"Which is the best football team of all time?" This is the debate raise in every football fans and in every corner around the world.The answers might be mighty Brazil in 1970 , irresistible Hungary of early 50s , Netherlands team of the 1970s ,Pep Guardiola's Barcelona Or Liverpool in 1980s.It seems like a natural question to debate that 'Who has been the best of all time?'and very difficult to say one name among these mention above.we might not have an conclusion to this big question – yet – but we can certainly find out the best team ever played in English soil.
Fans of beautiful football look away now. The greatest ever team is apparently the Chelsea team of the 2005/06 season.
Defensive skills
To figure out which team from which era tops the rankings, McHale and Baker created a statistical model of team strengths. They used this to analyse goal data from 200,000 matches in England and Wales that occurred between 1888, when the Football League was founded, and 2012 in the top four English leagues, the FA Cup and the League Cup.
In the model, each team scores goals at a rate determined by its attack ability divided by the opposite team's defensive skills,
With an extra boost for the home team to model home advantage. Using the model, McHale and Baker could work out the most likely outcome of any English football match played over the 124 year study period – and use the results to calculate which was the all-time greatest team.
Doing so revealed that the Chelsea team of 2005/06 comes out top, followed by the Manchester United team of 2007/08 and Arsenal's 2003/04 squad of "invincibles", which went unbeaten in the league. The similarly invincible Preston North End team from 1888 came just tenth.
"As a Liverpool fan, I was convinced they would at some point be the best, so it was a bit of a surprise," says McHale – the club's 1987/88 squad is ranked fourth.
Best of the best
An alternative measure looks at a team's strongest average performance over a 10 year period, and gives the same top three teams.
A third measure, dominance, gives the probability of a team winning against the second-best team over a 10-year period. The Manchester United of 1992-2002 come out on top with a 37.7 per cent chance of beating their next best rival, closely followed by Liverpool during 1979-89 and Wolverhampton Wanderers in 1951-61.
As well as coming up with all-time rankings, the pair's model lets them set teams from different eras against each other. "Even the guys in the physics department can't time travel, but with this model you can," says McHale.
For example, a match between Manchester United's 1998 team would have a 28.9 per cent chance of beating Liverpool's 1980 team, but a 39.7 per cent chance of losing the game. There's a 31.4 per cent chance the two teams would draw.
Out of time
"I think it is interesting, but it just focuses on what happens on the pitch," says sports historian Matthew Taylor of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. "It's very difficult to wrench them out of the social and cultural context of the period and imagine how they would compete against each other."
"You need to be careful how literally you take this," agrees McHale, because the model can't account for wide-ranging shifts in the training and diets of all players over a number of decades. "I cannot accept any modern day team wouldn't absolutely destroy Preston North End 1888."
Sanjit Atwal, who runs football stats site Squawka, says the model's top picks are in line with what he would have chosen, but he's not sure the model will work as well in other countries where football is played according to different tactics. "They are weighing attack and defence equally. In other styles of play, possession of the ball is very different."
As for whether this will settle the argument of the greatest team ever, these statistics are just more fuel for the debate, says Atwal. "Fans will take whatever they can out of the data to win an argument."
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