Arsenal have had a most unusual season of highs and lows. After a rough start to the campaign, the ship seems to have steadied. Robin van Persie is on pace for a record setting season; his 19 goals so far are only one less than last year's 20 scored by Golden Boot winners Carlos Tevez and Dimitar Berbatov.

With the pressure and excitement of each and every week's matches, it's sometimes easy to lose the overall plot of how a season has evolved in the league as a whole. Since we are just past the halfway point of the season, I thought I'd take a look at a couple of trends in teams' output in the Premier League this season.

With a quarter of the Premier League season wrapped up, the unavoidable reality is that Liverpool hasn't performed up to the level that many fans had hoped they would. They haven't seemed especially poor perhaps, but clearly they haven't hit the sorts of highs they did in the second half of 2010-11 that had fans talking about the squad being a few tweaks away from legitimate contenders after finishing out the season with the third best record—and very nearly the second best up until stumbling through their final two matches—in the league under Kenny Dalglish.

Untold Arsenal on Twitter @UntoldArsenal By DogFace Referee: Mark Clattenburg Assistant 1: Simon Beck Assistant 2: Stephen Child 4th Official: Andy D'Urso Good morning stat-fans and welcome to RefWatch! You'll be pleased to know that I've ironed out a few kinks in the graphs with regards to the span of seasonal data and the comparative [.

Going global: Birthplaces of Premier League players (excluding UK).

Another summer is on its way out with Arsenal barely making a splash in the transfer market. Once again it looks like Arsenal will be relying on youth this season. It got me thinking are Arsenal really good at producing players from their youth academy who are capable of playing in the Premier League?

In the next installment of "what happened last season in the Premier League?", here are season totals on teams' defensive prowess. Much has been made of Arsenal's inability to defend well and its need to improve defense during this transfer window. But the numbers tell a slightly different story - at least in part.

It wasn't all that long ago when playing midfield seemed to require more height than ever to crowd the center of the pitch. As a matter of fact, the average height of professional footballers has been increasing for a number of years now. The latest Professional Football Players Observatory report of the demographics of footballers in Europe reveals that players in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Denmark on average are around 1.

I've been looking for a positive way to say goodbye to Blackpool who were relegated after playing a single spirited and entertaining season in the Premier League. So here's my swan song for the Tangerines.
Corners are neither the most common nor the most efficient way to score. But as it turns out, Ian Holloway's men were the season's Corner Kings.

In this first part of Carlos Ruiz According To Heat Graphs, the Brotherly Game introduces every heat graph from games that MLS has on MLSsoccer.com. The heat graphs are part of MLS' new Chalkboards on its Matchcenter section of MLSsoccer.com.

Each heat graph's coloring shows the locations where a player is for lengths of time during a game.

Welcome to infographic week. Over the next five days, I'll have charts, graphs, and other visual lunacy in an attempt to further dissect the season that was. Today, Liverpool's league points week by week.
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• Liverpool's points per game under Hodgson = 1.

The famous World Soccer magazine came with 'New Look' starting April issue. The new look was not so much in the quality of the paper of the design of the cover, but in the content and material itself.
I found it very interesting to take a little journey into the new look as it reflects a new world of soccer.

The famous World Soccer magazine came with 'New Look' starting April issue. The new look was not so much in the quality of the paper of the design of the cover, but in the content and material itself.
I found it very interesting to take a little journey into the new look as it reflects a new world of soccer.

Similar to the graph showing the offensive production of teams, this graph shows their defensive production. I've reversed the direction of the axes so that the upper right quadrant in both graphs is the preferred location for teams. A key difference between the two is that I haven't generated a model to determine estimated points based on defensive production, so both color and bubble size indicate a team's actual points.

Here's a different way of looking at positive leverage. In the spirit of analyses that have looked at teams' ability to generate and take advantage of chances in a match, it's a way to identify teams that both generate positive leverage situations and manage to, well, leverage them for a win.
Here's what the graphs show.

Here's a different way of looking at positive leverage. In the spirit of analyses that have looked at teams' ability to generate and take advantage of chances in a match, it's a way to identify teams that both generate positive leverage situations and manage to, well, leverage them for a win.
Here's what the graphs show.

I thought I'd provide a quick and ready update on offensive production metrics this season in the EPL. Here are the overall averages per team/match, ordered from highest to lowest scoring teams, as of late February, 2011.
You can see that Man U and Arsenal lead the pack in producing goals (and Chelsea and Man City not too far behind); Birmingham brings up the rear, along with Wigan, Wolves, Fulham, and West Ham.

I thought I'd provide a quick and ready update on offensive production metrics this season in the EPL. Here are the overall averages per team/match, ordered from highest to lowest scoring teams, as of late February, 2011.
You can see that Man U and Arsenal lead the pack in producing goals (and Chelsea and Man City not too far behind); Birmingham brings up the rear, along with Wigan, Wolves, Fulham, and West Ham.

Woke up this morning to learn that my favorite new marketing campaign has "gone viral", with Jeremiah Oshan attributing the 16,000 season ticket sales that took place before the ad ran to the sexy campaign:

It should be noted that the Whitecaps' promos appear to be even more successful, as they've reportedly sold close to 16,000 season tickets already.

Woke up this morning to learn that my favorite new marketing campaign has "gone viral", with Jeremiah Oshan attributing the 16,000 season ticket sales that took place before the ad ran to the sexy campaign:

It should be noted that the Whitecaps' promos appear to be even more successful, as they've reportedly sold close to 16,000 season tickets already.

I was planning on running this series every five games, but for one reason or another I didn't get to it after the 25th game of the season; the 3-1 loss at Old Trafford. I really wish I had because now 26 games into the season, what I have to share isn't pleasant.

After the 2-2 draw against Fulham at Villa Park we now have 29 points.

If you want to know how amazing yesterday's comeback by Newcastle against Arsenal was, consider the expected point value of first and second half goals.
One way to compare the point value of goals it so calculate their values depending on when they were scored. To keep the analysis simple (after today's match), I was wondering simply whether first half goals are more valuable than second half goals?