An Interesting Debate: Head-to-head vs Goal differential

By: Isaiah | June 4th, 2007

This topic has already been covered somewhat by my colleague and now fierce rival, Mauricio. Eloquent though he may be in describing why Madrid deserve to be top of the league, I believe he is incorrect in his final conclusion. The question at hand is how to decide who leads the league. When two teams are tied on points, the tie-breaker is either their head-to-head record (as it currently is in La Liga) or goal differential (as it is in every other league I know about).

To start, the Madrista point-of-view: Real Madrid deserve to be in front because they have performed better against the top clubs in Spain than has Barcelona. They have also beaten Barcelona 2-0 at home in the Bernabeu and tied them 3-3 at the Camp Nou. There is some rationale there, certainly. It suggests that Madrid show up for “big” games when Barcelona do not, that Madrid have the guts and the know-how to rise to the occassion. Forgetting about the Champions League, where neither team had any sort of a strong showing (and certainly Madrid forgot about the first 22 seconds of their second-leg match against Bayern Munich — and Barcelona all of their first-leg against Liverpool), this seems to hold true when you look at the top third of the league.

Madrid never lost to anyone in the UEFA Cup spots and only Getafe is threatening to get there before the season is out, but probably won’t. Here is what Mauricio posted as the tell-tale signs of Madrid being better than Barcelona:

Barcelona 3 – 0 Recreativo (Oct. 28)
Barcelona 3 – 0 Nastic (Jan. 21)
Barcelona 3 – 0 Bilbao (Feb. 25)
Barcelona 4 – 0 Recreativo (Mar. 17)

It is quite easy to put multiple goals on teams like Nastic and Bilbao who are battling relegation. Winning 3-0 against one of those teams is not a measure of strength. Now, look at some of Barcelona’s results against the top teams in the league:

Barcelona 1 – 1 Valencia (Sep. 24)
Barcelona 1 – 3 Espanyol (Jan. 13)
Barcelona 1 – 2 Sevilla (Mar. 03)
Barcelona 1 – 2 Valencia (Feb. 18)

Similarly, look at Madrid’s results against the same opponents:

Madrid 1 – 0 Valencia (Nov. 26)
Madrid 1 – 0 Espanyol (Dec. 17)
Madrid 2 – 1 Valencia (Apr. 21)
Madrid 3 – 2 Sevilla (May 6)
Madrid 4 – 3 Espanyol (May 12)

In the sense that Madrid got the best of Valencia and Espanyol this year, it is true that Madrid were better than Barcelona, but when you look at who Madrid *didn’t* beat, you find a serious discrepancy.

“If both teams win their remaining games, Madrid deserves to be champions: They defeated the top teams that Barcelona could not defeat and had better results when the two teams faced each other.” Yes, but Barcelona defeated the minnows that Madrid was unable to beat. Wouldn’t that suggest Madrid were merely fortunate to have defeated Valencia, Sevilla, Espanyol, even Barca? Yes, it would. Because whereas Recreativo Huelva defeated Madrid 0-3 at the Bernabeu, they lost 3-0 at the Camp Nou. And whereas Madrid defeated them 2-3 away, Barcelona crushed them 0-4. Hmm. So much for showing up.

Here is who Madrid lost to at home:
Real Madrid 1 – 2 Celta Vigo (relegation zone)
Real Madrid 0 – 1 Levante (4 points from relegation)
Real Madrid 0 – 3 Recreativo Huelva (9th)

Here is who Madrid lost to away:
Deportivo La Coruna 2 – 0 Madrid (13th, fewest goals scored in the league)
Getafe 1 – 0 Real Madrid (8th, slim chance of UEFA Cup spot)
Villareal 1 – 0 (7th, large chance of UEFA Cup spot)

Here is a quick list of who Barcelona have lost to at home:

Oh. Right. It’s empty. They haven’t lost at home, to anyone, much less crap teams like Levante and certainly haven’t been mauled by Recreativo.

Sure, they’ve lost 6 times away, but the worst team they lost to was Espanyol (11th, UEFA Cup finalists), who happen to be their crosstown rivals. A derby loss is a little different than any other loss, really, because there is a special something in the air on those days.

Here is who Barcelona have lost to away:
Espanyol, Sevilla, Real Madrid, Real Zaragoza, Valencia, and Villareal. The combined deficit of these 6 losses is 9 goals (12-3) while the combined score for Madrid’s 6 losses is 10-1, or -9. Just like Barca. Only Barca lost to good teams and not crap teams. And one of those teams happens to be Madrid, yes, but Madrid couldn’t defeat Barcelona even when they had 10 men for half the game.

If it comes down to head-to-head and Barcelona lose the league, there are two key moments that are very important: Oleguer’s red card against Madrid and Sobis’ goal for Betis. You could probably go ahead and throw Giuly’s phantom red card into the mix there too, but that was after Sevilla went 2 goals to the good so it’s not quite the same. So if Madrid’s season hinges on whether or not Oleguer is given a bad first yellow and then makes a mental mistake to pick up the second, how can that and that alone determine the difference between two clubs? Sobis’ goal was another mental error and one that’s pretty inexcusable from Barca’s point-of-view, but it is indicative of what Madrid suggests be the deciding factors of an entire season.

As Frank so aptly put it in the comments of Mauricio’s post, “The point of the season is that you have to play against every team” and the best way to determine who well you played against every team is points as determined by wins, draws, and losses and if there’s a tie there, goal differential. 2 games hardly constitutes a season’s worth of work, but goal differential certainly does. And in this case we’re not talking a goal or two or even 5. It’s a 12 goal differential and that, ladies and gents, is a quite a few goals.

But let’s break down where those goals came from:

Barcelona and Madrid have both scored 32 goals and allowed 20 goals in their 18 away games to date. So, overall, Madrid merely scored at slightly more opportune times, but didn’t have the killer instinct against lesser opponents. In home games, however, Barcelona have scored 10 more goals and allowed 7 fewer than Madrid. They have drawn 4 times while Madrid have also drawn 4 times. But again, Madrid has lost 3 times in the Bernabeu this year. Both Barcelona AND Madrid drew with Real Betis and Atletico Madrid in respective home stadiums, while Barcelona drew with Valencia and Real Madrid, while Madrid drew with Getafe and Villareal. Barca have yet to play Espanyol while Real Madrid have yet to play Mallorca.

Interestingly, Madrid have only drawn twice away (Atletico and Barcelona), while Barcelona have drawn 5 times (Deportivo, Getafe, Levante, Osasuna, Betis). Real Madrid happened to lost to two of those (Depor and Getafe) while Barcelona clobbered the absolute bejesus out of Atletico in a 0-6 rompfest reminiscent of how the British fell apart in the war of 1812.* In terms of total points, they’re obviously even, but in away points Real Madrid has a pretty fantastic 35 while Barcelona has 26 (1st and 3rd overall, respectively). But at home Barcelona is baller. They have 46 points from 17 games while Real Madrid have 37 from the same number (2nd and 5th overall, respectively).

All-in-all, Barcelona have proved to be the better of two evenly matched teams, if you look at the season as a whole. If you look at 2 of the 36 games that have been played, Real Madrid is, indeed, the better of the two teams. But it is ridiculous to allow 2 goals to decide a championship when 12 would more aptly do the season justice.

Of course, hopefully Zaragoza will just beat the pants off of Madrid and we can all lay this thing to rest until next year when Mauricio and I switch positions or something.

*They never burned our capital during that war. It’s all a bunch of limey propaganda, I tell you! Andrew Jackson rules! Viva New Orleans!

Some Related Barcelona Posts:

Category: Barcelona, La Liga

« This is what Capello thinks of you | Home | TROPHIES GALORE!!!!! »

Jan

Wow, this debate is still going on. I just have another example, although it's hypothetical to some extend. The first half of this years Bundesliga season saw Werder Bremen and Schalke tied on points at the top of the table. Bremen took the top spot because they had by far the better goal difference stat on their side. And no one would have argued that Bremen did not deserve to be on top because the simply played the best football of any Bundesliga club at that point. But they had a rocky start into the season and were also missing a key defender (Per Mertesacker). At that time they played against Schalke and lost (around matchday 3 or so). So by La Liga rules Schalke would have been on top. The scenario almost repeated itself in the second half of the season. Bremen again had a slow start, lost against Schalke again, but at that point things changed and in the end Stuttgart won the title fair and square as they had the most points. But assuming the second half would have played out like the first one, then we would have ended up with Schalke winning the title while Bremen was clearly considered to be the best team.

Two matches are simply too few and too vulnerable to factors like temporary form, players missing, unjustified red cards, offside goals whatever can go wrong in a match. Those type of things tend to get evened out over the course of a season. Sometimes those decisions can be in your favor, sometimes they go against you.
Jay

Comparitively head-to-head is better, cuz you may not score many goals against some weak teams, reasons may be quite a few viz. not playing the starting eleven, resting the better players, missed goals etc., (luck do play a part in scoring and missing goals. Head-to-head shows who is better of the two when pitched against each other.
Wes

I just think head to head makes sense in a four team group in a tournament but not for a league format with 38 matches played.
pelethegreat07

What's these head to head, goal-differential crap on deciding which is the best football team in La liga?
- Just K.I.S.S ( Keep It Simple Stupid)

To determine who is better between Barcelona and Real Madrid, play the Best of Three Games between these 2 clowns, I mean clubs. The Team who wins Two out of the
three Final games deserve the Title.
Jim

Stop heating up the planet with all this talk and just follow THE PREMIERSHIP.
Isaiah

The difference between the way the soccer/football typically judges superiority and the way in which the NBA and NFL do it is that there is much more scoring in basketball and American football.

NBA scores are often 90+ points while the NFL has widely different valued scores (touchdown is 6, field goal is 3, safety is 2, extra point is 1). This drastically changes the equation in terms of overall point differential. In the NBA, a team can win by as many as 30 points one night while in the NFL, a single mistake on offense or defense can cause a 7 point swing in a scoreline. A 14-6 scoreline in the NFL can be any number of actual scores while 2-1 in soccer is always a total of 3 scores.

That the NFL is 16 games long and that not every team plays every team in the league is also important. I believe NBA teams play all other teams at least once so there is more of an argument for point-differential being a deciding factor, but the scoring system (which has 3 different scoring values: three pointer, field goal, and free throw) again causes issues.

In baseball, where every run counts for 1, head-to-head is not determined by 2 games. In fact, it's determined over the course of the season series. The Yankees and Red Sox play each other something like 12 times throughout the season so the head-to-head is much more likely to be indicative of the teams' respective abilities. And as they can't ever draw, they play extra innings to determine who wins. If they did that in soccer, it would be a completely different question.

All of that said, the NBA, the MLB, and the NFL all use head-to-head to determine a seeding in a post-season playoff. The Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the World Series, and the Stanley Cup are the final games of tournaments, not regular season championship titles. And even so, some teams are snubbed via their division (the Cleveland Indians could potentially be 3rd place in their division and have a better record than the Yankees in second place in their division and yet not make the playoffs) whereas in European competition, there is no post-season, merely the results available from the prior 38 or so games.

All of that said, total wins is a better indicator, in my mind, than head-to-head. (and again, American sports don't have draws, and win-loss only goes so far) In this case that would mean Barcelona would be second in the league as they have 1 less win than Real Madrid (20-21, respectively).

I don't agree with Ganesh that goal-difference is "too trivial" because it is indicative of a season-long ability to dominate the game according to whatever kind of system you use. If you are a freely attacking squad, you should score a lot of goals, but you are open to the counter attack and will probably concede goals too. If you're a defensive team, you will probably not score many goals, but you also won't allow many.

As the point of the game is to score more goals than your opponents, shouldn't that be a determining factor in who wins championships? I mean, really. And since the season is supposed to be indicative of your overall abilities, shouldn't the number of goals you scored throughout the year be more of a factor than how you performed in 2 isolated games during which basically anything could happen?

Still, yeah, the rules are the rules and they must be respected, yet also challenged to make them better.
Ganesh

Sorry Jan, I beg to differ with you. I certainly dont think tie-breaker rules should vary according to the number of games played. We see a lot of games played during a given season in certain American sports and not so many in certain others and still either of them use the same tie-breaking rules. For instance, both in the MLB/NBA, where # of games played is very high compared to what we see in european domestic football leagues, and in the NFL where it is only 16 games per season, the first tie-breaker is always head-to head, regardless of whether it is to determine the division winner or the wild card team. It hardly matters whether Red Sox scored more runs against their opponents or threw less pitches at them than Yankees. If its a tie, how many did they win against Yankees, period.

After giving each team 38 games to outsmart others, if they still end up tied with another team, going back to how many goals each one scored or how many goals each conceeded is a little too trivial.

If anyone is still wondering should the winner be decided on the back of just two performances? yes, because thats the sanest thing to do, when 38 games hasn't yielded a winner. If they are still tied, then move on to other tie-breakers.

Otherwise, lets use the European competition "away goals" rule. Instead of goals here, lets look at each team's away record to decide the winner. Just like away goal being more precious than the home goal, away record should be more valuable than the home record.

Simply because La liga is the only proponent of this rule doesn't make La Liga's rules inferior or other leagues' rules superior and just. Just to give an example of how misleading goal difference could be, in the 1992-93 premiership season Norwich City scored 72 points, finishing third, ahead of Blackburn with 71 points, though its goal difference of minus 4 compared poorly with the latter's +22. Leaving out the Spurs at 8th, who've always suffered this ignominy, the next worst record of minus 5 was that of 15th, 16th and 17th placed teams in the league.
Rupert

I agree that head-to-heads are a silly way of deciding the champion, but as Jan points out -- thems the rules. We all knew the rules at the start of the Liga, and we didn't complain then.

Beyond that, I think both teams have been underwhelming this season. And if it were not for Sevilla and Espanyol making the final of the UEFA Cup, it would have been a pretty poor year overall for Spanish clubs.

The less said of the national team, the better.

Let's hope Barca and Madrid (and Valencia and others) can shake off whatever ailed them this year and get back to cracking form in 07-08. Ohala, as they used to say in Andalucia.
Mauricio

"Should Barcelona-Madrid be worth more points than other games? If not, then why should it be worth more, in the end, than Madrid-Huelva? That, to me, is more than arrogance, it’s disdain for the entire league."

If teams like Huelva and Nastic were competing for the championship, than those games would rightfully become more important. I'm not saying that Madrid's games automatically become more important simply because its Madrid, but rather, because Madrid is competing for the title against Barcelona, it is only right for the two Madrid-Barca games to be the most important games of the season. I think any Liga fan would agree on this point.

Goal differential is a fair measure of determining quality, but ultimately there are too many factors to make GD the best measure to determine a championship. Injuries cause players to miss certain games, suspensions, and other externalities may affect GD. However, in head-to-head match-ups, Madrid stepped up and took 4 points. Barcelona took one.

It's a tough consolation, but both teams had pretty even seasons. The only difference is that Madrid won and Barcelona did not.
Alvaro

Head to head it doesn't reflect an entire season. Barcelona is better offensively as the number of goal demonstrate. Barcelona deserve to follow the rules of the rest of the European leagues.
Juanos

For me, head-to-head as a tiebreaker makes the most sense. If after 38 matches you have the same amount of points, then I see no reason to use another season-long factor like goal difference to determine a champion, when the teams have played each other twice. Against the league they were equal, period. So if a champion must be declared between the two, when the difference between the squads is marginal at best, it should be the one who comes off better in the head-to-head.

If we must use a season long stat, why aren't total wins the tiebreaker? Or total losses (who has the least)? Or even goals conceded? Why not reward the better defensive team. If you can't be scored upon, you can't lose.
Jan

I think that the more matches you play the fairer it is to decide a tie via goal-differential. Fewer matches and a head-to-head is better. E.g. the Euro 2008 qualifiers are decided by head-to-head.

But in the end: both clubs knew the rule before they started into the season and now have to accept the outcome.
Isaiah

Well, I suppose we will, at some point, have to agree to disagree because we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this. And to anyone on the outside looking it, I don't think it's a question of me supporting Barcelona or not, it's a question of what's the point of the whole damned season?

"By awarding the champion on goal differential alone, you’re diminishing the value of the Barcelona-Madrid derby. There’s a reason why those games are of the highest significance. Supporters of other Spanish clubs may indeed call me arrogant but I think (and I’m sure you agree) that a Barcelona vs. Madrid game is significantly more important than Nastic-Celta or any other mid-table matchup."

I agree on a personal level that Barca-Madrid is more important than any other game throughout that half of the season. But I disagree wholeheartedly that on a wider level that it is more important than Nastic-Celta. I would not personally watch 'Nastic-Celta over Barca-Madrid, but that is a personal thing. And most neutrals would agree with me because obviously Barca-Madrid is going to be a more exciting game. But Sevilla-Betis is not unimportant simply because it is not El Clasico Español -- after all it's the Sevilla Derby! 'Nastic-Celta is worth 3 points. Period. And that's the way it should be because all the games are worth 3 points, so that you have to play all of them.

You are correct that this season has been an even match, but your argument that Madrid has an extra win compared to Barca forgets that Madrid have two extra losses. Pick your poison, I suppose.

Should Barcelona-Madrid be worth more points than other games? If not, then why should it be worth more, in the end, than Madrid-Huelva? That, to me, is more than arrogance, it's disdain for the entire league. If a team like Betis or Getafe can change the course of the season by scoring or not, why shouldn't their accomplishments be factored into the final outcome?

Perhaps we should agree to disagree...until next May when the teams have reversed positions...
Mauricio

Andrew Jackson anecdotes aside, this is a well-researched and strongly supported argument. Now naturally, I am inclined to disagree with you but of course we can simply agree to disagree.

It's difficult to determine exactly which measure is the best at capturing who the true league champion should be. I think goal differential is a valid form of measurement but overall I feel it is too arbitrary of a process to accurately determine merit.

If all things are held equal between two clubs, should the champion not be determined by head-to-head performance? The main reason why I'm opposed to goal differential is because it unfairly punishes teams for not completely dismantling opponents. Sure Madrid doesn't have sterling 6-0 performances against the likes of Pathetico Madrid, but it's not like they haven't won games or done anything of significance. They still managed to win 22 games this year, and regardless of what the final score may have been, that number is still one more than Barcelona. Had Barcelona been able to defeat Madrid at Camp Nou, we wouldn't be engaged in this discussion.

And believe me, I know I'm in a very precarious position when the basis of my argument rests on one game between Barcelona and Madrid. But then again, it should rest on one game since it reflects just how even and competitive this season has been for both teams. Each squad has had streaks of brilliance and ineptitude. I think it would be fair to say that both clubs have experienced turbulent seasons. And when faced with the decision of choosing amongst two seemingly equal teams, it should come down to how those teams played against each other.

By awarding the champion on goal differential alone, you're diminishing the value of the Barcelona-Madrid derby. There's a reason why those games are of the highest significance. Supporters of other Spanish clubs may indeed call me arrogant but I think (and I'm sure you agree) that a Barcelona vs. Madrid game is significantly more important than Nastic-Celta or any other mid-table matchup. However, if you go by goal differential alone, a Madrid-Mallorca game is valued the same as a Madrid-Barcelona game. There's just something inherently wrong about that.

Certain games NEED to carry a higher weight of performance. Ideally, I would love to place games like Madrid-Barcelona in the last week of the season. Especially in leagues like the Spanish Primera where you generally know who will be competing for the championship, you should have the marquee match-ups as the final games of the season. Instead of Barcelona-Nastic and Madrid-Mallorca games in the last week, how exciting would it be to have Madrid-Barcelona and Sevilla-Valencia instead?

Unfortunately, because that is not the case, there needs to be a measure set in place to ensure that such games are indeed properly valued in the grand scheme of the league standings. Head-to-head over goal differential ensures that these games indeed are given the highest levels of importance.