I confess that I do not follow fotball particularly closely, but a column in the Independent on Saturday 15th August caught my eye. It was headed "The Statistics" and below were two bar charts that showed: (1) Points won by champions; (2) Points required to stay up. The two recorded time series are for the last 17 seasons.
I have just run regressions on these (sad, but there seemed to be a time trend) and discovered that the number of points needed to stay up is getting smaller at a statistically significant rate. Now this is curious, as there would seem to be no real reason for such a trend. It cannot continue for ever. But, of course, there is a simple trap that the data led into. The reason that there appeared to be a time trend was that the first three years were all high, and of course, they influenced the regression line. Remove those three outliers and then there is no trend. A caveat for the careless analyst.
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