The substitutions were:
53′ (Man City) – Kolarov Off, Wright-Phillips On
Aleksandar Kolarov had a largely ineffective first half, and the Serbian may have been lucky to see the second half at all. He missed 10 of his 18 passes, and lost two of the three tackles in which he was involved. He managed one shot, off target. The stats clearly showed that he was having a rough day – he was losing possession and especially ineffective whenever he left the far left flank. When Nani got the opening goal late in the first half, City needed to be both better and more attacking to get back in it. Shaun Wright-Phillips came on for him in the 53rd, and it was a night and day change. SWP completed 87% of his passes, about doubling Kolarov on that stat. He swapped onto the right side and managed to complete City’s only two successful crosses on the day.
Substitution Rating: 9 – should probably have come earlier

Guardian Chalkboards: Kolarov vs. Wright-Phillips, a clear improvement

60′ (Man City) – Milner Off, Dzeko On
Unlike Kolarov, Milner wasn’t having all that bad of a day in terms of statistics. His passing was good (80%), and was doing some decent defending. The issue was that even with Shaun Wright-Phillips raging down the right side, City was still not troubling Van der Sar’s goal. City only managed one shot on goal in the 20 minutes following Nani’s opening goal. Clearly a change to the attack was needed, and so Dzeko was brought on to cause trouble. Not long after coming on, he did just that, and even though David Silva’s back might get credit for City’s goal, it was Dzeko who made the shot. He didn’t do much else in his half-hour, but he was brought on to get a goal, and the goal was gotten.
Substitution Rating: 8 – just for the goal.

67′ (Man United) – Anderson Off, Berbatov On
Sir Alex Ferguson clearly saw this as a match to win, and when City drew even, knowing they could close up at the back, he went positive with his first change. Anderson for Berbatov was another tactical change, rather than to solve a player problem, since Anderson had a good first half. Sir Alex didn’t want rid of Anderson – he just needed someone to give way for Berby. Once on, Berbatov wasn’t particularly dangerous. He was an accurate passer, mostly feeding Ryan Giggs and Rooney, but only took one shot (though it did force a save). He was present for the goal, but didn’t really have anything to do with it.
Substitution Rating: 5 – Effective passer, but little edge

79′ (Man United) – Scholes Off, Carrick On
Sir Alex’s second sub was, like his first, a tactical reaction to a goal. Besides the fact that Paul Scholes rarely plays 90 minutes these days, Rooney had just made his wonderstrike, and United could shift from chasing a winner to defending a lead. Scholes had a characteristically positive match, completing 85% of his passes and running the center for United effectively. When Carrick came on, he did what he had to do, holding up play and never giving up the ball.
Substitution Rating: 6 – Effective, nothing flashy

In the end, the most telling substitution was the one that was never made. Fans both inside Old Trafford and watching from homes around the world were screaming for Rooney to come off, and for perennial game-saver Chicharito to come on. Rooney had been fairly quiet all match, with one blocked shot and fairly poor passing. The goal was a moment of brilliance – Sir Alex gets credit only for having faith in his striker, and who knows – if another five minutes would have gone by, he might have pulled Rooney off. We’ll never know.

Well, here it is again, April. Showers and all that. More importantly, European club football is wrapping up, with 8 total teams vying for the two continental trophies, the Champions League and the inaugural rebranded Europa League. But another race is heating up as well, to decide who will finish this season ranked as the third-best league in Europe, Serie A or the Bundesliga. There’s been a lot of talk about Germany overcoming Italy for the third spot (and its valuable fourth Champions League entry), but now that we’re almost through, we can see exactly what’s necessary to make it happen.

As of this moment, Italy is still the 3rd ranked league in Europe, with a total, including Inter’s win in Russia, of 63.624 points. Germany is incredibly close behind, with 63.207, for a razor-thin difference of 0.417.

Italy has one team left in competition, Internazionale, from their 7 original European teams. With potentially three games left (2 semi legs and a final) and one bonus point for reaching the final, Inter can gain Italy exactly 1.000 more point (2+2+2+1 points / 7 teams), for a maximum total of 64.624 points.

One of the many advantages the Germans have in all of this is that they only started the European season with 6 teams, meaning that their coefficient points are divided by 6 instead of 7. So, for them to pass Italy with Inter winning the CL, they would need a total of 64.625, which can be reached with 9 total points. Still with me? I’m not entirely sure I am, but it’s almost over.

9 points is the equivalent of four wins and bonus point. With two teams left, in two different competitions, there are technically 14 points on the table for Germany (6 per team for winning matches, and 2 bonus points for reaching the finals). So, if Inter wins the whole shebang in Madrid, Germany could still grab the spot with Hamburg and Bayern winning both legs of their semifinals and advancing. Any less than a win for Inter, and it’s going to be very hard to hold on. If Inter crash out to Barcelona without a win, Germany needs only 3 points to take it (a win, plus either team advancing to their tournament’s final).

Now, some would argue that this doesn’t matter much anyway – with a huge points advantage next season, thanks to Italy losing more points from the expiring 05/06 season, Germany will almost certainly take the spot next season. But holding onto it for one more year means that in 2011/2012, the 4th ranked Italian team will go to the Champions League instead of the Europa League, and to that team, it will matter quite a bit.

Though it is highly imperfect, the best measurement of comparative club quality across Europe is the UEFA club coefficient. It ranks every team in Europe based on performances over the past four seasons. It would be easy to say that the highest-ranked clubs in each competition will be moving on, and that will happen in a lot of cases, but chances of advancement depend on more than your own quality – they also depend on the quality of your groupmates. So I compared the coefficients of each club still alive in Europe with those of the other clubs in their group to determine the likelihood of each club surviving beyond this round. For Champions League clubs, that means finishing at least third, since third place drops into the Europa League. For the Europa teams, that means first or second place. So obviously, the CL clubs have a big advantage here, but what else is new?

So what we are measuring here is how much better (or worse) each team is compared to the team they would have to finish higher than to move on, with UEFA coefficients as the measure of quality. Here’s what we get:

Most Likely to Succeed: Any guesses? Duh. Barcelona, the #1 ranked club in Europe and defending Champions League holder, will probably not being going home after the groups.

Which Champions League fourth-ranked team is most likely to survive?: Wolfsburg, the German champions, who not surprisingly look ready to give Besiktas and the rest of the group a good run. The fact that the German champions are the fourth-ranked in a group is testament to just how imperfect these rankings are.

Which Europa League club is most likely to move on?: Werder Bremen just edges out Roma for this one, with both having relatively smooth rides into the knockouts.

Which Europa League third-ranked club is most likely to survive?: Hertha Berlin, almost dead even with group-mate Heerenveen, could upset the Dutch side and move on.

Which Europa League third-ranked club is LEAST likely to survive?: Fulham. The Craven Cottage faithful may want to be prepared for a let down, because the rankings say Roma and Basel will be too much for them.

Who is the biggest longshot of them all?: Surprisingly, not Debrecan, although they come a close second. In terms of the difference between their coefficient and that of the team they’d have to beat out, the least likely to succeed is Sheriff Tiraspol in Europa League group H. If they can get past Steaua Bucharest and Fenerbahce, that will be, by this metric, the surprise of the round.

For those of you who want to see the whole list, here it is. The number in parenthesis is each club’s ranking among competing clubs in terms of raw UEFA coefficients. As always with things like coefficients, it’s best not to take them too seriously, but it’s food for thought. We’ll see how useful this was when the group stages are over.

1 Barcelona (1)
2 Chelsea (3)
3 Liverpool (4)
4 Sevilla (6)
5 Manchester United (2)
6 Arsenal (5)
7 Lyon (11)
8 AC Milan (7)
9 Bayern Munich (8)
10 Werder Bremen (9)
11 Internazionale (12)
12 AS Roma (10)
13 FC Porto (17)
14 Shakhtar Donetsk (15)
15 Real Madrid (14)
16 Hamburger SV (13)
17 Villarreal (16)
18 Rangers (20)
19 Fiorentina (30)
20 Atletico Madrid (32)
21 Ajax (24)
22 Marseille (21)
23 PSV Eindhoven (18)
24 Benfica (19)
25 FC Basel (31)
26 Steaua Bucharest (28)
27 Juventus (25)
28 Fenerbahce (29)
29 Dinamo Kiev (36)
30 CSKA Moscow (23)
31 VfB Stuttgart (37)
32 AZ Alkmaar (33)
33 Bordeaux (34)
34 Valencia (22)
35 Olympiakos (35)
36 Panathinaikos (27)
37 Sporting CP (26)
38 Anderlecht (42)
39 Celtic (40)
40 Club Brugge (45)
41 Everton (38)
42 Galatasaray (39)
43 Lille (41)
44 Besiktas (43)
45 Levski Sofia (50)
46 Copenhagen (44)
47 Austria Wien (60)
48 Heerenveen (47)
49 Hertha Berlin (48)
50 Athletic Bilbao (64)
51 Sparta Prague (51)
52 Lazio (55)
53 VfL Wolfsburg (53)
54 Slavia Prague (46)
55 Nacional Funchal (75)
56 Dinamo Bucharest (49)
57 AEK Athens (52)
58 Toulouse (65)
59 Partizan Belgrade (66)
60 CFR Cluj (63)
61 Hapoel Tel-Aviv (54)
62 FC Salzburg (76)
63 Dinamo Zagreb (68)
64 FC Timisoara (72)
65 Genoa (67)
66 Standard Liege (57)
67 Maccabi Haifa (56)
68 FK Ventspils (79)
69 Unirea Urziceni (69)
70 BATE Borisov (71)
71 Rapid Wien (73)
72 Rubin Kazan (70)
73 FC Twente (59)
74 Fulham (61)
75 CSKA Sofia (62)
76 Sturm Graz (78)
77 FC Zurich (58)
78 APOEL Nicosia (74)
79 DVSC Debrecen (77)
80 Sherif Tiraspol (80)

All-time Series (before today’s match)
190 matches played
92 Arsenal wins, 40 draws, 58 Everton wins (+73 goal differential for Arsenal)

Streaks
Last time Everton lost by 5 or more goals : May 11, 2005 (7-0 away to Arsenal)
Last time Arsenal won by 5 or more goals : September 23, 2008 (6-0 at home to Sheffield United, FA Cup)
Last time Everton lost by 5 or more at home : November 6, 1982 (0-5 to Liverpool, old Division 1)
Last time Arsenal won by 5 on the road : January 27, 2001 (0-6 over QPR, FA Cup)

Shooting and Scoring Stats
Total Shots: 15 for Arsenal, 8 for Everton
Shots on Target: 9 for Arsenal, 5 for Everton
Shooting Accuracy (% on target): 60% for Arsenal, 62.5% for Everton
Shooting Efficiency (goals/total shots): 40% for Arsenal, 12.5% for Everton

Passing Stats
Time of Possession: 54% Arsenal, 46% Everton
Passes attempted: 419 for Arsenal, 319 for Everton
Pass Completion: 82.3% for Arsenal, 77.4% for Everton
Everton’s best passer: Jack Rodwell (off the bench) – 10/11 – 91% completion
Arsenal best passer: Denilson – 44/45 – 98% completion

The Story
There are two kinds of blowouts, and they have very different profiles statistically. First is the kind where one side completely dominates, holding all of the ball and barraging their opponent with shots at a fairly average level of accuracy and efficiency. Then there are the kind where both take a roughly equal number of shots on goal, but one side is far more efficient in taking high-quality shots. It’s basically a question of quantity vs. quality, and today, Arsenal’s win was based on the latter – quality. Chelsea took 11 more shots than Arsenal today in their skin-of-the-teeth win over Hull, but most were not particularly dangerous. High shooting efficiency means that when Arsenal took shots, they were often in a position to beat the keeper, rather than having to gun from awkward angles and distances. Basically, they could pick their chances, and did. And of course, Denilson completing 44 passes and scoring a goal didn’t hurt their cause.

As for the historical aspect of the match, it’s a major one in the annals of Everton, the worst home loss for them in the Premier League era. Although Arsenal beat Everton 7-0 in London in 2005, you have to go back to September 6, 1958 to find a similar result in Merseyside, another 6-1 for the Gunners. Overall, it’s only the 4th 6-goal scoring day Arsenal have ever had against Everton in 191 total meetings.

Rough day to be wearing blue in Merseyside. Only time will tell whether the scoring display we saw from Arsenal today was a flash in the pan or the beginning of a real title push.

To define a club as “big” or “small” is always controversial. For the purposes of this table, we are talking historically big clubs. I am ranking the size of relegated clubs by the contents of their trophy cases, with one point for each domestic cup, three for each league, five for a UEFA Cup and ten for a European Cup. Here are the 15 highest-scoring clubs by this metric to have been relegated in the past decade from England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France.

So, all you depressed Geordies out there, take some solace in the fact that you’re not alone. Bad management has sunk Atletico Madrid and their 9 La Liga trophies, and Nuremberg, Koln and Monchengladbach (who have a combined 17 German titles between them) have gone down a total of nine times in the last decade. And for those of you resting on the laurels of the massive club you support, remember that it can also happen to you.

The question is, what can the two most expensive transfers in history, along with likely the two biggest wage bills, do for Real Madrid? I won’t belabor the point everyone else has already made about building a team exclusively out of attacking midfielders and then being shocked when you concede in the fifth minute of matchday one. We can’t see the future, but we can look at the past for some ideas, and so I took a look at the fourteen biggest transfers in European history to see how both teams did before and after the deal. Is it better to sell or to buy, in terms of league standings?

The 14 biggest transfers of the pre-K-Ron era have, of course, been a mixed bag. Some have ended well for the buyer or seller, and a few even for both, and of course some have been disasters. Yes, Sheva, we are looking at you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But when we look at the data set as a whole, a few trends do emerge. Just looking at the raw averages, sellers of big players tended to slightly slide in the rankings (2 places total in 14 cases, so barely noticeably), and buyers rose, but only just as slightly. But if you take away one outlier from each, and look at them without this one most extreme case, things are a bit different. In 13 such transfers, sellers lost a total of 15 places, more than an average of a position per sale, while buyers get even more neutral, actually losing a ridiculously insignificant 0.07 average places. So it’s fair to say that while selling and buying big both average out to a wash, selling has a tendency to be a lot more negative than buying does to help.

But of course those numbers don’t mean much on their own, so let’s look a little deeper for some situations that are similar to the K-Ron insanity. Real fans can take some cautious optimism from the case of Juventus in 2001, who bought two big names after finishing second, and rode them to the league title the next year. Now, the reality check. One of those two players was arguably the best goalkeeper alive, Gigi Buffon, the ultimate build at the back. In fact, 2 of the 3 buyers that were able to spend their way to a league title the season after the purchase paid the big bucks on defense – Juventus for Buffon and Manchester United for Rio Ferdinand. To be fair, positional comparisons are a bit difficult with such a top-heavy set of data … 10 of the 14 on the top money list are primarily or exclusively attacking players. Factor in Ricky and Cristie and that’s 12 of 16.

The scatterplot below shows the effects on buyers and sellers the season after the sale. Higher means league improvement, and farther right means a higher transfer fee. Like so many datasets, the most important thing to look at here isn’t the trend, it’s the distribution. Buyers (red) didn’t see any extreme effects, mostly because they started in very high positions. The average buyer had just finished a 3rd place season, while the average seller had just finished in 5th. The effects of sales on the seller (blue) were extremely mixed and much more volatile, ranging from an improvement of 13 places to a loss of 10.

Of course, this is a small set of data. In the future, I’ll take a look at all the smaller transfers that, in the end, mean more to the fate of teams. But if you’re Manchester United, AC Milan, or Real Madrid now, you’re not thinking small. You’re about 2 months from starting what will be the ultimate experiment in whether the financial insanity of 100 million pounds changing hands on two players has a footballing reward for anyone involved.

Data Sources: Wikipedia (Checked all primary sources, so stop your whining)

As you can plainly see, a Manchester defender is a happy defender, with City going perfect in their nine shutouts, and United astoundingly dropping only six points in their 24 clean sheets. Newcastle, surprisingly to no one, tops the frustration table. More surprising is Hull, who only dropped four points in shutouts, though admittedly they only had six of them overall. Friendly advice to the Tigers : buy at the back.

Data source: Soccerbase

So why not call it the Statistics Offside? The answer is that I didn’t want to limit the scope of the blog to just traditional stats. This blog is about the numerical aspect of the game, and any football-related data is fair game.

Now, as some of you might know, I’ve been around the Offside for quite a while now. I started, and still maintain, the Caley Thistle Offside, and write for the Scotland Offside as well, and helped out writing on the main blog during Euro 2008. But my original background is in science, particularly in marine biology. Hopefully, the combination of an obsessive love of the sport and an almost equally unhealthy love of data and numbers will allow me to produce something on this blog that is at least a little bit different and interesting.

So, here’s what this blog will look like: Each week, I’ll be presenting two posts. On the weekend will be the main post for the week, and on Tuesday or Wednesday, there will be a shorter post in a couple of columns I’ve chosen to call “Table Tuesday” and “What If Wednesday”. Table Tuesday is going to be just that, a league table type graphic, with a short explanation, showing standings in some (probably obscure) statistic. What If Wednesday is a series of posts using real numbers to talk a little about hypothetical situations, like proposed rule changes or made-up tournament formats.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the blog. For those against the quantification of football, keep in mind that I at least partially agree with you – I love to just sit back and watch the game flow. This is just my way, and I think a lot of people’s ways, of understanding and appreciating the game on another level too. Cheers.