Sport is ‘peculiar’, as Walter Neale called it. Sports teams want competition on the field, and to get it, they need collusion off the field. The product in sport is jointly produced by two teams with identical production technology but different production costs. The game itself matters, but the title, or pendant, matters just as much if not more.

Soccernomics sport economist Stefan Szymanski discusses all of this in the context of a Contest Success Function where the outcome is a probability, even despite clearly different talent levels of teams. A probability. And even if a good team is 70% to win, there’s still a 30% chance they lose.

That can make all the difference - one game, one defeat. Or a couple of games and losses, and a title race, a challenge to qualify for European competition, a battle for promotion or relegation, can be all over. Soccer on Good Friday embodies this perhaps better than any other day. Easter adds the ingredient of tension that isn’t there at Christmas - seasons are made and broken over Easter, as usually there’s only a handful of matches remaining.

Good Friday, like Boxing Day, is a staple of the soccer calendar in England. Well, it used to be. Over 129 years since the first Good Friday match in 1892, 2,364 matches have been played in England’s Premier League PINC and Football League on Good Friday, involving 133 teams. Historically, teams would play back-to-back fixtures against the same team on Good Friday and Easter Saturday, before a rest and another key game on Easter Monday.

Many a fate has been determined over those Easter days, started on Good Friday. But while between the mid-1920s and late 1950s at least 30 matches took place on Good Friday a year, by the mid-1980s there was fewer than ten, and between 1984 and 2005 just 83 matches took place.

In the plot below, the number of matches each year is represented by a vertical bar, showing how Good Friday has returned to popularity in recent years.

This year, there will be no Premier League matches, with the break for World Cup qualifying matches having only just completed.

Nonetheless, there will be 33 matches across England’s Championship, League One and Two tomorrow, marking the fourth year out of five (no football in 2020 thanks to Covid-19) with more than thirty games.

So, which soccer team is best on Good Friday? Teams with more mettle will be the ones winning more often on Good Friday, we can imagine. And surely the top teams will always be buying in the mentally stronger players? But is there any reason to think particular teams will always have those more mentally strong teams, year in, year out? After all, that intense on-field competition in sport means that clubs have to collude off the field. This means they can’t always sign the players they want, or the coaching staff.

It turns out there is substantial variation in performance on Good Friday over the years. There’s a handful of clubs who have amassed close to two points per game on Good Friday over the years - that is, winning over half of their games. But the best team isn’t a team you might expect - it’s London’s Brentford FC, currently on the verge of promotion to the Premier League. But over the years they’ve moved up and down the English Football League’s lower divisions without large amounts of success. They’ve played on 58 Good Fridays, and won 32 of those, racking up an impressive 1.9 points per game. The top ten is listed below:

The striking thing about this top ten is the absence of the top Premier League teams. Man City make the cut, as do Everton and West Ham, but Man United, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal are nowhere to be seen. Man United’s absence probably reflects the relatively few matches on Good Friday in the 1990s and 2000s, when they were at their pinnacle of success under Sir Alex Ferguson.

The second best team on Good Friday is even more surprising - York City, who are no longer in the Football League, now playing in English soccer’s sixth tier, having suffered relegation out of the Football League in 2004. Alongside York in the top ten are similarly unfashionable Grimsby Town and Colchester United - both of whom are in danger of dropping out of the Football League this season.

Who are the worst teams on Good Friday? The real bottlers? Again, the results are quite surprising. Stoke City, until very recently a Premier League mainstay, are truly abysmal on Good Friday - they’ve won just 3 of 34 matches on the day, accumulating just 0.5 points per game.

Current Premier League teams West Brom and Southampton will be glad that there are no Premier League matches this year, as they are the third and sixth worst Good Friday teams in history, respectively.

Norwich City, on the cusp of promotion back to the Premier League, have only won 0.9 points per game historically, which may give them pause for thought ahead of a relatively easy looking game at Preston North End tomorrow. Could their poor Good Friday record derail their promotion attempt, which could cost them upwards of £100m?

It’s hard to make too much sense of these top ten best and worst lists. They show huge differences in fortunes for teams playing on a particular day in the calendar. Differences that have persisted over a long period of time and hence can’t be attributable to a particular manager, or ownership regime, at a club.

There is research into how soccer games turn out when played on unfamiliar, or non-frequent days, by Daniel Goller of the University of St Gallen, and Alex Krumer of University College Molde. They find that underdogs have significantly less home advantage on non-frequent days. Although Friday is a fairly common day for football, the authors make the point that unusual patterns related to soccer games may just make a difference in how things turn out. Maybe the same is true for Good Friday.

Or maybe moreover, sporting success is fleeting, is highly unpredictable, and soccer clubs need to have a business model that can cope with such levels of inexplicable results. That both the top and bottom ten contains both successful and less successful teams makes this point very clear.