FA Women’s Super League Team Stats through 23 October 2020
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In my last piece we took a look at some Arsenal WFC player stats (goal contribution, shot maps) from the 2019/2020 WSL season. Currently these same stats for the ongoing season are not available for me to access yet via StatsBomb, so in this piece I’ll be looking at team data available from FBref (the football stats site at Sports Reference).
These are all fairly simple bar charts I put together with R using the ggplot2 package for data visualization after importing a CSV of my desired data that I downloaded from FBref. All data was pulled on October 23, 2020 during the current FIFA window before the WSL resumes league play.
Goals Scored by Team
Arsenal leads the pack by a significant margin through their first five matches with 29 goals scored to Everton’s 16, the next closest team. To be fair, Arsenal opened the season against some of the weaker teams in the league and will face their first real competition in their next two matches when they play Manchester United followed by Chelsea. Three Arsenal players also lead the league in goals scored (Miedema, Roord, and Foord). Everton is the surprise of the season so far, bolstered by four goals from Lucy Graham.
xG by Team
The xG by team chart pans out more or less the same as what we saw in the goals scored chart with both Arsenal and Everton outpacing their xG numbers. Manchester City is underperforming based on their xG value of 13.2 and 8 goals scored so far this season. Birmingham City is scoring more than expected with 6 goals on the season and an xG of 3.3. All other teams are scoring closely in line with their xGs.
Yellow Cards by Team
Just for fun I made a bar chart of yellow cards to see which team has been the spiciest.
The answer is: West Ham, Tottenham, and Birmingham City.
Next up I’ll share some player stats for the current WSL season. Be sure to check out FBref for all your soccer stats needs! They also have stats sites for American college football, baseball, college basketball, and hockey.
