Uncle Jeff’s Coefficient: Every Premier League club’s returns compared to last season’s results | OneFootball

Arsenal are only third and Manchester United are just sixth when it comes to the Premier League‘s most improved teams on last season, while unsurprisingly Liverpool and Wolves have endured the biggest downturn.

The fixture list can be deceiving. Sometimes certain clubs might be doing better or worse than you might think, when you compare results from one season to the next.

This is where Uncle Jeff’s Coefficient comes in handy.

What’s that? You might be getting your head around new-fangled terminology like ‘xG’ or ‘field tilt’, but the Uncle Jeff Coefficient? Who’s Uncle Jeff and what on earth is his coefficient? All us to explain.

Regular listeners to the Totally Football Show podcast might be familiar with regular contributor Benji Lanyado of Picfair.

Lanyado regularly updates the listeners of his Uncle Jeff’s painstaking work to compare every club’s results in the corresponding fixtures last season. His old notes are genuinely a thing of beauty.

It’s pretty simple, really. Nottingham Forest picked up three points away at Liverpool this weekend, but how does that compare to last season? (Same result, actually.)

All the differences in results are totted up and compared to the same return from last term.

Easy. But what about the promoted and relegated teams, you ask? A fair question. In this equation, they essentially take one another’s place – so Championship winners Leeds United take on 18th-place Leicester City, runners-up Burnley take the place of Ipswich Town and Sunderland replace Southampton when it comes to like-for-like results.

Given that, it’s no major surprise that Sunderland are the ‘most improved’ team in the Premier League this season; Southampton were relegated with just 12 points last term and the Black Cats already have nine more points after just 12 matches.

Now, a brilliant new website – UncleJeffsCoefficient.com – has put in the hard yards and crunched the numbers, looking an every corresponding result. They even have a ‘projected’ final table based on these results that make for interesting reading.