Retrospective: an overview of team matches in 2024

Hello readers!

After publishing last year an overview of team matches from 2008 to April 2024, I'll now present the result of the processing of some data I gathered regarding team matches for the whole year of 2024.

As for the previous article, even if my data set is of good quality, I can't verify it's a complete set of every single match on the relevant period. It is not impossible a few got away and are not featured in this article. I'll say it here again: "I'm not going to pretend the data set is exhaustive, but I'm confident the majority of matches are in it, and it should be representative from a statistical point of view".

Another important point: I will only address here matches that were successfully started. Matches that have been aborted manually, or matches that didn't start (e.g. due to insufficient number of players eligible) are not counted.

Index:

1. Overall statistics
2. Biggest matches
3. Contribution of leagues
4. Most active teams
5. Teams leaderboard of 2024
6. The players

Overall statistics:

First, let's talk about all the matches that finished in 2024. Of course, many were started in the same year, but there were plenty started in 2023, or even longer ago.

• In 2024, 48406 matches have finished.
• The biggest match to end had 580 boards: EL2023 R9: Team Spain vs Team England.
• The longest match to end lasted for 1516.41 days (more than 4 years!): HOT empty SHELLS of ((`~155.mm GUNS~`)), from August 2020 to November 2024.
• The average duration of matches that finished in 2024 was 84.20 day.

Let's now see the matches that successfully started in 2024. Note that many of those matches are also contributing to the numbers above.

• In 2024, 53074 matches have been started. That's 4726 more than in 2023, an increase of 9.8%.
• The biggest match to start had 696 boards: WL2024 R5: Team Spain vs Team England, also EL2024 R9 (seems familiar?).
• The average match size was 8.47 boards (-1.06 w.r.t. 2023).
• The median match size was 5 boards.
• The cumulated total number of boards was 449445.
• 49781 classical chess matches were started (93.8%), and 3293 Fischer-random (960) matches (6.2%).
• The biggest Fischer-random (960) match had 368 boards: Chess960 WL2024 R7: Team England v Team Spain (again...).
• 1621 matches were started with a custom position (3.1%).
• The biggest match started with a custom position had 71 boards: PCL Thematic Openings S1 Open GA R5: Promote to King vs. Chess Team Europe - Grünfeld Defense.

Biggest matches:

As already said, the median size for a match was 5 boards. Below is presented a breakdown of the match sizes:

Here are the 39 matches with 200 boards or more:

And the same table, but excluding the matches created for leagues reserved to national or regional teams (also called "geographical leagues" e.g. World League, as opposed to "open" leagues accessible to all teams e.g. One World League). 15 matches remain:

Very few teams are able to setup a big match. Here are the list of the 70 teams that could start a match of 100 boards or more:

And the same data, but removing national teams (meaning the teams involved in World League). 43 teams remain:

Contribution of leagues:

An observation that can be made from the previous tables is the share of leagues to the creation of big matches. It is specifically true of geographic leagues, but it is not limited to that. Open leagues are also providing a great contribution to the overall creation of team matches, big or small.

Note that the numbers presented for leagues are based on match naming. Due to that, they are underestimated as some matches can be improperly named. It is normally not the case for World League but in open leagues it happens more often.

Also, only a subset of leagues are presented, as I might be unaware of many smaller or more exclusive ones.

The table below lists the leagues ordered by the quantity of matches they contributed to create in 2024, with the proportion w.r.t. the total number of matches started that year. Aborted matches are not counted.

One World League alone contributed to almost 8% of the total of matches created during the year, and all leagues cumulated are responsible for at least 16.91% (probably more, considering wrong match names and missing leagues) of the total of matches.

Most active teams:

In 2024, 5228 unique teams started at least one team match (-221 w.r.t. 2023, or 4.1%). Here's the breakdown of number of teams that started which quantity of matches:

Here is the list of the 186 teams that played 100 matches or more:

Teams leaderboard of 2024:

Last but not least, with this data we can make an estimation (only an estimation as some matches may be missing) of the amount of leaderboard points scored by each teams during the year 2024. The table below lists the 100 teams that scored the highest amount of points.

The players:

A team would be nothing without players. In 2024, at least 91882 unique players played in at least one of the team matches that started that year. Each of them played in an average of 9.8 matches (the median value is 2).

Here's the list of the 65 players who played in 500 team matches, or more, that started in 2024.

That's it for today. Maybe you have some idea of more metrics I could provide? Ask in comment and I'll tell you if I can answer with the data I have. 

On my side, I can't wait to se what will happen in 2025!

See you in matches! (at least, I see you in matches)