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When investigating the pros and cons of rotation in The Football Review 2007 we discovered, among of things, that there was no evidence of a relationship between first half rotations and second half success in the league. We have since revisited this topic to investigate whether any benefit is gained from rotating players regularly throughout the season and the answer is in fact yes. Using the rotation data we collected last season we discovered that there was a significant relationship between the total game-to-game player changes club’s made in the first 28 games of the season and the number of points they won in the last 10 games of the season (Table 1.1)...
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Having discovered that the strength of a team’s fixtures has a significant effect on how many points a club wins over the first five and ten games of the season in
The Football Review 2007 we decided to have a look a whether fixture strength has a similar effect at the latter end of a season.
Fixture strength a review
This is something that is forever overlooked by everyone at the start of the season. Playing away to Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal in your first five games, surely has a big effect on how many points you are going to have won - whatever quality your club has. To quantify this we used our overall adjusted estimated points performance averages for each team (home and away) to get a percentage figure above or below average for each clubs set of fixtures over the first five and ten games of the season. For example, in playing home to Aston Villa, away to Man City, home to Middlesbrough, away to Manchester United and home to Sheffield United, Arsenal had a fixture strengthen in their first five games 2.9% easier than average.
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