About Football

When you look at a league table for any sport, you have to examine in detail the number of points for each team to get a good idea of how far each team is behind the leading team, or indeed, how far the leading team is in front of the rest.

Here is a real example. At one stage in the football season, the team I support was 18th. At first this sounds quite bad for a league with 24 teams. On closer inspection, I noticed that many of the teams were on the same nubmer of points and only differed by goal difference. In fact, in terms of points, my team was as close to the playoff positions as it was to the relegation slots. If instead of a table, these were all cars racing around a track, I would see easily that my team was right in the middle of the race even though there were 17 cars in front and only 5 cars behind.

Now you understand the purpose of this site.

Football League tables were the first I considered using to get a real picture of how well each team was doing. Originally, I used post-it notes along the wall of my office

In previous encounters with Google Maps, I have used the default placemarkers and set the mouseover to display appropriate information. The difference here is that football teams all have club badges which make great map icons and don't rely on a mouseover to see which team is which. There are many sources of these icon but the ones that work best are the ones with a transparency layer. Wikipedia has a great collection of these. Without a transparency layer, all the icons overlap a great deal and when teams are close together, this obscures information. Unfortunatly, no club icon is perfect and if the main icon colour matches the backgound (for example, blue over the sea) it's had to see but the transparency is still a good compromise.

Originally I used Google Maps. This worked quite well at the time and was better than anything else around at the time. The problem with Google Maps is you require a key and there are limitations on the number of views. This limitation is not a problem for the low traffic on my football site. In more recent times, Open Street Maps has become much better and there are no traffic restrictions so I have started using this instead of Google Maps.

The output format is a JavaScript file that conforms to the Open Street Map API.. I also make use of some JavaScript from Leaflet. Although this is simple in its construction, it becomes quite large when all 20 or 24 teams are included along with several sections of track for relegation, playoff regions, etc.

A quick search of the web shows that there are hundreds of sources of football league table information. Almost all these are designed for display on web pages and not for incorporating into applications where the information can be accessed easily. Although it is possible to parse web page tables, these often change as the web sites owners rebrand the site. The easiest way to parse the data would be from an XML source. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many of those around however, I found a good one from Football Web Pages and I used this for a few years until it moved to a different platform. The new platform allows me to use nodejs and JSON so now I use Football Web Pages API, which is free to use for small volumes. My usage is four times per day.

To show the teams on a race track the number of points a team has gained corresponds to a distance between the start and end positions of the race track. This means you have to determine the number of points that corresponds to the finish line, that is, the maximum number of points that any team can achieve.

Each team plays a match approximately twice per week but not all teams play on the same day. Most teams play on Saturdays with a few that play on Sunday. Mid-week games are usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday and some televised games are played on a Friday. During the season, this utility runs at 22:00 every day.