The Madness That Started With Gary and a Bad Bet
You know how some of these projects start, right? Not with some grand plan, but with sheer, stubborn irritation. That’s exactly why I started tracking the positional changes for Las Palmas and Rayo Vallecano. It wasn’t because I’m a massive fan of either club. It was because I needed to prove my brother-in-law, Gary, wrong, and I needed the evidence to be absolutely bulletproof.
Gary is the kind of guy who watched one El Clásico in 2017 and suddenly became an expert on La Liga relegation battles. We were at a family gathering back in November, right when the league table was starting to settle but before the real chaos began. He was absolutely adamant. He kept going on about how Rayo had the “mid-table stability pedigree” and Las Palmas was clearly punching above their weight and would soon crash and burn. He even bet me fifty bucks on it. I usually avoid betting on football, but his smug look sealed the deal. I shook his hand, and immediately regretted trusting a hunch against his confident, if unfounded, opinion.
I realized quickly that just checking the standings on Sunday wouldn’t cut it. To truly track if a team is stable, you can’t just look at the current position; you have to see the history—how violently they bounce around the table every single week. I had to record the journey, not just the destination.
So, the practice began. I decided I needed a weekly log, simple and clean. I didn’t want to mess around with APIs or fancy coding, because frankly, that would have taken the joy out of proving Gary wrong. This was a manual labor of love.
The First Step: Getting the Raw Numbers
I started just grabbing the league table every Monday morning. I’d find a reliable source—you know, one of those standard sports sites—and I would literally copy and paste the entire 20-team standing into a basic spreadsheet. I knew I was only interested in those two teams, but dumping the whole thing felt safer, ensuring I had context for how the rest of the table was moving. I did this religiously. Monday morning, coffee in hand, data logged.
The Fiddly Part: Focusing the Lens
Once the full table was in, the real work started. Filtering. I set up two columns side-by-side: Week number, Las Palmas position, Rayo Vallecano position. Then I added a crucial fourth column: the positional difference. I wanted to see if they were chasing each other, or if one was consistently pulling away. This is where the pattern started to emerge, and it was glorious.
- I quickly noticed that for five straight weeks, they were separated by no more than two positions.
- Then, Rayo would suddenly drop after a tough fixture run, maybe three or four spots.
- And like clockwork, Las Palmas would climb up to take that spot, only to fall back down the next week.
They weren’t stable at all! They were basically doing a chaotic, mid-table samba dance. One step forward, one step back, mirroring each other’s instability perfectly. This was far better than just checking the current rank. This was proving the nature of their mid-table fight.
The Data Visualization That Shut Gary Up
By January, I had accumulated solid data. Enough to create a simple line graph that plotted their positional rank over time. When you looked at the graph, the lines for Las Palmas and Rayo Vallecano looked like two roller coasters running on adjacent, slightly asynchronous tracks. Up, down, crossing over, constantly changing leadership.
Gary’s entire premise—that Rayo had “stability”—was fundamentally flawed. They were both desperately unstable, just hovering in a similar band of the table. Their current ranking was purely dependent on who had managed to scrape a draw the previous weekend.
I didn’t even show him the raw spreadsheet. I just printed out that single graph. It was beautifully messy. I waited until we were at another gathering, brought up the La Liga results naturally, and when he started talking about stability again, I casually slid the paper across the table.
He looked at it, squinted, tracing the lines with his finger. He couldn’t argue with the evidence—the weekly, undeniable oscillation. He didn’t even try to debate it. He just grumbled, reached for his wallet, and paid the fifty bucks.
The best part? I kept logging the data even after I won the bet. It became a habit. I just find it fascinating seeing how two seemingly similar teams struggle to keep still. It wasn’t about the money or the bragging rights anymore; it was about the proof that even in professional sports, stability is a myth, and chasing the details gives you the real story. Now I’ve got this beautiful historical log that proves my point every time someone brings up mid-table consistency.