One of the new features we’re planning on unveiling for the 2009-10 Premier League season is a weekly analysis of the Actim Index. We first started talking about the Actim Index back in June, when all the information we had to go on was the season’s end review. Actim actually updates that information after every matchday in the Premier League (although the first week’s was a little late, which is why this column’s a little late), so every week we’re going to take a look at who did well and who didn’t do well last week according to the Actim Index. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Actually, the first week in the league is pretty boring. There’s really no trending that can be done after only one game’s been completed; all you can really do is look back on the week and reflect. Before we do that, let’s take a quick refresher course on what the Actim Index is and what it’s trying to do.
The Actim Index is a statistical measurement for soccer players. It’s arrived at by going over six different calculations, evaluating the following information for each player:
- Assesses a player’s contribution to a winning team, based on points won by the team when he appeared.
- Assesses a player’s performance in each game, by allocating points for actions that positively contribute to a winning performance such as shots, tackles, clearances and saves. It also takes points away from players for negative actions such as yellow/red cards and shots off target.
- Allocates points based on time on the pitch.
- Allocates points for goal scorers.
- Allocates points for assists.
- Allocates points for clean sheets.
The specifics of those equations, of course, are super-secret, and without more time and information than your average blogger has there’s not really a way to figure out the exact weighting of each individual calculation. The end result is a number value assigned to each player. Some of those numbers make a lot of sense; for example, after Arsenal’s 6-1 win over Everton, it makes a lot of sense that Cesc Fabregas would be the highest ranked player. Some of those numbers, on the other hand, don’t; from the same game, Everton midfielder Steven Pienaar somehow managed to become the 33rd best player in the Premier League, in spite of the six goals scored on his team while he was on the field.
Still, Week One stats are always kind of interesting in a “wow, I wonder if he can keep that up” kind of way. The most interesting ones:
- The aforementioned Cesc Fabregas accrued an absolutely astounding 63 points in that Everton game. That’s a lot of points; last season’s points leader – Nicolas Anelka – ended the year with 751 points, which means that Cesc is already 8% of the way there. He’s already 19% of the way towards his own personal last season total of 334. Fabregas averaged 15.18 Actim points per appearance last season; I’m not going to say that he’s going to drop off, but I’m certainly not rushing to add him to my fantasy team anytime soon.
- Strictly speaking, Manchester City’s 2-0 win over Blackburn was the most dominating win of the weekend by Actim’s standards. All eleven of Manchester City’s starters ranked in the top 100 players in the league, while only ten of Arsenal’s players made that grade (Gael Clichy and Nicklas Bendtner, who both started, did not; Eduardo, who came off the bench, did). Also, Arsenal slipped up and let Pienaar do well, whereas no Blackburn Rover appears anywhere in the top 100.
- In spite of the fact that he completely dominated Fernando Torres for a full ninety minutes, Ledley King was only the 60th best player in the league. This is probably because he, unlike fellow defenders Sebastian Bassong and Benoit Assou-Ekkoto, failed to get on the scoresheet, but it’s worth mentioning that Actim apparently doesn’t take his excellent coverage into account.
- Before we start saying that the index is biased against defenders, however, we should note that 40% of the top 100 are defenders; that’s consistent with last season’s final results, which ended up with 39% of the top 100 playing in the back.
Finally, in a sobering take on how badly stats can get it wrong, Bobby Zamora’s ass-deflection goal for Portsmouth made him the fourth best striker in the league. That’s two steps above Robin van Persie, who was intimately involved in the build up to four of Arsenal’s six goals.
That’s the update for this week; meanwhile, Matchday #2 just finished yesterday, so we might have a review of the index after that tomorrow. See you soon!
