Sometimes football TV pundits talk about “the Premier League race” as though it were an actual race between the teams, rather than just a list of teams sorted in descending order of points. I thought it would be interesting to see what a Premier League season would look like if it actually was a race, so I decided to make a little animation. This post is a write up of how I did this. If you want to go straight to the animation for the 2011-2012 season you can do so.

I chose to implement this as a web page, with the animation stuff written in JavaScript. I wanted to use it as a practice project for getting good with web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. It turns out I also used some PHP to process the result data and generate the web pages (although I could have used any language for this part because the PHP is just used to generate static html files; there’s no dynamic server-side code running). Continue reading →