Even the best educated international football fans can sometimes get confused when looking at the South African Premier Soccer League table. The columns showing wins and losses look exactly the same as for any other league, but the real balance of power may be hard to ascertain based solely on these numbers. There are a couple of reasons for that, from wild swings in schedule difficulty to the low-scoring nature of South African football.
If you are starting from the form table and trying to learn more about how PSL really works, you should keep the following things in mind.
PSL Is a Top-Heavy League
The first thing to understand about PSL is that a handful of teams operate with much bigger budgets than the rest of the league. In addition to 15-time champions Mamelodi Sundowns, the elite tier also includes perennial contenders Orlando Pirates and Kaiser Chiefs. The rest of the league is perpetually playing catch-up, and facing a top-3 squad is a very daunting proposition for almost any other PSL club. This is why a team that played its matches against the favourites early might appear lower in the table than it objectively deserves to be. To truly account for the presence of the heavyweights, you would need to go beyond the table and look at the schedule for each team, determining how much it’s going to harden in the near future.
Beware of Low Scoring Contenders
If you are expecting the level of scoring typical for the best international leagues, PSL might leave you disappointed. A lot of squads lack the dynamic firepower needed for offensively minded football, instead resorting to very conservative tactics to win points. In such an environment, a team that enjoyed good fortune in matches decided by a single goal could appear to be good even if it’s really much closer to average. That’s why goal difference can be a better predictor of future performance than the win/loss record, reflecting the fact that so many wins were eked out by scrappy defence and a single lucky shot on goal. When combined with an uneven schedule, this factor can produce quirky outcomes.
Pay Attention to Remaining Games
In South Africa it’s not rare to have some matches delayed to allow one of the teams to take part in an international competition. While such games are typically played out before the season ends, they are temporarily missing from the table. If you ignore this reality, the table can give you a completely wrong impression about where each team stands in the race. Since it’s normally the strongest teams that play in other competitions and thus miss national league games most frequently, the impact of these ‘games in hand’ can be tremendous. That’s why you should always pay attention to the Games played column, which many casual fans never bother to do when evaluating odds on a soccer betting site.
Don’t Trust the Table Until Late in the Season
Any evaluation of small sample data is bound to be ripe with fallacies, and that’s especially true when a dataset is as imbalanced as is the case with the PSL table. As a season progresses and the teams face opponents of various strength levels at home and away, the predictive power of the table starts to increase. Looking at the standings after 20 games is much different than doing it in the first month of the season, and after a certain point you can start trusting what you see. It’s tempting to jump on early returns and try to catch a hot team on its way up, but this approach is very risky and will often land you in trouble.
