Alright, let’s talk about wrestling with the Premier League table for the 2001-2002 season. I remember wanting to dig into this data way back when, and finally got around to it recently. Here’s how it went down.
First off, I started by hunting around for the actual table data. Found a bunch of sites with the final standings, but I wanted something I could actually use, you know, copy and paste without a headache. Ended up finding a decent one on some old sports stats site. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good starting point.
Then came the fun part: cleaning the data. This involved a lot of manual labor. The initial data was all jumbled, with weird spacing and extra characters. I literally opened up a text editor and started chopping away at it. Removed all the crap, aligned the columns, and generally made it look presentable.
Next, I decided to put it into a spreadsheet. I fired up Google Sheets and started copying and pasting everything in. This took a while, because, you know, I had to make sure each column lined up correctly – team name, games played, wins, losses, goals for, goals against, all that jazz. Added some headers to make things easier to read.
Now that I had the data in a usable format, I could finally start playing around with it. I was mainly interested in goal differences, so I created a new column and calculated the goal difference for each team. Just goals for minus goals against, simple stuff. Then I sorted the table by goal difference to see how that compared to the actual standings.
I also wanted to see how consistent teams were at home versus away. So, back to the internet, I started searching for home and away records for that season. This was a pain! Different sites had different formats. Finally, I found one that I could kind of massage into something usable. More copying and pasting into the spreadsheet.
Then came the real struggle. I tried to merge this new home/away data with my existing table. Lots of VLOOKUPs and other spreadsheet magic that I barely understand. It took a lot of trial and error, but eventually, I got it to work. Now I had a spreadsheet with the overall standings, plus home wins, home losses, away wins, away losses – the whole shebang.
With all this data in one place, I could finally start analyzing things. I calculated the percentage of games each team won at home versus away. It was interesting to see which teams were significantly better at home and which were more consistent regardless of location. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was cool to actually see the numbers.
Finally, I created a few charts and graphs to visualize the data. A simple bar chart of goal differences, a scatter plot of home wins versus away wins. Nothing fancy, but it helped me see the patterns more clearly. I even tried to make a cool looking table with conditional formatting, but that was a bit beyond my spreadsheet skills. Maybe next time!
- Scraped data from various sources.
- Cleaned and formatted the data in a spreadsheet.
- Calculated goal differences and other stats.
- Analyzed home and away records.
- Created basic charts and graphs.
Reflections
All in all, it was a fun little project. It took way longer than I expected, mostly because data cleaning is a huge pain. But I learned a lot about spreadsheets and got to relive some football history. Maybe I’ll tackle another Premier League season next!
