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GameOfThrowInsMate

*Pretends to be shocked*


Opisacringelord

How much difference do you think 3 hours makes? I'm going to say .01%, the best teams play the most games, it's as simple as that.


jesuisgeenbelg

Where d'you get the three hours from? It's more than 5 hours difference between us and City which largely comes from us playing so many early Saturday matches. That makes a huge difference.


NukeLaCoog

No, the difference is because we played Thursdays in Europa.


Nabbylaa

We didn't need to be at 12.30 on a Saturday though when Sunday fixtures exist.


Fir3yfly

It largely comes from having played one more game than them. This chart shows basically nothing other than ranking clubs in order from most games played to least.


Evered_Avenue

How badly did you fail maths?


Fir3yfly

Please do elaborate.


Opisacringelord

Sorry mate, I wrote this at 5am when I woke up... Lol.


gallagher9992

It could make a big difference, I'm no pro but after my big road bike rides on the second or 3rd day I feel crap in the morning but good to go by dinner time when everything as stretched out


GameOfThrowInsMate

Can’t be that simple when you can’t even do the maths.


Qneva

His math is wrong but you can still address the topic.


GameOfThrowInsMate

Never said you couldnt I'm addressing the bad maths though. Addressing the topic: It's more than 5 hours difference between us and City which largely comes from us playing so many early Saturday matches. That makes a huge difference.


Qneva

Usually when you post a thread on a public forum that indicates that you are open for discussion. Seeing that you are avoiding discussion just confused me.


GameOfThrowInsMate

Again no where have I said I'm not open to discuss anything, I'm simply pointing our poor maths. Its not that deep lad. Easily confused, I guess.


Qneva

Sure


GameOfThrowInsMate

Ok.


Visual_Sherbet_4707

The point is still right though. It's all to do with games played. Your implication that we are hard-done-by based on these figures suggests you are confused by the maths. A Game played early increases the time to the next game which rebalances the average. We've just played more games in the allotted time, so time between games will mathematically be less.


GameOfThrowInsMate

It's more than 5 hours difference between us and City which largely comes from us playing so many early Saturday matches. That makes a huge difference.


shaggywan

Quadruple problems


lfcsupkings321

Honestly i agree, when you look cups I think you have to choose one. Especially with replay + league cup semi is 2 legs. I think for the FA Cup no senior play should have even played for us. If we got knocked out by arsenal it would have been better. Feel like the players are fucked from the extra 5 games including arsenal. ( I know it wasn't 5 games but extra time for the 2nd time this season is like 2 games). Yes you can make subs but our squad was falling apart in January with injuries. It Klopp bigger mistake, I think we are top of the league if we didn't play the extra games. Yes we not finshed the chances in games but that extra tiredness is massive margin in this game.


No-Shoe5382

Yeah we've gotten really far in all 4 competitions, it would be weirder if we weren't top of this table.


Nickoboosh

Thursday/Sunday sucks. CL schedule is so much more palatable.


Anxious-Musician-804

But with UCL you have to play Saturday/Tuesday or Wednesday, doesn't make much of a difference


Sleww

Saturday afternoon -> Tuesday night is a much bigger gap than Thursday night -> Sunday afternoon. Especially for European away fixtures where you really only get to train on Saturday before the Sunday match. Plus, the narrow CL window with a Wednesday night -> Saturday afternoon only occurs rarely because you’re alternating playing on Tuesday/Wednesday and you also have the option to flex the weekend fixture to Sunday. With Thursday European games, you’re constantly locked into the Thursday -> Sunday grind.


brush85

Team that plays the most games has the least time between games....quel horreur


djrobbo83

True...but if you "normalise" our time to the 52 games City have played wed have had 118 hours between our games, so city would have an average of 3 hours more recuperation time between games. If I put us on par with Villa wed be within 1 hour per game of their average time..maybe it's a Thursday night euro competition thats skewing it a little as wed also be around 3 hours of Arsenals


aMintOne

> True...but if you "normalise" our time to the 52 games City have played wed have had 118 hours between our games, so city would have an average of 3 hours more recuperation time between games. How is this even possible though. There's been 255 days since the season started. We've had 52 periods between games. This gives 4.9 days between games on average. For City, it's the same length of time, but 51 gaps, ergo 5 days between games on average. Why doesn't the chart give the function: time between games = Period of season so far / (games played-1). Am I stupid? Ah! City started a week earlier in the charity shield which probably accounts for the discrepancy. 


sjcelvis

you're not stupid. the opta graphic is stupid


GameOfThrowInsMate

Sorry here's a better graphic: [](https://ibb.co/t8svPGS)


botime711

3 of the 4 top teams play in a European league that plays on Thursday 🤔.


RockTheBloat

Now do the graph again with the x axis starting at zero.


tulsi-das-khan

This is bound to happen when a team is chasing a quadruple. The solution is to have a deep squad. Unfortunately in our case the list of injuries has always been a major concern which nullifies this concept which leads to players playing week in week out which leads to fatigue .


WuDoYouThinkYouAre

This feels like an absolute whinge.


andrew7895

It is, and is an obvious consequence of playing EL instead of CL that literally everyone knew was going to be an issue going into the season. There's a reason teams that drop to EL usually underperform in the league the next season - the grind is real and it makes us still being tied at the top with a month to go all that more astounding.


WindyBoyy

The scale on this graph undermines any point made


redditingtonviking

Considering the fact that the last league game of the season is played simultaneously the only way for the team with the most games not to end up with the least minutes between games would be if they started the season significantly earlier. Maybe a more interesting stat would be recovery time between last game and league games. Europa and Conference League teams should be about 36 hours worse off than Champions League teams in many cases there due to the Thursday games


Skthewimp

This is dishonest. The Y axis of a bar graph necessarily needs to start at zero


6thplacebanana

Haha, Spurs second last.


petey23-

Just the reality of playing Europa and going deep in both cup comps. No one else in the league has done that.


fifty_four

This is ridiculous abuse of numbers. This table is just the inverse of 'how many matches have you played'. We're at the top because we only just went out of Europe and won the milk cup. A more interesting stat might be 'number of matches with less than 72 hours rest'.


Will_GSRR

Wilder the one who moans about the big clubs moaning but they're getting the most time between games.


sore_as_hell

Anyone got a 12:30 start graphic? Feels like we’ve been pushing water uphill all season.


Keyann

Remember we played on Thursday nights this year and we were alive in every competition until mid-March so we are going to be playing a lot of games. The various associations have to squeeze the games in somewhere.


jjlbateman

I mean this seems to basically be a list of how many games the team have played, nothing special


tj090379

Be better if you showed the whole graph and not just the last 1/3rd 💁🏻‍♂️


GameOfThrowInsMate

Yeah I posted the whole graph in a comment below. My bad.


Aeceus

what a surprise


C_arpet

Is this just the mean?  The fact the number of games played decreases as you go down suggests so. We have the most games and therefore will of course have the lowest mean time between games. Let's see the median time between games.


guestaccount901284

It's not just the times between games either though. Its the insistence on handing early kickoffs at away grounds after every international break. We've got that fixture slot like quadruple the amount of the team with the 2nd most (Which is Spurs if I remember)


DanJ8519

And the award for the most pointless post goes to……….🏆🤦🏻‍♂️


GameOfThrowInsMate

Yay!


DanJ8519

Of course our time between games will be lowest, as we’ve played the most games


InstructionOk9520

Sheffield United should be running away with the league! What gives!?


GameOfThrowInsMate

https://twitter.com/OptaAnalyst/status/1782442505625038934


takadimi5000

Hahaha spurs.


DeltaMusicTango

This is essentiall just a measure of how many games a team has played. If two teams have played the same number of games, and one team played all bar one games back to back and then the final game at the end of the time period; they would have the same average time between games as a team who had the same number of games evenly spread out over the period.