As the league has now gone on a summer break for the UEFA Euro 2016, let’s take another look a the Allsvenskan season so far.

Since last time, Malmö have overtaken Norrköping at the top, and the early surprise side Sundsvall have dropped to 6th. AIK, Kalmar and Häcken have climbed in the table, while Djurgården, Hammarby and Helsingborg have done the opposite. Gefle and Falkenberg still struggle at the bottom.

Shots-wise the league seems to have settled, as only Elfsborg and Göteborg have changed quadrants since the last update. Also, Malmö’s gap to the other clubs has decreased.

Looking at effectiveness in attack, we can see partially why some sides have climbed or dropped in the league table. Malmö and Häcken have enjoyed some efficient scoring, moving them from ‘wasteful’ into the ‘constant threat’ quadrant, while Djurgården have done the opposite.

Defensively, we see how AIK have been more effective at the back together with Sundsvall and Jönköpings Södra, while Djurgården’s performance has worsened.

Looking at xG, we see how AIK have overtaken Malmö as the best attacking side, but have at the same time moved into the  ‘worse defence’ half. Hammarby’s attacking numbers have dropped while Falkenberg have performed better. Östersund and Örebro still sit at opposite ends, with the former involved in some low xG games and the latter producing some xG-fests with both defensive and attacking xG at about 1.8 per game.

Malmö are still at the top of the xGD table, but have dropped a bit from their >1.0 from last time. Kalmar have climbed to third while Djurgården and AIK have dropped. The bottom three remain the same as last time.

Looking at Expected Points for a ‘fair’ table based on the shots taken and conceded so far, we see how Malmö are still at the top while Gefle are stuck at the bottom. Göteborg have overtaken AIK in the top three, while Kalmar have climbed by about 8 points out of 12 possible.

A note on Expected Points Performance: Winning teams will always outperform their Expected Points, as picking up all 3 points will usually be above expectation as no team dominate a game so much as to warrant a 100% win probability. The same goes for teams who consistently lose, as 0 points will usually be below expectation.

Looking at time spent in Game States, we see how Gefle have spent just about 10% of the season in the lead so far. Helsingborg and Häcken have spent little time drawing while Sundsvall still have spent very little time trailing.

Just with like the actual league table, there some big differences in the prediction compared to the last update, showing how difficult it can be to predict the league this early into the season. Mid-table has really opened up since last time, but the top 2 and bottom 3 remains the same.

Long-term trends and managerial changes

Usually, I would’ve ended the post here but as two managers have been sacked since the last update, I thought it would be interesting to see how AIK and Gefle have performed under Andreas Alm and Roger Sandberg respectively. I won’t comment on these plots more than that Alm likely had to leave because of politics and disputes at the club, while Sandberg was sacked due to Gefle’s poor results.

With three rounds of Allsvenskan games played since my last post, it’s time for an update. Like last time, I’m just going to throw a few visualizations at you together with my initial thoughts without going too much in-depth.

Starting out with the league table, we see just how close the league has been so far – with eight games played, only four points separate Östersund in 11th place from Malmö in 2nd.

We can also see some interesting streaks since last time, with Norrköping and Elfsborg winning all three games while Hammarby, Gefle and Falkenberg have been struggling. Looking at the early surprise teams we see that Sundsvall have continued to perform well while Jönköpings Södra have dropped in the table.

Looking at shots we see how Hammarby, Kalmar and Norrköping have all moved in to the ‘busy attack, quit defence’ quadrant, indicating that they’ve played a bit better lately (or faced easier opposition!), while Sundsvall is still stuck in the ‘quiet attack, busy defence’ quadrant.

While Malmö produces a lot of shots, they’re still one of the most ineffective sides up front. Göteborg and Norrköping on the other hand are enyoing some effective scoring at the moment.

Sundsvall are still conceding a lot of shots, but at least they’re not converted into goals very often – which in part explains their good results so far. Elfsborg have moved into the ‘formidable’ defensive quadrant, only conceding one goal in the last three games.

Looking at Expected Goals, Malmö are still the clearly best team, with Norrköping improving while Djurgården have dropped a bit. Here we really see the difference between the early surprise teams’ performance recently, as Sundsvall have improved both attacking and defensive numbers while Jönköpings Södra have done the opposite.

So how would the teams rank xG-wise? Expected Goals Difference should do well as measure of skill, and here we again see how the model ranks Malmö as the best side so far, with Norrköping and AIK the main contenders. A bottom three of Helsingborg, Gefle and Falkenberg have also emerged.

Another way of evaluating the teams’ performance so far is to simulate how many points on average each team would’ve received from their games. To do this I’ve used the shots from each game to simulate the result 10,000 times and the teams have then been awarded Expected Points based on the derived 1X2 probabilities.

For example, if the simulation would come up with probabilities of 0.5, 0.3 and 0.2 for each outcome then the home side would be awarded 0.5*3 + 0.3*1 or 1.8 Expected Points, while the away side would get 0.2*3 + 0.3*1, or 0.9 Expected Points.

Here’s a table of the team’s Expected Points so far:

But a team can’t get 1.8 points from a game, only 0, 1 or 3 – so how have the teams performed compared to their Expected Points?

Note: Malmö have been awarded a 3-0 win against Göteborg as the game was abandoned due to home fans throwing pyrotechnics towards a Malmö player. These points have been included.

Here we see how Helsingborg and Sundsvall have taken quite a lot more points than expected, while Falkenberg and Kalmar have done the opposite. This could be the result of some good/bad luck, but it can also mean that the model fail to properly assess the quality of these teams.

Let’s dig deeper and have a look at the Expected Points distribution of each team:

Looking at these distributions we can see just how extreme the results have been for some of the teams so far. In fact, my model estimates that if we re-played Helsingborg’s games 10,000 times, they would get 13 points or more only about 5% of the time!

Lastly, here’s my updated prediction of the final Allsvenskan 2016 table:

That’s it for now. I hope to be back with another update when the league have gone on break for Euro 2016, and maybe I’ll look closer at individual players then.

With 5 rounds of games played I thought it would be a good time to look at how the 2016 Allsvenskan is going. Let’s have a look at the league table so far:

True to it’s rather unexpected nature, the opening five rounds of the 2016 Allsvenskan have seen some surprises, and I don’t think anyone expected Sundsvall and newly-promoted Jönköpings Södra to be at the top! Also, last year’s top team’s have been struggling a bit, but seem to have picked up the pace lately.

But nevermind the table – altough it never lies, it does give an unfair view of the teams’ underlying performances, especially with so few games played. To really have a look at how the team’s been coming along so far I’ve reproduced some of Ben Mayhew‘s beautiful scatterplots:

Looking at shots taken and conceded per game we can see how Malmö, Djurgården and AIK have dominated their games so far, outshooting their opponent’s by some marginal. League leaders Sundsvall have, given their results, surprisingly spent most of their time in defence – but that’s just how Allsvenskan is.

When looking closer at shooting effectiveness we see that surprise teams Sundsvall and Jönköpings Södra have been clinical in front of goal so far, partly explaining their results. Häcken on the other hand have really struggled to score.

Looking at defensive effectiveness we can really see why Sundsvall are at the top of the Allsvenskan table. While spending a lot of time in defence, they’ve managed to concede very few goals given their shots faced. If this is down to some new tactic, skill or simply dumb luck remains to be seen – but for a team like Sundsvall I’m willing to say it’s the latter.

Expected Goals-wise we see just how lucky Sundsvall have been so far. They’ve conceded a lot of xG while failing to produce up front, putting them in the same group as struggling sides Falkenberg, Häcken, Helsingborg and Gefle. Malmö is at the other side of the scale, producing a lot of high-quality chances while keeping a tight defence.

Another interesting thing to look at is time spent in Game States. As a result of their good performance (or luck!) so far, Sundsvall have only spent about 1% of minutes played losing so far while Gefle have only spent 10% in the lead!

What about a prediction for the rest of the season then? I’ve used the games so far to fire up my league table simulation based on my Monte Carlo xG game simulation, and this is the result:

Note: The first table posted here was wrong due to a minor error in the code. This is the correct table.

As a Djurgården supporter, I kinda like the result – even though I think it’s a bit unrealistic for us to compete for silverware just yet. And anyways, a simulation of the whole season based on only 5 games tells more about what has happened so far than what we’ll see in the future, at least in my opinion.

The model clearly ranks Malmö as the best team in the league, as it’s done pretty much every season in my database, alongside AIK and Göteborg. Both the newly promoted teams, Östersund and Jönköpings Södra, seem competent xG-wise and have a good chance of staying up, while reigning champions Norrköping seem to be performing worse than last year. Gefle are always in the bottom of these kind of tables, but nevertheless seem to outsmart every metric available to avoid relegation season after season – but maybe this is the year they finally drop down to Superettan?

I’m planning to do these kind of updates at regular intervals, and maybe add some more plots and deeper analysis, but this will have to do for now!

Though I hadn’t planned on posting a prediction for the new Allsvenskan season until a couple of rounds had been played, after seeing Per Linde of fotbollssiffror posting his prediction on twitter and mentioning how he disagreed with it, I decided to do the same and fire up my league table prediction script from least season.

My Monte Carlo game prediction is designed to use at least a couple of rounds of data, so I was unsure how it would go about predicting a new season right from scratch, but I actually think it turned out better than expected:

There are some obvious problems though. First off, the script still thinks it’s 2015 and Jönköpings Södra and Östersund are playing in Superettan, causing some strange error where their every game is simulated as a 0-0 draw. This obviously skews the prediction for every team, but it isn’t really an error as the league simulation script isn’t designed to involve different leagues, and it’ll will be corrected when I update the database with the weekend’s results.

Also, every game is simulated with the teams’ squads as they were at the end of the 2015 season which is obviously a problem, with a lot of players coming and going since then – but again this will be fine once I update the database.

What about the actual prediction then? Besides the error with the promoted teams the only problem I have subjectively is the high percentages for Gefle’s relegation (they’ve been ruled out as long as I can remember but have still managed to stay up year after year) and Norrköping’s title defence. I’d also switch places between Djurgården and Häcken while placing Örebro somewhere in lower mid-table. The promoted sides are hard to predict, but I definitely place Östersund above Jönköpings Södra.

Though I’m pretty happy with the prediction, I’ll update it in another post once a couple of rounds have been played.