Sunday, June 12, 2011

How good were United this year? Part 2

So in my last post, I looked at Man United's z-score for points and noted that it was better than the average Premier League Champion and the second-best score of any United team over the past ten years. Clearly, if we look at points, they were very good this year.

But what if we looked at the z-score of their goal differential instead? After all, goals are what produce wins and looking at points makes all wins the same, when there clearly is a difference between winning all your games 1-0 and winning them 6-0. How did United fare in this measure?

Not as well, but not poorly either. United this year had a goal differential of 41, good for a z-score of 1.98. This is below the average goal differential z-score for a title-winner (2.04), below Chelsea last year (2.15), and similar with Liverpool two years ago. However, it is higher than their score in 2008-09 when they also won the title and is second only to the 2006-7 United team, which had an excellent z-score of 2.36. More evidence that United were actually pretty good this year.

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