Good to see the full programme back this weekend and big start to Saturday with the Manchester derby which has had a serious upgrade this season and Pep v Ibra is a good matchup.

Got an email recently that said

I wonder if you have any stats on first goal scored in a game:

or

Anything thing relating to who scored the 1st goal ? AND HOW IT EFFECTS THE FINAL OUTCOME / RESULT

Not something we have looked at before and should have some data for this from the top leagues in Europe but this week we’ll just look at the Premier League.  First step is to see which team scores first in the Premier League.

As you can see the home team scores first in around half the matches and the away team in about 4/10 and a little less than 1/10 matches ends 0-0.

What happens when the home team scores first

When the home team scores first in the past 4 seasons they have on average won 72% of the matches. What is interesting is that they have only drawn 18% of those matches and then lost 10% which is quite high based on the draw figure.

What happens when the away team scores first

When the away team scores first the home team only comes back to win the game 16% of the time. 20% of the matches end in a draw and the home team goes on to win the game around 2/3 of the time.

It’s the international break this weekend, which is always odd coming so quickly in the season. Some decent friendlies, such as Belgium v Spain and Italy v France yesterday.

Today there are plenty of matches being played even if the top tiers aren’t in action. The main console page has full stats for League One and League Two, who both have full programs, as well as the Conference. Some cracking goals get scored in those leagues such as this one last weekend by Jay Emmanuel-Thomas

Time to take a look at a few stats for those leagues and see if the number of home wins has changed over time and that’s shown in the table below

Table showing % of home and away wins for League 1, League 2 and the Conference for the seasons 08/09 to 15/16

Looking at home wins these are pretty random with a range of 40.2% to 47.3% for League 1, 37.5% to 44.6% for League 2 and 41.5% to 48.4% for the conference. Home Advantage clearly still exists as has been proved by numerous studies over time. The draws seem to have a similar pattern as well.

The away wins is the one that looks like it could have a pattern with there being more away wins. If you look at the average value then in League One, League Two and the Conference 3 of the last 4 seasons have seen a bigger than average number of away wins.

Good luck for the weekend.

The Simple Weekend will be a regular feature but there are no stats to add today as we are in holiday mode at the moment. People away and a long bank holiday ahead.

Last weekend there were 3 away wins on the opening day in Spain with Leganes winning at 4.89 and Las Palmas at 4.84. Overall a loss of -0.53 backing them all but if we ignored the 2 Madrid teams and Barcelona then it would have been a solid 1.73 profit on the 3 matches.

Good luck this weekend.

Last weekend the opening day Premier League stats pointed towards laying home teams and there were just 3 home wins at prices of 4.17, 1.25 and 1.64. Swansea (3.10), West Brom (4.16), Liverpool (3.04) and Man United (1.86) all won away and a 2.16 point profit would have been achieved backig all those.

La Liga starts this weekend and in the table below we can see the same stats as for the Premier League last weekend and the odds for these are the average odds taken from football-data.co.uk.

The home teams dominate in Spain and the away teams have really struggled so backing the away team would not have been a good strategy. Last seasons opening day had 7 of the 10 games with 1 goal or less but that is not normal. In terms of BTTS there isn’t much of a pattern.

However, Spain has two massive giants in Real Madrid and Barcelona and removing those two, as well as Sevilla and Atletico Madrid, who have probably been the most consistent of the rest in those years we get completely different results.

As you can see above again it’s not the away teams that are worth backing and aside from 2009/10 there have been at least 2 away wins in the remaining 6 or 7 matches.