The investigation of the league ratings of the Super League Football teams by performance data

In today's world, the game of football is one of the main sports types that utilize the sports sciences to the highest degree. In that respect, the aim of this study is to investigate whether the physical performance data of the 2017/2018 Turkish Super League football clubs had an impact on their league rankings after 17 weeks. In this study, we used data from all the 18 football clubs competing in the Turkish Super League. By looking at different physical performance parameters of each team such as the total running distance, running distance over 20km/s, running forwards distance over 20km/s, running backwards distance over 20km, the average height of all teams, ball recovery times, running distance over 20km when the ball is possessed, running distance over 20km/s when the ball is with the opponent, the total play area when the ball is possessed, the total play area when the ball is with the opponent, the total distance travelled when the ball is possessed, the total distance travelled when the ball is with the opponent and the depth of the defensive lines, we tried to reach conclusions on the impact of each team's performance in these parameters on their league rankings after 17 weeks. The relevant data has been provided by Instat Sentio Sports – data provider of the league. In this study, we observed that there is a high negative correlation between the distance travelled by each team and their rankings in the league. Subsequently, we also observed a high positive correlation between the distance travelled when the ball is possessed and their league rankings. Other physical performance parameters did not yield to any significant correlation against their league rankings. As a result, out of the 13 different physical performance parameters analyzed, only the two described above have been found to have some meaningful correlation against the league ranking of each team. As we have seen from this study and a limited number of other studies in the literature, it can be clearly observed that there are many technical, tactical and other extrinsic factors as parameters impacting the league rankings in which physical performance-based data alone won't be sufficient enough to explain. Keywords: Football, match analysis, ranking