Where We Stand: 100 Games Down

By: Isaiah | November 10th, 2008

Before we get started, here’s a little bit of site news: the Barça Offside page improved its record number of visits in a single month during October to 16,866, up approximately 1,000 visits. Kevin and I would like to thank you, our readers, for making this site both possible and a friendly place. Without you and your kind words and passion for the game and FC Barcelona, this site would not exist. So thank you.*

Onwards and ever upwards:

The 100th league game was played this weekend (Getafe – Valencia), so I thought it would be appropriate to give a brief rundown of where Barcelona stands in the league. Most of us already know that Barcelona is 1st in the table with 25 points, but there are other things to consider. I’ll be discussing not only the league, but also the other competitions we’re involved in. I will not be comparing this year with last year, by the way.

We’ll start, though, with La Liga. So yes, we’re 1 point up on second placed Valencia (25pts to 24pts), but we’re also the holders of the best offensive and defensive records. With 34 goals scored, we’re 6 better than the second-most prolific offense: Real Madrid (28). The least-scoring team in the league is Osasuna, with a blink-inducing 3 goals in 10 games. You read that right, folks: 3 goals scored in 10 games. Blink. By the way, 34 goals is the most goals scored through 10 goals in La Liga since the 1959/60 year. We’re on pace to score a whopping 129.2 goals (so, I guess, 130 goals), which would be the most goals scored by 22/23 (the record is 107). Yowza, as they say.

Our attack has been bolstered by 13 goals from (current Pichichi) Samuel Eto’o; he accounts for just over 1/3 of all our goals (but let’s be more precise: 38.2352941176% — 10 decimal places!). Lionel Messi, with 6, accounts for just under 18% of the goals, Henry with 4 accounts for just under 12%, and Gudjohnsen and Xavi with 3 each account for just under 9%. All told, these 5 players account for 29 of the 34 goals (just over 85%). The other 5 goals are spread across 5 other players.

Defensively, Barcelona has allowed 8 goals, tying us with Sevilla and putting us 1 better than Villarreal, Valencia, Deportivo La Coruña, and, um, Osasuna. There’s another blinker. What is wrong with Osasuna? Do they play 12 men behind the ball or something? Do they have Atom in goal?** A goals-allowed rate of 0.80 has earned Victor Valdés a share of the Zamora trophy with Sevilla’s Andrés Palop. Neither compares to Segunda division keeper Juan Calatayud from Hercules, though, who has allowed just 5 goals in 11 games. I’d like to note here that Soccernet credits Valdés with 14 saves (FCB’s official stats page claims 18) while Soccernet also credits Palop with 29 saves. That’s quite a difference in terms of shot-blocking and is suggestive of Barcelona’s defensive superiority as a team, but also of Palop’s current run of form between the sticks. Valdés has had 3 clean sheets while Palop has had 6.

Barcelona hasn’t achieved their success by being dirty defenders, though, having received the fewest number of yellow cards (15) and the fewest number of red cards (0). Only Valencia also has no red cards, but they have 25 yellows. Osasuna, of all teams, has just 16 yellows, but they have 4 reds to go along with them. The team with the most yellow cards is Racing Santander (34) and the teams with the most red cards are the aforementioned weirdo team Osasuna and Recreativo Huelva.

Just for the records, I’d like to make a few statistical notes. You’ll read a lot of places about Barcelona’s goal average (3.4 through 10 games) and that’s well and good, but it doesn’t necessarily suggest how good Barcelona is right now. The first game of the season was a 0-1 loss at Numancia. The second game was a 1-1 draw with Racing Santander. If you take out those two games from the stats, you end up with a streak of 8 wins, during with the team has scored 33 goals and allowed 6. During that time, Barcelona has scored over 4 goals per match on average (4.125 to be exact).

Still, we should look at median scores to remove the outliers, if possible. We’ve had games where Barcelona has scored 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6. That puts the median at 3.5 goals per game, which is extraordinarily close to the average, but is slightly higher. If you remove the first two games, the median for the 8-game winning streak is 4.5 (as opposed to the 4.125 average). Keeping in mind that our goals against average is 0.80, let’s find the median: 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 gets us a median of 1 goal per game. The outlier appears to be the 2 goals allowed during the Betis game, but it’s hard to say we won’t have more of those coming our way over the next 28 league games.

Here’s another piece of stats info to keep in mind going forward: the team’s official stats page lists the team as having played 942 minutes over its first 10 games (if you’re going “huh? But games only have 90 minutes” it’s because you’re forgetting stoppage time). The way you tell how many minutes have been played by the team is by going to Valdés’ stats page and checking out how many minutes he’s played since he’s played every minute of the La Liga season so far. Whether this includes the time spent not on the field during the Espanyol game or not, I’m not sure. If it does, it’s a bogus stat, really. Still, it’s nice to note that we as a team score a goal once every 27.7 minutes. That’s once every 27 minutes and 42 seconds for you nerds out there. Okay, yeah, that one was for me.

Now to the Champions League†. With 2 games left in the group stage, Barcelona has made mince-meat of Kevin’s plans to watch a meaningful game by simply qualifying early, though the draw with Basel puts them only 1 point ahead of Sporting. Despite having guaranteed themselves a place in the knockout stages, the potential for ending up 2nd means that Pep will want to get maximum points from visiting Portugal before hosting Shakhtar (and Kevin!) in the last group stage match on December 9. This is especially important because the Shakhtar match is sandwiched between league games against Valencia and Real Madrid.

The team sits in first in Group C by just 1 point, after putting together a 3W-1D-0L record. That 1 draw, a 1-1 home draw against Basel, is what keeps them within touching distance of second-place Sporting. With a Goal Differential of +8 (11GF 3GA), the team is basically where they are in the league (2.75 goals per game average; 2.5 median), though with different statistical leaders. It’s Messi who is the leading scorer with 4; Bojan and Xavi each have 2; and Eto’o, Márquez and Busquest each have 1.

Comparing Barcelona to all the other teams comes up with a rather favorable impression for us, I think. FCB has more goals scored than any other team (Arsenal and Lyon have scored 10) and only ManU has allowed fewer (1), though Sporting CP, Chelsea, Atletico, Arsenal, Juventus, and Dynamo Kiev have also only conceded 3. [Note that Sporting CP is in 2nd behind Barcelona and all of their conceded goals were in their game against Barcelona; also note that Dynamo Kiev is in 3rd place in their group because they only have 3 goals for]

With such a small sample of games, it’s hard to say what will happen or who is really all that good or bad — a more complete breakdown will happen before the first knockout match, of course, so I’ll end my CL report with this: it only gets tougher from here, but go Zenit.

As for the Copa del Rey, it’s a little early to truly assess what’s gone on, but I’ll give it my best shot in tomorrow’s preview of the second leg of the Benidorm tie. Suffice to say that we’re averaging 1 goal per match (the median is 1), our leading scorer is Bojan, we’re 100% in clean sheets…all right, I’ll stop.

For those of you keeping tabs on my statistical analysis progress, I’m currently attempting to figure out how to use the NBA’s efficiency ratings effectively. Off the top of my head, this is the best stat I’ve seen so far, but is it basically what ACTIM does? Without a real explanation of what ACTIM does (their FAQ is intentionally vague the site itself is littered with statements like “[ACTIM stats] have been statistically proven to measure a player’s effectiveness in winning matches”…you can check out their best FAQ here)

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*If you’d like to know, this stat puts us 3rd in terms of Offside subsidiary blogs, behind only Roma and Italy. Yippee for bronze medals! And if you’d like to bump our fellow (and excellent) La Liga bloggers up the list, just click their links above. If you’re interested in starting a team page for one of the teams not currently being covered, please let the main page contributors know.

**That’s the only video I could find; I know it sucks. Here are the lyrics.

†Please note here that I am not including the 2 games against Wisła Kraków in this discussion of the Champions League. The main reason is because it skews the number of games played and the scoring stats when comparing FCB to the other teams.