Alright, so today I’m diving into some football data – Arsenal vs. Crystal Palace matches, specifically. It’s something I’ve been tinkering with on and off, and I figured I’d share my process. No fancy tools, just good ol’ data and a bit of elbow grease.
The Starting Point: Grabbing the Data
First things first, I needed the data. I scoured the web and landed on a few football stats sites. I tried a few different sites ’cause some had weird formatting or were missing data. Ended up piecing it together from two main sources: one had historical results, and the other had more detailed match stats like goals, assists, and cards.
The initial data was messy, to say the least. Think HTML tables, inconsistent date formats, and team names abbreviated differently across sources. So, the first step was cleaning. I loaded the data into a spreadsheet – yeah, I started simple with Excel. Used find and replace like crazy to standardize team names (Arsenal F.C. vs. Arsenal, for example) and date formats. It was tedious, but necessary.
Getting Down and Dirty: Data Wrangling
Next up, I needed to structure the data. I created columns for each match – date, home team, away team, home goals, away goals, result (win, loss, draw), and a few extra columns for things like the competition (Premier League, FA Cup, etc.).
- I had to manually fill in some missing data. Like, sometimes the data source only had the score, not the actual result (win/loss). I’d just calculate it myself and fill it in.
- I also created a “goal difference” column, which is simply home goals minus away goals. This came in handy later.
- I used excel formulas to extract information from text strings. For example, If the data came with the whole score result together, I separated them into two columns for each team using the “text to columns” option on excel.
Time for Some Analysis: What Did I Find?
Okay, with clean and structured data, I could finally start digging into the interesting stuff. I was curious about a few things:
- Overall win record: Who’s won more often? I used a simple countif in excel to see who had the most wins over all matches.
- Home vs. Away advantage: Does Arsenal perform better at home against Crystal Palace? I broke down the win/loss/draw record by home and away games.
- Goal Scoring Trends: Are the matches typically high-scoring affairs? I calculated the average number of goals per match, and the average goal difference.
The basic analysis was pretty straightforward. Arsenal has historically dominated Crystal Palace, but the matches are often closer than you’d think. Especially in recent years, Crystal Palace has been a tough opponent, even managing to snatch a few wins at the Emirates.
I also noticed that home advantage plays a big role. Arsenal wins more often at home, as expected, but Crystal Palace’s performance drops significantly when they play away against Arsenal.
Wrapping it Up: Lessons Learned
This was a fun little project. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was a good exercise in data wrangling and analysis. Here are a few things I learned:
- Data cleaning is the most time-consuming part. Seriously, it took up like 70% of the total time.
- Starting with simple tools like Excel is perfectly fine. You don’t always need fancy software.
- Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Manual data entry and manipulation are sometimes unavoidable.
I’m thinking of expanding this project. Maybe I’ll try to scrape the data directly from the web, or use Python to automate some of the cleaning and analysis. But for now, I’m happy with what I’ve got. Go Gunners!
