I swear, trying to get simple, clean football stats is an absolute nightmare. I wasn’t asking for rocket science here. All I needed was a quick comparison between Valencia CF and Sevilla FC. Who scores more, who gets scored on more. Goals for, goals against. Should take maybe thirty seconds, right?
I started the way everyone does. I just typed it into the search bar, hoping some reliable data aggregator would spoon-feed me the truth. But that’s where the trouble started. I opened up three different major sports sites. Every single one gave me conflicting numbers. It was maddening.
One site included Copa del Rey matches, which totally skewed the goal difference because Valencia had a weird high-scoring run a couple of years back. The next site claimed to only track league games but had a clear error mixing up home and away fixtures for the 2019-2020 season. The third one? It just buried the actual head-to-head metrics under sponsored garbage and endless player transfer rumors. I realized fast: relying on those sloppy reports means you’re relying on someone else’s mistakes.
If you want the real picture, you gotta build the picture yourself.
The Data Gathering Grind
So, I ditched the browser tabs and the clickbait. I decided to pull the raw numbers myself. My goal was simple: focus only on the last five complete seasons of La Liga play (2018-19 through 2022-23). I specifically excluded all cup runs, European matches, and pre-season friendlies. That extraneous stuff just muddies the water and doesn’t tell you anything about their consistent league form against core opponents.
This process was not smooth. I had to scrape data from two primary independent league databases because neither one was fully comprehensive or trustworthy on its own. I had to write a quick script just to compare the two sources and flag any discrepancies over three goals in any given season. Let me tell you, there were a lot of discrepancies. It took much longer than I planned, but the result was a dataset I actually trust.
This is what I tracked down, focusing on the metrics that truly matter:
- Total Goals Scored (GF): The offensive firepower benchmark.
- Total Goals Conceded (GA): The core defensive vulnerability indicator.
- Home GA/GF Split: How vulnerable are they when playing in front of their own fans? This is often forgotten.
- Away GA/GF Split: Do they struggle on the road? Crucial for predicting future consistency.
- Head-to-Head GF/GA: Their direct comparison over the five seasons.
Why I Wasted a Tuesday Night on Spreadsheets
You might ask, why go through all this trouble? Why spend three hours wrestling with Python and spreadsheets just to settle a simple football question? Because of my neighbor, Steve. That guy is the biggest know-it-all in my building when it comes to La Liga.
We were watching the highlights last Sunday, and he starts shouting about how Sevilla is historically a defensive fortress, claiming they haven’t conceded more than Valencia in a decade. I tried to pull up the stats on my phone right there, and that’s when I hit the wall of inconsistent, conflicting data. I showed him one site that favored Valencia, he showed me another that favored Sevilla, and then he just started laughing, saying I was making things up because I couldn’t provide definitive proof.
That made it personal. It wasn’t about football anymore; it was about proving that my structured approach beats his loud, opinionated gut feeling. I was going to find the truth, even if I had to clean up the entire internet’s messy stats to do it.
The Raw Numbers Speak
Once I standardized all the criteria—only league matches, five seasons, cleaned data points—the truth was immediate. The difference wasn’t huge, but it was definitive, and it completely dismantled Steve’s fortress theory.
Over the five seasons analyzed:
Valencia CF: Conceded 238 league goals. Scored 220 league goals.
Sevilla FC: Conceded 215 league goals. Scored 245 league goals.
The gap is small, but Sevilla’s defense is statistically more reliable. However, the real killer was the head-to-head. In the 10 league matches they played against each other in this window, Sevilla completely dominated. They outscored Valencia 19 to 8. That tells a story of mental superiority in direct competition that simple aggregate stats can hide.
The exercise confirmed my belief: never trust the first answer you find. You have to dig into the criteria and methodology. Next time Steve tries to throw out a baseless opinion, I’ll just pull up my clean, custom data set. That spreadsheet is now my weapon. And trust me, that silence is worth three hours of scraping junk data.
