Patterns of Assistance: The Lack of Jeopardy
On Thursday 28th March the following podcast was recorded on the A Celtic State of Mind platform. You can view it here or listen wherever you consume your pods.
In the third written piece as follow-up, I consider how likely a penalty is to be given and what the trends are in awarding and conceding penalties in the SPFL Premiership.
Likelihood of Penalty Awards
We’ve considered whether the penalty, and other big calls, were correct or not during the last two and a half seasons an independent expert has been running the rule over the video evidence.
But how many penalties could be considered “normal”?
To do this I have used “Touches in the Opposition Box” as a proxy for penalty opportunities. You cannot win a penalty without getting the ball into the opponent’s penalty area. This premise is supported by this article from the European Journal of Sport Science.
For this analysis, I recorded all touches in the box for and against each Premiership side between 2020-21 and to 2nd January 2024 of the current season. I then calculated how many touches in the box each team and their opponents have per penalty awarded and conceded.
Penalties Conceded
Here are the results for penalties conceded:
On average in the SPFL Premiership, teams concede a penalty every 147 times their opponent has a touch of the ball in their penalty box.
Champions Celtic concede a penalty every 142 times their opponents enter their penalty area.
The major outlier in this sample is The Rangers.
The opposition needs to get into The Rangers penalty area 372 times on average before a penalty is awarded. With a Z-Score of -2.68, this is outside the 95 percent deviation from the mean and is therefore statistically significant and is the only result to be so.
This suggests that The Rangers have substantially better defenders than the rest of the league in that they are incredibly careful in not committing fouls in the penalty area. Yet despite this, Celtic have conceded 100 goals over the period in question and The Rangers 92, very similar.
Penalties Awarded
If we then look at how many times each team must get into the opponent’s penalty area to win a penalty:
The Rangers achieve a penalty on average every 147 entries into the opposition penalty area, the league average.
What is curious, however, is that the only statistically significant outlier, with a Z-Score of -2.28 is perennial Champions and highly dominant Celtic.
Celtic must, on average, get into the opposition penalty area 203 times before converting that possession into a penalty. The other teams that struggle in this regard are all those who are normally near the foot of the table such as Ross County, St Johnstone and Kilmarnock.
None are as statistically significant an outlier as Celtic, however. This is despite Celtic having a more potent attack during this period scoring 337 goals to The Rangers 306.
In itself, does this indicate a pattern of assistance or just one of those things that will even out over a season?
Next up: are all penalties and red cards equal? Do some carry more impact than others and to whose benefit?
Note: data is correct up to January 3rd 2024.