Which team wins more using blackburn rovers vs preston north end f.c. stats？ We analyze the derby data!

You know, sometimes you just get obsessed with a random, pointless question, and you can’t let it go. That’s exactly how this whole Blackburn vs. Preston North End stats deep dive started. It wasn’t because I’m some fancy sports analyst; I was just trying to avoid fixing the bloody garden fence, and I got dragged into an argument with my neighbor, Dave, who is a massive PNE guy.

He was going on and on about how PNE invented football and how Rovers were just a flash in the pan. I, being a neutral but slightly annoying data nerd, decided to shut him up the only way I knew how: compiling every single competitive match they ever played against each other and seeing who actually won more. I wasn’t messing around. I set out to map the entire history of the Lancashire Derby, start to finish.

The Grunt Work: Digging Up the Historical Mess

First, I had to define the scope. We’re talking 1884 to today. League matches, FA Cup, League Cup, the whole lot. I didn’t care about friendlies or those weird war-time leagues; only official head-to-heads counted. This was the first hurdle. If you’ve ever tried to pull consistent data on football matches from the 1890s, you know it’s a massive pain in the neck. Records are spotty, scores sometimes change depending on the archive, and sometimes I just had to take the word of some dusty old football history forum.

I started by gathering the fixtures. I hit up three main online historical databases, cross-referencing every single game. I literally sat there for two afternoons, coffee going cold, copy-pasting match dates, venues, results, and the competition into one hideous Excel spreadsheet. I needed four key columns:

• Date and Competition
• Blackburn Goals
• Preston Goals
• Result (BR Win, PNE Win, Draw)

The total count hovered around 150 official matches. That’s a decent sample size, but man, sorting this data was brutal. I had to manually check for transcription errors because some early records use abbreviations that look like typos now. I remember finding one match listed in 1908 where the final score was written as ‘4-0’, but the text beneath implied a draw. Had to dig into archived newspaper reports just to confirm that score. Took me half an hour for one match!

Crunching the Ugly Numbers

Once I felt reasonably sure I had a clean set of data—or as clean as 140-year-old sports data can be—I started running the tally. I wanted to see the raw dominance, total wins only.

Step one: Tally the wins. I used a simple COUNTIF function in the spreadsheet, separating them into three categories: BR Wins, PNE Wins, and Draws. The first shock was how many draws there were early on. Teams seemed obsessed with sharing the points back in the day.

Step two: Segmenting the data. The full historical tally is interesting, but football evolves. I figured I needed to look at specific eras to see who dominated when. I decided to break it down into:

• Pre-WWII Era (1884–1939)
• Post-War Era (1946–1992)
• Modern Era (1992–Present, covering the Premier League and modern Championship structure)

I processed the segment data, and this is where the picture really cleared up. In the early days, Preston North End was a powerhouse, clearly holding the upper hand, capitalizing on their “Invincibles” reputation. They grabbed a solid early lead in the win column.

However, when I moved into the later decades, particularly the Modern Era, Blackburn Rovers absolutely ran away with it. Their period in the top flight, especially that Premier League title run, translated into serious dominance over PNE when they did meet. It wasn’t even close during that stretch.

The Shocking Results Emerge

After all that painstaking work, the answer to the question—which team wins more overall—finally appeared on the screen. I was ready to call Dave and gloat, but I paused and looked at the overall count again.

Overall, after nearly 150 competitive games, the totals were stunningly tight. Seriously tight. Blackburn Rovers held the historical advantage, but only by a whisker. We’re talking about a difference of maybe three or four wins across the entire history of the fixture. I had to double-check the arithmetic, thinking I’d messed up one of the crucial subtotals.

I leaned back and laughed. All that effort, arguing with Dave, avoiding fixing the fence, to find out that over 140 years, the derby is essentially deadlocked. The data showed that while PNE dominated the very beginning, and BR dominated the modern peak, the full history reveals a level playing field.

I called Dave immediately and just sent him the final spreadsheet, without comment. He called back twenty minutes later, totally deflated. He expected one of us to have a clear 15 or 20 win lead. The data didn’t give either of us bragging rights. It just showed that this derby is perhaps the most balanced and hard-fought in English football history. And that, surprisingly, was the real win for me. It wasn’t about proving a point; it was about uncovering a genuine football mystery, right there in the data.

I still haven’t fixed the fence, by the way. Too busy finding the historical win rate of Huddersfield Town vs. Barnsley now.