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Ryan O’Hanlon
After ten matches, it aligns with what we all anticipated. Arsenal, Manchester City, and Liverpool are clearly the top three as we entered the Premier League season, and they remain the current top three.
In other words, you could’ve taken a two-month snooze before the Liverpool vs. Bournemouth match to kick off the season and you wouldn’t have missed much– OK, fine. Aside from the top trio in the standings, almost everything has deviated from the expected.
Man City suffered losses in two of their first three games. Liverpool started strong with five consecutive wins but then faced four losses in a row after only losing four total matches last season. Bournemouth, having lost 75% of their defensive line to high-profile transfers over the summer, sit on par with Liverpool in points, alongside newly promoted Sunderland, who ended last season in fourth place in the Championship.
The points differential between Arsenal in the lead and City in second is identical to that between City and Brentford, who sit in 12th. Just below them at 13th? Newcastle, who currently outpace Barcelona and Liverpool in the Champions League rankings.
In a reversal from the past two years, where all promoted teams promptly faced relegation, it’s West Ham, Nottingham Forest, and Wolves now occupying the bottom three. Together, they have achieved three victories and have seen four managerial dismissals; every other club in the league has secured at least three wins, maintaining the same coach who started the season.
The ten-match milestone is when we should begin to discern a clearer picture of the situation, as the erratic fluctuations of the initial weeks start to firm up into something more tangible. Numerous studies indicate that a team’s overall performance, evaluated using various strength metrics, starts to become indicative of future results around this time.
If this is accurate, what does the tumultuous season thus far imply for the remainder of the matches? Below are our forecasts for the final 28 games, along with the anticipated final standings of all 20 Premier League teams.
– Ranked: Top 50 players of Premier League season
– How Arsenal can be halted from clinching the league
– 15 emerging talents to watch
How we forecast the remainder of the season
Instead of opting for a more elaborate and possibly mathematically rigorous projection, this method will be relatively straightforward: (1) it’s more comprehensible, and (2) it facilitates drawing insights from the projections.
I’ve referenced this so often that I fear I may develop a specific strain of hand soreness from repetitively typing these letters, yet my preferred single metric for anticipating future team performance is what I term «adjusted goal differential.» This originates from a research conducted by former AC Milan data analyst Ben Torvaney, which revealed that a combination of 70% expected goals and 30% actual goals more accurately predicted future points than either goals or xG alone or alternative combinations of the two.
With this in mind, I then examined the correlation between a team’s adjusted goal differential after ten matches and their points accrued over the last 28 matches. An analysis of the past decade in the Premier League suggests that a team with a neutral adjusted goal differential after ten matches could be expected to earn 1.39 points per game for the remaining season. Furthermore, every additional goal in the adjusted goal differential enhances the average points expectation by 0.47 points.
Granted, ten-match performance does not cover everything; otherwise, we could wrap things up now and let these players take a seven-month break until the men’s World Cup.
Moreover, there exists one figure that has proven more reliable in predicting future outcomes than this amalgamation of goals and expected goals: the salaries of players. More than the ten-game performance horizon, the linkage between player wages and team performance has been extensively researched. Recently, analyst Paul Johnson has examined how estimated player values on Transfermarkt can indicate how many points a team secures in a season. He discovered that, among other findings, a 10% rise in a team’s value boosts a team’s season point total by approximately one and a half points.
Although neither of these figures can provide complete clarity, I’m employing them due to their intuitive rationale. Adjusted goal differential recognizes the significance of creating superior opportunities compared to your rival as a key factor in team success while also considering that teams often adjust their gameplay after scoring and it captures some aspects that xG models may not completely encompass.
Additionally, market valuations serve as a proxy for talent. Even the most adept managers acknowledge that player quality is pivotal in driving team performance. Nonetheless, there are instances where a cluster of exceptional players performs poorly simultaneously or a group of competent players faces parallel injuries, or a gifted ensemble of players needs more time to harmonize. Adjusted goal differential wouldn’t factor in these scenarios, but we’re all aware that they occur. The market value input at least attempts to consider this.
Finally, to determine the weighting of each factor, I reviewed betting predictions for season point totals. Given the financial stakes involved and the persistent, incredibly lucrative nature of sportsbooks, these will likely be the most precise publicly accessible «projection systems.» I then selected the weight that aligned these projections most closely with the betting markets: 64% transfer values and 36% adjusted goal differential.
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