What happened at Veikkausliiga 2015?

  Stuff like this chart below from is my mates blog 1907shots and I explain them here a bit. There is a lot more of them at his website, but unfortunately in Finnish only. If you want to make up your own charts and data everything from the season can be found at the match centre.

In short what the chart tells you is that SJK, RoPS and HJK were both the "best" and the "luckiest" this season followed by Lahti and Inter by a large margin. The unluckiest of all was MIFK, and the worst were KTP and Ilves. The final standings accept this theory rather well, and the biggest loser in terms of luck was Jaro who got relegated directly. They still had their chances of survival until the last round where they needed to win over SJK who needed to win to win the title!  However not scoring is not only unlucky, it is also a feature and lack of class and even if it was hard to see in that particular match which team was the champion    on the pitch during the game it was easy to see after the final whistle from the scoreboard.

Top-3 were the only clubs that you could think of winning the title, and as they were really close in terms of final points there is a lot of room for speculation.

It was a very poor season for a random and neutral spectator. Poor quality and slow football from the start from most of the clubs. No risks were taken and in case someone got a lead they in general were happy to try to defend that. The number one reason for this is that there are too many matches in a short period of time and tiredness and lack of spare feet takes over. Of course as there is very little money available it means that there not that many quality footballers either, and for example Ilves were honest in their semi-professional approach and their players worked full-time outside of football! Some handicap there!

There were a few good things too and the best of them was that there was a real derby in Helsinki too as HIFK had won the promotion the earlier season after dramatic events, and all those derbies were, and will be sold out also in the future.

SJK were ranked as 2nd at odds around 10 before the season. Big budget, large quality squad but the only foreseeable scenario for them winning title was that HJK should fail big time -as they did. SJK were strong in the defense but boring and cautious in the attack, and performancewise they were a big disappointment!

HJK failed miserably in their pre-season training which led to massive injury crisis during the season and at "best"  in August they had about a dozen players sidelined. In fact between Aug 5th and Sept 27th HJK played 12 competitive matches out of which they won once, Lahti 1-0 in early Aug. The new signings also failed except Tanaka, and their European campaign was a mess despite being very close to qualify at least to Europa League for a few moments. To get kicked out at extra time after gk mistakes was just the icing of the cake. Still they should had won the title,but losing to SJK a few rounds before the last round in an even match was the deciding moment. HJK's "top" signing of the season Mike Havenaar appeared as the worst signing ever as he was not interested and was all the time in a wrong role in a wrong team. Not all his fault I guess and he is doing ok back in his native Holland. He was best used as a mascot and a compagnion and interpreter to the real top man Atomu Tanaka.

RoPS started the league with 3 consecutive losses as the manager experiment with new defensing formation which was no success, and they kind of lost the title already in April despite being the most solid of the league for big parts of the season. In my papers they were the moral winners and also enjoyed the services of leagues best player Mostagh Yaghoubi. Below is the start of the season for RoPS with also the league cup final loss and cup loss of 7-3 to Inter!

Sat	04/04/15	LEC	RoPS	0 - 2	HJK	View events	More info
Sun	12/04/15	VEI	RoPS	1 - 3	HJK	View events	More info
Thu	16/04/15	SUC	Inter Turku	7 - 3	RoPS	View events	More info
Sun	19/04/15	VEI	SJK	1 - 0	RoPS	View events	More info
Thu	23/04/15	VEI	RoPS	0 - 4	Inter Turku

At the bottom fight one could argue that if Jaro 's top player and scorer Emet would had been fit they would survived easily, but he was not. KTP deserved to go down, and they were thrashed in the play-offs in the hands of PK-35.

#		Team	MP	W	D	L	F	A	D	P	Last 5 matches	H2H
1		SJK	33	18	6	9	50	22	+28	60	WWWLW
2		RoPS	33	17	8	8	44	29	+15	59	WWLWW
3		HJK	33	16	10	7	45	30	+15	58	WWWWD
4		Inter Turku	33	13	10	10	45	35	+10	49	LLWLW
5		Lahti	33	12	12	9	38	36	+2	48	LDDWW
6		Mariehamn	33	11	12	10	30	36	-6	45	WLWLL
7		HIFK	33	10	13	10	42	42	+0	43	WWDLW
8		Ilves	33	11	7	15	32	48	-16	40	WLLLL
9		KuPS	33	9	11	13	32	40	-8	38	LLWLD
10		VPS	33	8	9	16	36	43	-7	33	LDWLL
11		KTP	33	7	11	15	27	44	-17	32	LDWDD
12		Jaro	33	6	11	16	27	43	-16	29	LDLLD
Champions League qualifiers UEFA Europa League Relegation Play-off Relegation

There is a plenty of time to discuss what might happen 2016. A lot will change, HJK will be totally new. League cup to kick off in January.

Terms used in this article:

PDO – 

I’m just going to copy the definition from James Grayson.

“PDO is the sum of a teams shooting percentage (goals/shots on target) and its save percentage (saves/shots on target against). It treats each shot as having an equal chance of being scored – regardless of location, the shooter, or the identity or position of the ‘keeper and any defenders. Despite this obvious shortcoming it regresses heavily towards the mean – meaning that it has a large luck component. In fact, over the course of a Premiership season, the distance a teams PDO is from 1000 is ~60% luck.”

SoTR – Shots on Target Ratio