Okay so today I wanted to see how that crazy 2012/13 Premier League season actually stacked up against the years right before and after it. You know, that year Man United won it but Fergie left, and all the usual spots seemed kinda messy. I figured just looking at the final table wasn’t enough, I needed to see the shifts for each team year-on-year.
Finding the Old League Tables
First thing: finding the actual final standings. I keep a bunch of old football almanacs and season review books on a shelf gathering dust, right? Dug those out. Flipped through them to find the final tables for 2010/11, 2011/12, 2012/13, and then 2013/14 to see what happened next. My fingers got kinda grubby from the old pages! For a couple of seasons, I was missing the physical book, so I pulled up my own old spreadsheets where I sometimes jot down stuff like this. Thank god I had those backups!
Setting Up My Messy Spreadsheet
Next step: fired up my spreadsheet app. Made four sheets, one for each season right in the same file. Then the tedious bit: started manually typing in the club names and their final positions for each year. You know, 1st place down to 20th, all lined up. Had a few typos at first – putting ‘West Bromwich Albion’ instead of just ‘West Brom’ one year, mixed up QPR and Reading once. Had to clean that mess up so everything matched properly. Almost spilled my coffee on the keyboard at one point too!
Calculating the Changes
This was the crunch part. Made a new sheet just for the comparison. Copied over the team names again. Then created columns for each season’s position. Next to them, I needed columns showing how many spots each team moved up or down from one year to the next.
- So for 2012/13 vs. 2011/12: simple math, right? =Position in 2013 minus Position in 2012. A negative number meant they dropped places.
- Then I repeated it for 2013/14 vs. 2012/13.
Finally, I did one extra column showing the net change comparing 2013 back to 2011, just to see the bigger two-year shift. Formulas saved my life here!
Spotting the Big Movers
With the numbers all filled in, I sorted the sheet by the biggest changes for that 2012/13 season compared to the year before (2011/12). And wow, some wild swings jumped out:
- Liverpool? Fell off a cliff! Way down.
- Swansea and West Brom? Absolutely flying high, big jumps up the table.
- Then looking at 2013/14 vs. 2013? Man United’s collapse right after Fergie left was stark, dropping like a rock. Meanwhile Liverpool surged back up. Just confirmed what we remember, but seeing the actual numbers was cool.
The net change over two years showed some teams like Everton were just super steady, hardly budged an inch.
What the Numbers Told Me
It really hit home how that 2012/13 season wasn’t just random. Flipping teams, big regressions for usual top sides, and mid-table clubs having an amazing year. The comparison showed the flux happening right before the whole Guardiola-Klopp era started changing things again. It was a proper transition year, messy and dramatic, and those little position changes for each club told that story way better than just the final table alone.
