In the column on the 19th January 2022, the following question came up…“With Boston United currently (Jan 17th, 2022) occupying a play-off spot despite having lost as email list providers in germany many games as they’ve won, has a side ever finished a season in the play offs (or better, been promoted) with more defeats than wins on their record?”
To answer this question, for league matches for a season. We need to know the total number of wins and losses in the league for a season and we can do this by using ‘On-the-fly aggregations’ in expressions (see previous blog articles – Note 3). The expression below works out the difference between the two. We need to find seasons for which this value <= 0 (i.e. as many defeats as wins).
Losses wins for a season
The second thing we need is to know is the league position for the season. In order to be able to do this, we need to know the total number of points for a season (which we can do with a sum aggregation of points scored in a season), and the total number of goals scored and conceded (in order to be able to break tied teams).
The Numeric Banding wizard can rank the teams in each group of (‘Division and Season’) to give a value from 1 to N for that particular division/season.
We can then look to make a selection of teams who achieved a position higher than N as follows:
New selection
This will give us all the teams who have finished at least 7th with as many losses as wins. The most recent occurrence of this was for West Ham in 2001.