The ups and downs of teams who need to win in the last matches of an EFL season

After nine months and 45 games, some teams are approaching a moment of truth. Saturday is the last day of the League One season. Playoff-chasing Sheffield Wednesday and Wycombe will go into their games feeling they need to win. So will relegation-threatened Fleetwood.

There are some games in which both teams still have something to play for, and others in which neither team have anything to play for.

Next Saturday we will reach the same stage in the Championship and League Two.

What should we expect?

On the final day of an EFL season dramatic things can happen. Strange results do occur. Not all of the time but more often than results in previous weeks would have led us to suppose.

EFL teams who need to win their last game – to gain automatic promotion, qualify for the playoffs or avoid relegation – have won about 20 per cent more often than they did in earlier games.

On this point I have changed my mind over the years as I have gathered more data. I followed John Maynard Keynes’s advice. “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Keynes was a successful investor as well as a famous economist, so his words are worth listening to.

The all-important question, however, is: do teams who need to win get the wins they need as often as the odds require?

I have kept detailed records of the final weekend of the last 20 Football League seasons – those from 2001-02 to 2020-21. Before each I noted teams who still had something to play for – those who needed a draw or a win to guarantee or give themselves a chance of automatic promotion, a playoff place or safety from relegation.

In most games neither team had anything to play for. In some games both teams had everything to play for. All of those games were similar in that both teams had the same motivation. Either it was equally high or equally low. We can say that the teams’ motivations were symmetrical.

What I want to do here is look at the games in which one team had something to play for and the other had nothing to play – games in which motivations were asymmetrical. There were 246 of them.

Teams who needed to win their last game for automatic promotion or a playoff place won 64 per cent of the time. Teams who needed to win their last game to escape relegation won 48 per cent of the time.

Then I looked at the results those teams had achieved in their previous 45 games. And this is what I found. Teams who needed to win their last game for automatic promotion or a playoff place had earlier in the season won 45 per cent of the time. And teams who needed to win their last game to evade relegation had earlier in the season won 26 per cent of the time.

So on the last day promotion-chasing teams won 19 per cent more often and relegation-fleeing teams won 22 per cent more often.

There were probably two things going on here. Teams who needed to win managed to raise their performance level. Their opponents who had nothing to play for performed at a lower level than they had before. The combination of those two changes produced results of which there had been no hint in previous performances.

Teams who needed to draw their last game did so 40 per cent of the time. There was little difference in that regard between teams aspiring to automatic promotion or the playoffs and teams trying to avoid relegation.

And the draw-rate on the last day for those teams was obviously much higher than on other days or in Football League games generally.

Teams chasing promotion in one form or another who needed to draw their last game did so 40 per cent of the time. They had drawn 29 per cent of earlier games. Teams fleeing relegation who needed to draw their last game did so 39 per cent of the time. They had drawn 28 per cent of earlier games. Over the whole 20 seasons the draw-rate in all Football League games was 27 per cent.

Yet another example of the strange results that can occur in final games.

The rule against time-wasting that is almost never enforced

Time-wasting. We see even more than usual in the last games of a season.

When a team would like the game to end with its current score they can increase the chance of that happening by keeping the ball dead for as long as possible in the time that remains.

It is crazy that in a global, multi-million pound sport the clock can be ticking down when the ball is out of play, but I have said that before.

There is one situation in which, so to speak, the ball is neither in play nor out of play – when it is in the goalkeeper’s hands.

The Laws of the Game are quite clear about how long this should be allowed to go on for. Law 12 says: “An indirect free kick is awarded if a goalkeeper, inside their penalty area, commits any of the following offences: controls the ball with the hand/arm for more than six seconds before releasing it…”

It is not uncommon to see the goalkeeper of a time-wasting team hold the ball for 20 seconds. How often does the referee award an indirect free kick?

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