To do better than this, we have to go back well over 100 years. In the grid below, the highlighted rows shows the most recent occurrence for teams placed 4th (only happened once), placed 5th (only happened twice) and placed 6th (happened 6 times).
Position for season table
A common requirement in email list providers in germany marketing analytics is to be able to look at sequences of products a customer has bought, or sequences of interactions that they have had. This type of question is also very common in football analytics questions too, as supporters are always keen on looking at streaks of good/bad results/seasons for instance.
In the column on March 2nd 2022 was the following question (see Article 3):
“Bristol City’s 2-1 win over Middlesborough on 19 February 2022 was their 12th consecutive league game in which they have both scored and conceded. What’s the longest such streak any team has managed?”.
Any question that has the word ‘streak’ in it is a good candidate for the Pattern Match functionality. To do this, we need to order matches by a date variable, and then use a categorical variable to define the characteristics of the streak. The selector variable we need here is a simple one that identifies whether a match is one where both teams have scored. We can do this by creating an expression like this and turning it into a categorical value.