The best of the rest in Scotland 2000-2014, Part II: Home teams

Last week I looked at the away performances of Scottish top-flight clubs since 2000, which revealed some surprising results.

This week I will do the same analysis, but for home teams. As before, I downloaded the data from XMLSOCCER.COM's free demo API and wrangled it using the XML package in R. All subsequent analyses were also done in R.

I focused on two measures of performance, average home goal difference (GD) and average Total Shots Ratio (TSR) per match. The former measures both points earned and win quality. While the latter is a measure of the degree to which one team controls the ball (in a subsequent post, I will show that these two variables are correlated at the match level).

As with my previous analysis, I hypothesized that one of the bigger non-Old-Firm clubs would be the "best of the rest," for example Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen, Dundee United, or Motherwell.

As you can see in the bar plot below, my hypothesis was confirmed as the Edinburgh club Hearts has the 3rd best average home GD, followed by Aberdeen and Hibs.

A similar pattern can be seen in the bar plot of average TSR below; Hearts is the best of the rest again.

Unlike my analysis of away team performances, the current analysis did not reveal any major surprises. Heart, Hibs and Aberdeen are all relatively big clubs by Scottish standards and one would expect a bigger club to have a better record over time than a smaller club with fewer resources.

However, in my previous analysis of away teams, Inverness Caledonian Thistle (ICT) and Falkirk were the best of the rest with regard to average GD and average TSR respectively, despite both clubs being relatively small by Scottish standards.

It is important to note that Hearts was near the top of the heap in the away team analyses too. Their best-of-the-rest rankings both home and away are as follows.

Best of the Rest Rankings for Hearts (2000-2014)
Average Home Goal Difference	1st
Average Away Goal Difference	2nd
Average Total Shots Ratio (Home)	1st
Average Total Shots Ratio (Away)	2nd

Thus, I think it's safe to say that between 2000 and 2014, Hearts was, on the whole, the best team in Scotland, outside of the Old Firm.

Too bad they got relegated...