Pochettino's point about pitch size is a good one - Manchester City's away record on small pitches is disproportionately bad.
— Jonathan Wilson (@jonawils) October 29, 2014
Is this true? I thought I'd have a look at the stats to see if this was the case.To do this I looked at City's points per game at each away ground in the Premier League since the start of the 2010-11 season, and then combined those where the pitch is the same size. The most common pitch size in the Premier League is 105 by 68 metres (this is the standard size for international matches). This is the size at 9 current Premier League grounds, including the Etihad stadium (and Wembley). For pitches of this size, City got 1.97 points per away game over that period.
The only bigger pitch City played on in the Premier League during that period is at Ewood Park. That pitch is 105 by 69.5 metres and City won both matches played there. This is too small a sample size to draw many conclusions from.
All the other pitches in the Premier League are smaller but have various dimensions, for example Loftus Road is 102 by 66 metres, Stamford Bridge is 103 by 67 metres. In matches played on pitches smaller than the Etihad, City got 1.51 points per game.
This is a clear difference. City are getting nearly half a point less per game on smaller pitches. There is clearly an issue here, the smaller the pitch the worse City do.
Added comment:
There are two factors which go into the area of a pitch - width and length. So do City have an issue with narrow or short pitches? The answer surprised me in that it looks like its the pitch length which is important. If only pitches which are shorter than 103 metres are considered, City got 1.46 points per game. This reduces again to 1.44 points per game for pitches shorter than 102 metres
