Early season update: squad retention, table-topping droughts and fixture difficulty

Summarising the key updates from the last month

While I’ve been waiting for the new season to ramp up, I’ve mainly been focused on building stuff behind the scenes so that I’m ready to switch things on. However I have found the time to refresh a few existing posts and create one new piece of analysis, all of which are summarised here.

This email doubles as a test for the posting format I’m looking to adopt this season. To avoid clogging inboxes with a separate email for everything I create, the plan is to send out fewer, chunkier updates with embedded links to individual pages.

Table topping droughts

Starting off with something new, when following the live scores on the Championship’s opening weekend I noticed that Stoke were on course to finish the day at the top of the table. Having done a bit of work on results data over the summer, I remembered that it had been a while since they’d last managed this and was able to churn out some analysis on how their drought compared with others.

As it turns out, their run of over 17 years since ending the day at the top of a table was the longest of any current team in the top four English divisions. While I was at it, I also looked at the longest stretch of time since each club had last finished a day at the bottom of a league table, which threw up some even crazier numbers.

Squad retention

I’ve been refreshing the squad retention charts for English teams on a regular basis. These quantify how much each squad has changed by calculating the percentage of last season’s league minutes accumulated by players still at the club.

There have been some notable shifts as we head towards the final two weeks of the window, with 14 teams now having lost at least half of last season’s minutes and one having lost eight of their most-used XI.

As the English versions have proven so popular, I ran the same analysis for other major European leagues: specifically the top tiers of Italy, Spain, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Portugal.

The Portuguese league includes the highest level of churn I’ve ever seen in over a decade of running this analysis: newly-promoted Alverca only have one player left from last season’s first-team squad. Everyone else who stepped on the pitch for them in a league match is gone.

Premier League fixtures

Finally, I went back and updated the Premier League fixture difficulty analysis that I had originally published on the day they were released. This was to factor in how the odds have moved in response to transfers, pre-season form etc (but also for selfish reasons as I make last-minute tweaks to my FPL team).

There were fewer shifts in the rankings than I expected. Newcastle have drifted a couple of places due to the Alexander Isak saga and their recruitment difficulties, but nobody else has moved more than one place. However, the distribution of odds had changed quite a bit, to the extent that I had to adjust the groupings.

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Looking ahead

Once a meaningful amount of data has accumulated - probably in mid-to-late September - I’ll be able to switch on a lot more of the regular visualisations, get a posting rhythm going and build the site / newsletter out a bit more.

In the meantime things will be a bit more ad hoc, but there will definitely be a few new things appearing alongside further updates to the squad retention graphics.

I'm always happy to hear suggestions, so please feel free to reach out in the comments or via social media (I’m most active on BlueSky, followed by X).