Man, I gotta tell you, trying to keep up with the league standings this year, specifically looking at how Real Betis is doing versus, weirdly enough, CD Leganés, has been an absolute grind. It’s not like tracking the top Premier League teams where the data just sits there, perfectly organized. Nah, this required some real legwork. I promised myself I’d document the whole thing, the messy reality of trying to track two teams in two completely different phases of their season.
The Messy Start: Why I Even Bothered Tracking This
I started this tracking project a couple of months back, mainly because of a stupid argument I got into with my brother-in-law, Dave. Dave’s obsessed with the big clubs, only cares about the top four in La Liga. I was telling him that the real test of a club’s strength isn’t just winning, it’s managing the expectation of winning, and sometimes the teams fighting tooth and nail in the second tier (like Leganés is doing) are putting in more consistent effort than the ones floating near the top (like Betis).
Dave just rolled his eyes. He challenged me. He said, “Okay, smart guy. Prove it. Track Betis’s performance week-to-week, especially their points accumulation, and compare it to Leganés’s fight for promotion. If Betis slips even once, you win. If they hold that top-tier spot easily, you owe me a ridiculously expensive dinner.”
I shook on it. Instantly regretted it. I thought it would be easy. Turns out, tracking the granular details of two teams whose games often happen at totally different times and whose league tables update on different schedules is a nightmare. I decided to really dig into the data and not rely on some aggregated app that smooths out the rough edges. I wanted the real picture.
The Grind: Building the Spreadsheet from Scratch
My first step wasn’t downloading some fancy API or coding a scraper—I don’t have time for that nonsense. My first step was dragging out my ancient, dusty laptop and opening an Excel sheet. I labeled columns: Date, Betis Points, Betis Rank, Leganés Points, Leganés Rank, Notes (Crucial Games).
I had to manually refresh about four different sports news websites every Monday morning. Why four? Because the Spanish sports sites are notorious for updating standings only after the last Monday game is tallied, and often they disagree on tie-breakers for the first 12 hours. I’d have one site listing Betis at 3rd, and another at 4th, based on goal difference they hadn’t fully factored in yet. I had to cross-reference and calculate the true standing myself. It was maddening.
I started seeing patterns. Betis, while generally high up, had these frustrating periods where they’d draw a game they absolutely should have won, or they’d struggle against a mid-table team. The data points were static, but the feeling of their hold on the top spot felt so fragile. I would type furiously into my “Notes” section: “Betis drew 0-0. Felt like a loss. They are coasting. Leganés won ugly, 1-0. Pure grit.”
The sheer effort of logging this information twice a week started draining me. My wife kept asking why I was so glued to football stats when I used to barely watch the games. I told her it was crucial research. In reality, I was just too stubborn to admit to Dave I should have never taken the bet.
- I spent over 15 hours just verifying point totals across three weeks.
- I created five separate graphs attempting to plot momentum vs. raw ranking.
- I wasted two full Sunday afternoons waiting for a Leganés game to finish just so I could input their final points before Monday morning.
The Current Reality: Is the Top Spot Held by Grit or Luck?
This brings us to the current update. After tracking every single game, what I’ve realized is that Betis’s grip on that top-tier position—the one Dave was so confident in—is shaky. It’s not just about the points; it’s about the underlying performance that the points don’t fully capture. I had to look past the league table itself. I focused on goal difference momentum. When they slip, they really slip.
I finished my final calculation last night. I stayed up until 1 AM, staring at the numbers, trying to find a bias, but the numbers don’t lie. Betis is still there, near the top, but the distance between them and the immediate competition is shrinking. Every time they stumble, the sheer effort Leganés is putting into their promotion fight makes Betis look lazy by comparison, even though they are in different leagues.
My practice record shows a clear trend: the expectation that Betis should effortlessly hold that high ranking is completely unrealistic. Their positioning relies on other teams faltering almost as much as their own wins. My data screams that consistency is their weakness. I compiled the final standings snapshot showing just how close the chasing pack is. They are breathing down Betis’s neck. If Betis doesn’t pull off a couple of solid, definitive wins in the next few weeks, they are going to drop. Fast.
I’m ready to present this mountain of data to Dave. It took me a huge amount of effort, just plain scraping data from the screen and typing it into a simple grid, but I now have tangible proof that being “at the top” means squat if you aren’t fundamentally sound week in and week out. The answer to the question in my original tracking plan—Will Real Betis keep their top spot?—based on my meticulous, hand-compiled records, is a definitive, “Not if they keep playing like this.” And if they drop? Dinner is on Dave.