Being alone at the office at lunch has its advantages. I get to do a tiny bit of analyzing instead of socializing. After matchday 10 Ajax is rock-bottom of the league and PSV has won all their games. There’s a 8 point gap already between the fourth and fifth place and it looks like our subtop has vanished this year. However, 10 games can give a very skewed look if you play against ‘easy’ or just ‘hard’ opponents. So I decided to see who has had an easier time and who has had a harder time. The main thing that kept being said was that Ajax has had a tough schedule and PSV has had it easy. While a look at the fixtures will mostly answer that question, I wanted to see how much of that rings true and compare it to other teams around them.

Method

I downloaded all the finished fixtures from a football data site and started working on the numbers. All teams got a strength number between 0 to 1 based on their current position on the league table. The number 1 gets a full 1, the number last gets ~0.06 (1/18th). These numbers are used to see how strong the opponents have been that a team has faced. Obviously this is already a bit skewed, since there are teams with only 9 games and Ajax only has had 8 games. But I can’t adjust for every thing up front.

Results

I calculated two things. I first checked the general strength that each team faced. Secondly I checked the points gained compared to the relative strength of the opponents. Both are adjusted to the amount of games played to reduce the skewedness of the data.

Strength faced

Position Team Strength Home Strength away Strength average
1 Ajax 0,78 0,64 0,69
2 Vitesse 0,69 0,61 0,65
3 Heerenveen 0,54 0,71 0,63
4 Almere City 0,72 0,5 0,61
5 Sparta Rotterdam 0,56 0,67 0,61
6 Zwolle 0,67 0,54 0,61
7 Go Ahead Eagles 0,49 0,71 0,6
8 Volendam 0,51 0,65 0,57
9 Fortuna Sittard 0,31 0,83 0,57
11 RKC Waalwijk 0,75 0,41 0,56
10 Heracles 0,53 0,47 0,5
12 NEC 0,32 0,69 0,49
13 Utrecht 0,4 0,54 0,48
14 AZ Alkmaar 0,61 0,29 0,47
15 Feyenoord 0,44 0,48 0,46
16 Twente 0,42 0,38 0,4
17 Excelsior 0,42 0,37 0,39
18 PSV Eindhoven 0,33 0,39 0,36

Higher ranked teams are most likely to be lower on this table and lower ranked teams more likely to be on top of this table. However, it is clearly visible that PSV has had a relatively easy schedule compared to their position and Ajax has had by far the toughest opponents. Sparta and Excelsior are interesting outliers in this, they are 6th and 7th in the league right now. However, Excelsior has had a really easy schedule, while Sparta has faced a lot of tough opponents. Interestingly PEC Zwolle and Go Ahead Eagles have also had a tough program and they are 5th and 9th in the league. I did not expect them to be so high up this list.

Points relative to strength faced

Position Team Points Home Points away Points average
1 AZ Alkmaar 1,59 0,88 1,27
2 PSV Eindhoven 0,97 1,17 1,05
3 Twente 1,3 0,66 0,98
4 Feyenoord 1,16 0,58 0,87
5 Sparta Rotterdam 0,58 0,79 0,68
6 Heracles 1,16 0,21 0,68
7 Go Ahead Eagles 1,18 0,17 0,67
8 Excelsior 0,59 0,58 0,58
9 RKC Waalwijk 0,83 0,13 0,44
11 PEC Zwolle 0,22 0,61 0,42
10 Ajax 0,61 0,22 0,37
12 Heerenveen 0,64 0,07 0,36
13 Volendam 0,59 0 0,33
14 Almere City 0,36 0,28 0,32
15 NEC 0,32 0,31 0,31
16 Fortuna Sittard 0,3 0,3 0,3
17 Vitesse 0,24 0,33 0,29
18 Utrecht 0,04 0,38 0,24

The only change in the top 4 is AZ overtaking PSV, which means that PSV really had a much easier schedule than them. As expected Ajax climbs a lot in this ranking. They haven’t gotten many points, but relatively speaking they have had a lot of tough opponents. Utrecht for example is still dead last on the list.

The gap between the top four and the rest of the league is apparent even from this ranking. There are some changes upcoming, especially Ajax will probably climb higher and PSV maybe finally facing tougher opponents.

Probably even more interesting is the traditional subtop teams from the Eredivisie. Vitesse, Utrecht and Heerenveen are nowhere to be seen this year. Are we just going to have a top 4 (perhaps 5 if Ajax comes back) and then the rest of the league, or is there a new subtop coming with Sparta, Heracles, Go Ahead Eagles, Excelsior and RKC?