Man, I never thought I’d be spending a whole weekend digging through the historical head-to-head statistics for Deportivo Alavés and Villarreal CF. Seriously. These aren’t the El Clásico stats, right? This all kicked off last Tuesday when I was having a beer with my neighbor, Tony. Tony is usually a decent guy, but when it comes to football, he’s absolutely convinced that Villarreal holds some kind of untouchable, historical psychological upper hand against mid-table La Liga teams.
He was boasting that Villarreal always had the mental edge against teams outside the top six, claiming they were just inherently tougher in those specific grudge matches. I pushed back hard. I argued that Alavés, while maybe never reaching the same European heights as the Yellow Submarine, are the kind of stubborn, nasty, defensive team that consistently messes up other clubs’ plans and that their historical grit beats Villarreal’s occasional flashiness. We were just shouting over each other, totally unable to agree on whose perception was right, so I said: “Fine. I’m gonna prove it with the numbers. I’m going to see exactly what the history shows.”
The Scrape and the Spreadsheet Mess
I immediately went hunting. I didn’t mess around with professional data science tools or anything fancy. I just needed cold, hard facts. I pulled up every reliable football stats site I could find that listed historical fixtures. I focused exclusively on La Liga meetings—cups and friendlies don’t count for psychological rivalries; they are too random, in my book. I wrestled the data into a spreadsheet, which looked like total garbage for the first hour because I kept confusing home and away results, and some sites had slightly different date formats.
What I needed to know was simple: Who wins more? But more importantly, when they win, do they dominate, or is it always a tight squeeze? I filtered the data down to only the matches since Alavés returned to the top flight consistently in the mid-2010s, because the really old stuff from 20 years ago is kind of irrelevant to the current mental battle between the squads.
- I tallied up the full historical results, counting every meeting since they first played in the top division back in the late 90s.
- I isolated the recent history—the results from the last 15 league matches.
- I calculated the average goal difference in all games that ended in a decisive win (excluding draws, which tell you nothing about dominance).
The first look at the total win count slapped me in the face. Total wins? Villarreal were definitely ahead. No argument there. Tony was initially right about the sheer volume of victories. But that’s not the whole story. I drilled deeper into the specific margins and location of those victories.
The Surprising Home Advantage Discovery
This is where it got interesting and where my initial feeling started to look a lot smarter. While Villarreal held the overall edge, I noticed a massive, undeniable pattern. When Alavés won against Villarreal, they usually won at home, and those victories were consistently gritty—mostly 1-0 or 2-1 results. Pure scrappiness, defensive effort, and relying on the crowd. But when Villarreal won, especially in the last five years, their victories tended to be broader blowouts—3-0, 4-1. They were more explosive, but perhaps less reliable over time.
The stats screamed one thing very clearly: Home field is absolutely everything in this specific rivalry. I discovered that of the last ten meetings, the home team had won seven times, with two draws and only one away win. And that single away win was during a bizarre COVID season where crowds were gone, completely skewing the usual atmosphere and home advantage factor.
So, what did the stats actually tell me? Not that Villarreal had the universal mental edge, but that they only had it when the conditions were near-perfect or when they exploited Alavés away from home. Alavés, on the other hand, leaned entirely on their stadium, Mendizorrotza, to generate their wins, making them less predictable but absolutely formidable when the crowd was behind them. They turn their home field into a proper fortress.
I compiled my findings into a concise summary of bullet points and marched right over to Tony’s house later that evening. I showed him the raw data, specifically emphasizing the monumental home/away split. I said: “See? Villarreal might have more wins overall, but Alavés has the psychological edge when it matters most—when they are defending their own turf. It’s not about consistent victory; it’s about fortress mentality and mental fortitude under specific high-pressure conditions.”
He grumbled and complained, tried to argue about expected goals (xG) which I hadn’t even bothered calculating because this was just about settling a silly argument, not publishing an academic paper. But he had to admit the home-field stats were brutal and undeniable. It took me about six hours of frustrating data manipulation to definitively win a two-minute argument, but man, was it satisfying to see the data back up the gut feeling. The history isn’t just about who scores more goals; it’s about who breaks under pressure, and in this specific fixture, both teams seem to absolutely despise playing away against the other.