Graphic: proving a point - the myth of fixture pile-up

My favourite part of match-day programmes is the section where players talk about their lives, telling us what they do when they are not playing.

There is always a great deal of detail and I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you come across some archive copies. But a brutal summary is this: they seem to have a lot of time on their hands.

That is one reason why I haven’t come to grips with the idea of fixture congestion. You go to work on Saturday, say, and if you are asked to go to work again on Wednesday, that is supposed to be exhausting.

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Anyway, you haven’t come here to find out what I think. In fact, the great thing about the Fink Tank — what makes it unique among columns — is that what the author thinks doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is the data.

Joel Minsky, Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham have been trying to work out what the truth is in one of the most potent football myths of all — that fixture congestion changes the outcome of games.

The Fink Tank team looked at 312 Barclays Premier League games that were played after a midweek European tie. Using our weighted computer model, we were able to establish what we expected the Premier League team to achieve in any given match, allowing us to compare our expectation with what actually happened.

On average, in games taking place after a midweek tie, sides did slightly underperform — they scored 0.13 points less than we expected. But this drop is not statistically significant — in other words, it is small enough to have happened by chance. As the graphic shows, Manchester United and Arsenal performed better after a midweek game.

You can split this number further and look at whether there was a difference if the midweek European game was played away from home. But you find no statistically significant difference — it does not matter where the game was played.

The usually acute Sir Alex Ferguson has added a novel twist to the fixture-congestion debate by suggesting that the dice were loaded against his team because they were asked to play away league games after their European ties. In other words, it is not the location of the midweek tie, but of the Premier League match that matters. An odd theory, but not hard to test. So we did. Surprise, surprise — when the results achieved in away Premier League games taking place after a midweek match were compared to those achieved at home, the difference was negligible. Ferguson’s complaint is baseless.

We went on drilling down into the figures, looking for evidence — any evidence — that fixture congestion had an impact on results. Did the number of rest days before a match make a difference, for instance? We compared the two teams in Premier League games and found that, for every day of rest you had more than your opponent, your team gained 0.01 more points than expected. This tiny number is not remotely statistically significant.

We tried a range of complicated equations combining the number of days of rest a team had with the distance that they had been travelling. But again, nothing. And one final try — perhaps the sheer number of games made a difference. But all we got was this: for every game fewer you played than your opposition, you were expected to pick up 0.0026 more points than expected, an utterly negligible amount and, again, nowhere close to being significant.

So fixture congestion changes the outcome? Another football myth.