This article continues the series of assessing the winners of Europe’s top five leagues. We’ve been using data to find an all-time champion for each league. In the last two articles we analysed the Premier League and the Bundesliga.
This article will focus on Spain’s Primera División, otherwise known as La Liga. Beginning in 1929, La Liga has seen nine different champions over its 92 years.
More recently, Barcelona and Real Madrid have dominated La Liga. Between them, the two El Clásico clubs have won 17 of the 21 titles on offer since 2000. Valencia and Atlético Madrid have each won two apiece.
With an even greater number of seasons to analyse than the Premier League or the Bundesliga, I again used Python to extract the data quickly and efficiently, before completing analysis in Excel.
The below graphic shows the top five La Liga champions since 2000.
3. 2012/13 Barcelona: 7.30
This season was Barcelona’s first without Pep Guardiola. Despite the Catalan’s departure, the club won a 22nd league title, leading the table for the entire season and equalling the points record set the previous season by Real Madrid.
2. 2011/12 Real Madrid: 7.85
Real Madrid broke a number of league records this season. It won the most points (100), scored the most goals (121), had the best goal difference (+89), and won the most games (32). Lionel Messi’s 50 league goals in 37 games (another record) wasn’t enough to stop Madrid claiming a record 32nd title.
1. 2015/16 Barcelona: 8.79
Barcelona retained its crown as the best team in Spain this season, winning back-to-back titles after a Treble the previous season. Luis Suarez won the Pichichi award for the highest goalscorer – the first time since 2009 it hadn’t been won by either Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. This team had the most possession of all the teams studied (67.1%), and scored the second-most goals (112). It conceded the fewest penalties (1) and collected the fewest red cards (1) too.
2021/22: ?
Will Atlético Madrid challenge for the title again after breaking the duopoly in 2021? Check back at the end of the season to see if this year’s champion can challenge Barcelona 2015/16 for the title of the best team to win La Liga.
Methodology
Historic stats for club performance are available from fbref.com. These have been supplemented with data from transfermarkt.co.uk.
The script uses the Beautiful Soup library to extract the data from the HTML source code. The script then stores it in a Pandas DataFrame and exports to an Excel spreadsheet. Each DataFrame is exported to a separate worksheet.
Once in Excel, I standardised the data, renaming columns and removing unnecessary rows and columns. I then combined the data into a single worksheet, normalised, and averaged to give an overall adjusted score for each league champion since 2000.