The 2017-2018 W-League season ended at the weekend with Melbourne City’s victory over Sydney in the Grand Final.
During the season, I used the Westfield W-League match centre as my source of secondary data to monitor goal scoring and game outcome.
My analysis of the data on 57 games played is:
Scoring first and not losing
46 games were won by the team scoring first.
6 games were drawn by the team scoring first.
Scoring first and losing
There were four games in which the team scored first lost.
Newcastle v Canberra (Round 4)
Melbourne Victory v Perth (Round 4)
Melbourne Victory v Brisbane (Round 10)
Melbourne City v Melbourne Victory (Round 11)
When were goals scored?
194 goals were scored during the season: 93 in the first half; 100 in the second; and 1 in extra time. The home teams scored 103 goals and the away teams 91. There was one 0v0 draw (Melbourne Victory v Brisbane in Round 12).
In 15 minute time intervals, these goals were scored:
Shots at goal and goals scored
The W-League Stats Centre recorded 1609 shots at goal during the season of which 611 were noted as ‘on target’ (a shots per goal measure of 12.06).
Visualising Performance
Andrew Howe has visualised goals scored for and against in the W-League from the start of the competition in the 2008-2009 season. His circular plot is a very powerful interactive resource.
My search for Melbourne City’s performance in 2017-2018 before this year’s grand final revealed:
I do think this is an outstanding resource for anyone interested in the history of the competition. It also sets a standard for how we visualise performance data.
Photo Credit
Three in a row (Westfield W-League, Twitter)
