The Table Never Lies? Why Fans Shouldn’t Read Too Much Into Early Season Form

There’s the old adage that you can’t win a league title in the first few months of a season but you can lose one, and so you can forgive fans at football clubs up and down the land if their beloved have gotten off to a sluggish start to the 2022/23 campaign.

Hope springs eternal too, and so those who have gotten off to a better start than expected will no doubt be dreaming of glory days to come.

Of course, both mindsets can be foolhardy.

A slow start can be a manifestation of many things, be it a disrupted pre-season, injuries, new players settling in or simply the vagaries of the fixture list throwing up a hard run of games in the early going.

Those who bet on football with Paddy Power won’t be surprised to see Ipswich Town and Portsmouth leading the way in League One, but who would have expected Sheffield Wednesday and Peterborough to have dropped so many points? Who would have foreseen Wycombe’s struggles, or Cambridge’s over-achievement? The betting odds for the third-tier have, in many ways, not worked out.

The same can be said for outstanding English Premier League bets. Is the title race already over? Liverpool have looked less than impressive at times, and few have been able to stop Manchester City, who have bludgeoned 20 goals in just six outings thus far.

So should we just call the whole thing off and anoint Pep Guardiola’s men as champions? Of course not, and that’s the reason why Vale fans shouldn’t be too down in the dumps right now either.

The Valiants have played three of the top eight sides in League One already, and have struggled to get key players fit and firing with James Wilson, Tom Conlon and Gavin Massey still working their way back to full fitness.

https://twitter.com/OfficialPVFC/status/1566169260208148485

It’s all ifs, buts and maybes of course, but when they are in prime condition – and an easier set of fixtures are next up – there’s no reason why Vale can’t put their early season malaise behind them.

Besides, there’s another interesting measure of performance we can use this early in the campaign…

The Story Within the Story

With just seven rounds of games gone, it means that any side in the third tier has only had 21 points to play for – so, a freak result or two can skew the early league table tremendously.

Perhaps a better marker at this premature stage is Expected Goals, which you may have heard of (or seen written as xG). This measures the quality of goalscoring chances created and yielded, and when you subtract the latter from the former you can take a view as to how a side is performing… it takes some of the ‘luck’ out of the equation.

Right now, Port Vale sit tenth in a hypothetical Expected Goals league table, which suggests they are playing much better than their place in the actual standings attests.

The game-by-game data confirms the Valiants were by far the better side in the opening day win over Fleetwood, and that they deserved far more than a 1-2 defeat at MK Dons.

https://twitter.com/itvfootball/status/1560189759611338753

In fact, the only real aberration on the copybook of Darrell Clarke so far this term was the 0-4 hammering at Exeter – that, according to the xG numbers, was well and truly deserved. Vale were lucky to get nought, as the old joke goes…

So, all in all, there are reasons to be cheerful at Vale Park. A promoted side, which faced frustration in the transfer window, has played well for much of 2022/23 so far… even if results don’t suggest as much.

Robbie Williams once released an album called Sing When You’re Winning. Sometimes, you have to belt out a tune when you’re picking up points here and there too…