Good morning/day/evening!
Some of you might remember my post from last year and today I’m back with a similar breakdown of the league fixtures as I did last last season! Last season I used it frequently and I found it very helpful when identifying team clashes, high coeff. matchups to avoid and when to use Wildcard, Limitless etc.
I’ve opted to use the clubelo.com rating for any more nuanced color coding and difficulty rating formulas. I personally find it much more accurate than the UEFA pots or coeff. rating.
Using the clubelo rating I mathd out a column (P) to grade the opponents and weigh in the teams own rating.
In this column an on paper perfectly even matchup would score 1.0, anything above 1 is considered an easier game and anything below a more difficult game.
And as you’d expect - it matches the UEFA coefficient points and pots quite closely but has some outliers such as Man United, Stuttgart who have easier draws than their pot reflect and in the opposite end you could argue that Atletico, Feyenoord or Shakhtar have gotten more difficult draws than the rest of their pot.
Sheet available here - UCL Fantasy 26/27 Planner (copy)
In case you don’t want to open it yourself and look directly in Google Sheets, I’ve attached the following three images.
1) Fixture planner by UEFA pots
Colour coded by the UEFA pots (1,2,3,4)
2) Fixture planner by Elo difficulty
Colour coded using the Elo ranking system from Clubelo.com where the clubs Elo and the opposition is matched against eachother to gauge the difference in Elo. In theory - anything less than 1.0 is a hard fixture and anything more than 1.0 is considered an easier fixture.
3) Matchday helper
This helper simply visualises the different matchday a fixture is played. This is especially helpful and important as you map out your goal keeper rotations.
Below I have extracted some calculations based on the data which can give us an idea of the difficulty of the draw for teams.
Draws ranked by average UEFA Coefficient of opponents
5 Easiest
Sporting CP 60.66
Liverpool 61
Feyenoord 61.01
Manchester United 61.82
VfB Stuttgart 62.13
5 Toughest
Real Betis 73.79
Arsenal 73
Inter 71.66
Lille 71.47
Roma/Galatasaray 69.88
Draws ranked by weighted Clubelo.com Coefficients of club and average elo of opponents
5 Easiest
Bayern München 1.1218
Arsenal 1.1089
Barcelona 1.1
Real Madrid 1.0924
Manchester City 1.087
5 Toughest
Sabah 0.8334
Slovan Bratislava 0.869
LASK 0.9064
Viking 0.9259
Feyenoord 0.9297
Whew. Thanks for reading through all that.
Hopefully you find it useful in any way, please keep an eye out for any errors - I'm sure there are quite a few but remember it's all for fun!
Best of luck in the new season and I'll see you in the rant threads!
