Chelsea, City, United and Spurs. However both teams dropped points against oppositions you would’ve expected them to beat which is why they aren’t doing as well as the high-flying Leicester this season.

Also worth noting is the stark contrast in Leicester’s and Chelsea’s seasons. The Foxes had 10 unexpectedly positive results in their favor whereas Chelsea dropped points on 11 unexpected occasions.

#Work I’ve been teaching myself D3.js and thought this would be an interesting project to try out. The data is from football-data.co.uk which includes match results and betting odds. I normalized the data available to make it much easier to query as part of this project. You can download the matchdb.db database (sqlite3) and run queries of your own. The database includes match data for seasons 2003-04 to present and also the otherwise missing referee data for the 2012-13 season and some corrected referee data. Feel free to fork the project or submit pull requests if you can think of ways of improving the parsing script. Heads up, it was written over a weekend and doesn’t follow a lot of Python standards (as with all quick’n’dirty scripts) but I’ll get to that eventually.

Lastly, shameless plug for my Fantasy website, FPL Assistant, which you might find interesting if you play the Fantasy Premier League.