It is difficult at any moment in the season to know how well your team is really doing because everyone has played different matches. This is an attempt to quantify the affect of fixture difficulty on the table and track its progression through the season.

Methodology

There are many ways this can be done, and my method is by no means the best for every possibility. But here is how it will be done:

I have calculated the number of points an average Premier League side gets when playing against each table position at Home and Away over the last six seasons. These values look as follows:

When Opponent is Away.

When Opponent is at Home.

This gives us a simple value that we can add up every week to determine how difficult each team's fixtures have been. Once we have that we can normalize the table by dividing each teams actual pts by their fixture difficulty and multiplying it by the average fixture difficulty.

(Note that the table positions of every opponent faced for the whole season is updated every week. This means there will be two factors at play with every update – 1. The results of the week. 2. A correction for the changed table positions of previous matches. I will report both each week.)

For Wk07 it looks as follows:

Fixture Difficulty

(Higher number is easier)

No surprise to see Liverpool with the easiest set of fixtures, and Wolves with the hardest.

Normalized Premier League Table

(EDIT: Fixed image links)