How strength of schedule has impacted the Premier League so far

The teams that a club has played pretty obviously make an impact on how you expect them to perform. A match away against Liverpool is much harder than a match at home against Leicester. Even a match away at Liverpool is harder than playing that same Liverpool team at your own clubs home stadium.

This is something that we intuitively know and I don’t think is particularly controversial to say.

Where this can stir up a hornet’s nest is where you use the schedule to talk about why a team might not be quite as good as the numbers suggest or that the schedule is hiding that a team is better than they might look.

Let’s wade into those dangerous waters.

There are several different measures out there for rating teams, there are the Opta Rankings, the Club Elo rankings, and many more. For this exercise I am going to use my team ratings because I like them, I know how they work, and in my opinion are a good reflection of overall team strength.

Data through November 25th

For the ratings, I like to use an old baseball standby and set League Average to 100 and then have each point above or below represent a percentage better or worse than that baseline.

This usage of 100 as League average will carry over to looking at how easy or hard a schedule is for a team. At the end of the year most teams will all be bunched very close but not perfectly even and that is down to a team not being able to play themselves.

This is what the Premier League Strength of Schedule looks like right now:

The easy schedules

The bottom five in schedule difficulty have been Everton, Fulham, Tottenham, Liverpool, and Brentford.