Everyone loves a good Premier League schedule spreadsheet that shows who teams will be facing in the upcoming weeks, where they'll be playing and then some arbitrary color-coded designation to describe the difficulty of the matchups. It's always helpful to go four, six or eight weeks out to ensure you're prepared when deciding who to transfer in and who to kick to the curb.
And while having someone determine what makes a matchup easy or not, maybe we can simply build the same spreadsheets and show actual statistics. Surely you've seen something that looks like this:
Using this table, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal are marked in red, indicating the toughest matchups. The orange group includes Burnley, Brighton, Watford and Huddersfield, who sit seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th in the table, respectively. The following group in yellow has Newcastle, Leicester, Southampton, Stoke and Everton (11th through 15th in the table), and finally West Brom, Bournemouth, West Ham, Swansea and Crystal Palace in green, indicating that matches against the bottom five sides in the table are good.
You could take it a step further and color code it based on how each team does in the table using home and away results (same groupings as above):
The difficulty with all of this is that it feels so arbitrary. Using this latest grouping, you'd rather start a player who is home against Arsenal rather than one playing home to Leicester or Brighton. Does that sound right to you? I'm not saying this is the only way to make this type of schedule table, but I do think it leaves plenty to be desired.
Instead, why not build them based on certain stats instead of including the team names that ultimately clouds our judgement because we have obvious preconceived notions about these teams? Would you be comfortable making lineup decisions based on goals allowed by upcoming opponents without worrying who the actual opponent is (home/away stats are shown in the table)?
Looking at the first schedule, you'd certainly be questioned if you said you liked Brighton's upcoming schedule, as they have matches against Manchester United and Liverpool within their next four. But looking at the goal table, all you see is that they'll face three teams in the next four weeks who have allowed at least two goals per game (again, home/away splits are included). Not everyone is lining up to play someone facing Liverpool, but with 16 of their 17 goals allowed this season coming away from Anfield, Anthony Knockaert (£5.7), Pascal Gross (£5.9) and Glenn Murray (£5.8) don't look so bad.
If goals aren't enough for you, how about shots and shots on goal allowed?
Shots are not the end-all, be-all, but it's really tough to score goals without shooting, and teams that allow a lot of shots tend to allow a lot of goals (unless Sean Dyche is your manager). We could also take it a step further and look at how many chances are created against each team in their home/away splits:
Arsenal's upcoming schedule looks fairly tame after the north London derby in Gameweek 12, but Burnley and Huddersfield haven't been easy opponents this season, so those expecting big fantasy breakouts for Alexis Sanchez (£11.8) or Mesut Ozil (£9.8) may be disappointed before their Gameweek 15 match against Manchester United. On the other side, there has been plenty of discussion about Crystal Palace players because of their encouraging upcoming schedule, but it's worth noting that while the club names on the schedule look mighty enticing, the stats aren't quite as optimistic.
