Does winning the League Cup have an effect on league form?

After the appalling run of form that Liverpool have endured since winning the League Cup and the same issue that got Birmingham relegated last season, I figured it may be interesting to see if there is anything more to this trend. As a disclaimer, my aim wasn’t to come to much in the way of conclusions, just collecting the data itself, so if anyone wants to do this themselves, I’m happy to publish their findings.

I have chosen to examine the results since the millenium, as it is a relatively easy landmark somewhere near the time Arsene Wenger began putting out reserve sides that devalued the competition. It also gives us a good range of data but not so much that the task becomes too daunting.

The first set of data I collected was how many points the League Cup winners collected before and after their win, then dividing those points by the number of games it took to collect them, finding out how many points they won per game and comparing the two averages.

Here are the results:

Early on, the trophy seemed to give the teams a boost to their form, but the effect lessened, becoming negligible and eventually having a negative effect in the last two seasons. The victories of title challengers such as Chelsea and Manchester United seems to skew the results a touch, given the League Cup is a generally meaningless competition to them.

I then looked into the more immediate impact of a League Cup win, comparing the points totals from the previous five games and the form they showed in the next five games. Here are the results:

This seems to have a less distinct pattern, so I looked even more immediately, at the games either side of the final:

The title challengers have a tendency to win both games, while the other sides manage just one win between them.

The data doesn’t take into account the quality of the sides the teams go up against, but there does appear to be some trends if people wish to look into it further. The most obvious suggests, should Liverpool get into another League Cup final, it seems worth betting on them to lose the game beforehand, looking up a sportsbook review to find the best odds.