How League Titles are Won

Winning a league title requires a lot from a team and its players.

They have to be consistent.

They have to have depth.

They need to avoid mistakes.

They need to score a lot of goals and not allow a lot of goals.

I’ve come to be of the opinion that winning league titles in competitive leagues proves to be a harder endeavor than winning a tournament such as the Champions League because of variance and how it plays out. Tournaments require teams to be just good enough over a short span of minutes and as well, get lucky. This is why we often see teams make tournament “Cinderella” runs, where a team that wasn’t expected to make it very far ends up making a run deep into the tournament. We saw this happen for example last year when Dortmund made it to the final of the Champions League.

What happens with a league campaign that stretches over 9 months and roughly 38 matches is we start to see the standard error converge closer to the mean or what we would have expected. That’s why only Liverpool and Manchester City have won the Premier League since 2017 and only one team since 1994, when Blackburn Rovers won the league title, outside of the traditional “big 6” has won a league title when Leicester won the Premier League in 2016.

In La Liga, there’s even less disparity where only Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Atletico Madrid have won a league title since 2004.

In Ligue Un, PSG has won every year except two since 2013.

We can see that a league title is hard to win, especially if you are already disadvantaged because of your squad. It’s hard for the smaller clubs to compete when you are going against teams who can buy 300 players for fun.

But there is a formula for teams to win. Let’s look at ways teams who have won league titles over the years.

Win matches you’re supposed to win

This may seem like I’m just stating the obvious but winning a league is done because you are able to be consistent and win matches you actually should win. It might seem like an entire season rides on if you can beat the teams close to you in the table. But rarely does it matter if you win or lose that match when it comes to winning a league title outside of the psychological effects.

A lot of times, teams you are competing against are going to drop stupid points. The goal for a title-contending team is to not drop silly points.

Let’s look at the current La Liga situation Barcelona is a perfect example of this.

On November 10th, Barcelona was in first place in La Liga and had just come off a big win over Real Madrid and looked like they were in a good position to start running away with the league especially because they had a relatively easy string of matches coming up.

Let’s look at what happened during that span:

• Loss to Real Sociedad (0 pts)

• Draw vs Celta Vigo (1 pt)

• Loss to Las Palmas (0 pts)

• Win vs Mallorca (3 pts)

• Draw vs Real Betis (1 pt)

• Loss to Leganes (0 pts)

• Loss to Atletico (0 pts)

Out of 21 available points, they only accumulated 5!!!

That is shocking given their form and especially given their opponents. Most of these teams outside of Atletico are outside of the top six while three of them are relegation contenders.

This run of matches has seen them drop from a comfortable spot in first place all the way down to third while the two teams in front of them have a match in hand.

Win matches you’re supposed to win and you set yourself up for a shot at winning the league.

Defense matters

The most straightforward way to win a match is to not let your opponent score. If your opponent doesn’t score, then you only need to score one goal to win. We can evaluate how well a team does this through expected goals against (xGA), which measures the sum of expected goals a team faces throughout a season.

A team that limits the amount of expected goals will be seen to have a solid defense. This might be due to style of play (high possession teams will limit the number of chances an opponent has due to them just not having the ball) or it can be due to a solid compact defense which limits the quality of chances opponents have. Sometimes it can be a combination of the two.

Over the past seven seasons in the Premier League, the winner has done a very good job of limiting the opponents and is usually in the top two defenses when it comes to expected goals against.

We see this playing out already this season as well as Liverpool is currently leading the Premier League halfway through with the second-lowest xGA

We can also use this to evaluate why Manchester City has struggled this season as they have already allowed more xGA this season halfway than they did in some of their title-winning seasons. Nottingham Forest is also relying on a very solid defense to win matches and currently sees themselves in second place.

The old verbiage rings true when they say defense wins championships.

More money = less problems…?

Squad depth is a key part of being able to win a league title and is often why we see clubs with a smaller budget fail to compete over an entire season with clubs that have large backings.

Clubs like Newcastle United were able to put themselves into at least contender mode after they received a substantial boost from outside funding. The same thing happened with Liverpool and Manchester City after they received takeovers in ownership and a surge of money coming in.

Money doesn’t always equal success but it is very important when it comes to being able to build and bolster out a squad with better players. It allows a manager to sign players he wants. It also allows for a team to sign better managers, upgrade training facilities, bring in better staff, etc.

Injuries are almost guaranteed to happen to a couple of players over the course of a season and a squad’s ability to replace those players with players of equal or similar ability is key in its pursuit of a title push.

Titles can be won through different means, and we’ve seen teams in lower divisions have success playing moneyball to get promoted to the upper leagues. But usually in these higher, more competitive divisions, you need a deep squad of talented players to make the push over the long months.