La Liga has been a true rollercoaster of emotions from the very start of the 2020/21 season. And while the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid are still trying to find their footing, Atlético Madrid have taken the initiative and are dominating the opposition across the table.
However, do the statistics back up the eye test when it comes to team performances so far? In this data analysis, we’ve crunched the data for you to identify the best performers in some of the most important metrics within the league.
Note that the analysis only includes La Liga until matchday 18 with some teams still on 17 or even 16 games played. However, we’ve mostly included per 90 statistics to even out the playing field a bit.
General performance
Before we delve into the analysis of specific phases of play, let’s first see which teams are over or underperforming so far in 2020/21. The first graph we’ll analyse depicts their offensive and defensive performances in %, which is a custom made metric that represents the variance between xG and goals and xGA and goals conceded respectively.
To put it simply, teams can tally positive or negative scores based on whether they overperform or underperform their xG values and the formula above gives them a % score based on that. Right from the bat, we can see a couple of very interesting things.
Atlético Madrid are certainly topping the charts here with an incredible overperformance in both categories, absolutely crushing their rivals. Diego Simeone’s team is having a great season both in terms of offensive and defensive styles of play and it’s showing in the data as well with the highest percentage in both the former (34.8%) and the latter (146.8%).
