Do Swansea City win more games with Leon Britton in the team?
With the Swans enjoying a prolonged rest period news over the last week has been somewhat slow and mostly fairly inconsequential. It makes a change to be honest - this season has seemingly been a cycle of reviewing and previewing games on a bi-weekly basis, and now that we've actually got a bit of time to take stock and assess where we are I thought I'd open it up a bit and ask you what you'd like to see analysed! Get on Twitter and tweet @TheSwanseaWay with your suggestion for an article (or even if you fancy writing an article - though I can't guarantee it would feature) and you could well see your idea thrashed out haphazardly by yours truly.
The first suggestion I came across that seemed worth analysing was from @medwynw, who suggested looking at what effect Leon Britton had on our win/loss ratio:
@TheSwanseaWay Leon & % matches won when he's played and likewise our 2 keepers % games won and clean sheets
— medwyn (@medwynw) March 8, 2014
I'll get on with the goalkeepers another time, but let's concentrate on Leon for now. I thought the best way to look at this would be to look at the stats from the last three seasons (since we were promoted to the PL), and see if a) the absence of Leon had a notably detrimental (or even positive!) effect, and b) whether he's become more or less influential as time has gone on.
So, 2011-12 then. The season of Rodgers. It should be no surprise to learn that Leon featured in 36 of our 38 league games, so analysing what effect he had when he wasn't in the team is fairly meaningless, what with him being fairly ever-present. For what it's worth, we won 30.55% of our matches with Leon in the team, and lost 41.66%, while we lost one and won one of the games he didn't feature in. That's the league - as for the cup he played in a win over Barnsley, while he missed our two losses against Shrewsbury (urgh) and Bolton.
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| Statistics looking at our win % with & without Leon in the team (2012/13) |
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| As you can see last season there was a clear disparity - we won more games with Leon in the team. |
On to 2012-13. With the arrival of Laudrup altering the rhythm of the Swansea midfield it would have been understandable had Leon featured less, but that simply wasn't the case. In the Dane's first (and subsequently only) full season in charge Leon was a regular, featuring 33 times in the league as well as making a good amount of appearances in cup competitions. Did we perform better with Leon in the team? The statistics would seem to indicate we did.
As you can see from this season's stats, even though it's marginal again we win more games with Leon in the team. What's striking is the cup performances - we only managed one win across three cup competitions without Leon prowling around our central midfield.
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| Overall PL stats showing how we perform with or without Leon Britton in the team |
As a self-confessed lover of meaningless statistics, I find it both pleasing and slightly worrying that we've only ever won five Premier League games without Leon in the team, however when you consider he was more or less ever-present for our first two seasons in the top flight it does seem to suggest there's not really much in that one.
Overall though, the stats don't lie and we win a higher percentage of games with Leon in the team. As to whether you can infer a great deal from these numbers - well, that's a question that's best debated in pubs across South Wales and beyond.
Oh, and in the comment section below...