The EPL Plus/Minus Blog – Coming Summer 2019!

It’s almost exactly four years since I wrote the following blog looking at the Plus/Minus statistic in football, though I still remember writing it very clearly, despite the hundreds of posts I’ve written since. It can’t remember any other post taking quite as long to put together, with compiling the statistics taking the majority of my time. Yet despite the lengthy process, it felt like a worthwhile endeavour as I was intrigued as to the potential value the statistic could offer in terms of analysing individual contributions to a team beyond the more common statistics like shot accuracy and pass completion rate.

To recap the concept of the statistic, which is commonly used in a few other sports, notably Ice Hockey, it is essentially a goal difference assigned to each individual player, calculated purely by the time they spend on the pitch. So, if player A is replaced by player B after 70 minutes with his team leading 3-0, then player A will receive a Plus/Minus rating of +3. If the team then concedes one goal and the match finishes 3-1, player B will have a rating of -1, whilst all of their teammates who played the full game will have a rating of +2.

As with any statistic, taken in isolation it is of little use. However, with the right analysis and combined with other statistics, the Plus/Minus rating can be useful. It might be that player B was just unfortunate to come on at a time when his teammates were tired or lacking concentration, but if they consistently have a lower rating than their teammates, it would suggest that the team is weaker when that player is on the pitch.

Nobody is currently publishing this data, which is where I come in. This Summer, I will be launching a new website dedicated to the Plus/Minus statistic in the Premier League. The ratings for every player at every club will be listed and updated after every round of fixtures, and I’ll also be including summaries of the highest and lowest rating players at each club, as well as the top 10 and bottom 10 across the league as a whole. Not only that, I’ll also be writing a weekly blog post, looking at some of the most interesting findings from the previous round of fixtures.

Whilst I’m planning to launch the site a few weeks before the start of the 2019-20 season, work starts this weekend as I’m going to start compiling the statistic for this season. This will partly to give myself some time find the quickest ways to record and update the data, and also so that when I launch the site, I’ll have a full season’s worth of data to compare with. And don’t worry if this doesn’t sound like your thing – the Scorpo Stories blog is still going to continue the current format, albeit there might be slightly fewer posts per week.

I’m really excited to start working on this project and sharing it with you all. If you have any feedback or ideas you’d like to see me incorporate into this site, please let me know!