Premier League Table Simulation- PreSeason

The start of the season is upon us, there is optimism in the air and maybe some dread and anxiety over transfer business not being completed.

With that comes trying to figure out where everyone will finish in the final table. Like many other analysts out there I'll try my hand at projecting the final positions based on a statistical model and simulations. I still have it on my to do list to go more into depth on how explaining my model but here is how I project things to go this year:

Click to enlarge

Manchester City are my favorites like most others, with Liverpool the first of the following pack. After those two the teams are all essentially on the same levels. This bunching of talent could make for an actual title race this season which would be a fun change.

After the big six teams you get Southampton and Everton (who the model doesn't rate nearly as high) followed by a whole bunch of meh teams who all could end up in the relegation battle with the newly promoted teams. Somewhat surprisingly Burnley rates as the 2nd worst team with a 42.7% chance of being relegated.

A quick tangent on the projections, like almost all projection models this one moves teams towards the mean and really flattens the spread of points compared to what will really happen. For example here is the table after one simulation instead of running 10,000.

Team	Points	Goal Dif
Tottenham Hotspur	77	31
Arsenal	72	32
Liverpool	71	27
Manchester City	70	26
Southampton	70	24
Chelsea	69	22
Stoke City	55	6
Newcastle United	54	-4
Everton	53	1
Swansea City	53	-2
Manchester United	49	9
Crystal Palace	49	-1
Leicester City	46	-16
Brighton & Hove Albion	45	-20
West Ham United	44	-16
Bournemouth	43	-9
Burnley	38	-26
Watford	35	-31
West Bromwich Albion	34	-26
Huddersfield Town	33	-27

It's quite a bit different and looks a lot more like what you would expect from a season expect for being able to win the league with 77 points. I'd to have loved to see Jose Mourinho's meltdown and subsequent firing after his Manchester United finished in 11th place.

Back to the larger sampling of the simulations here is the Title, Top 4 and Relegation odds for the season:

Here is another way to look at the teams, looking at the spread of outcomes with the box and whisker plot.

Click to enlarge

Surprisingly Arsenal have the 3rd highest median points total but they have one of the smallest point spreads among the top 6 teams. I would imagine that this comes from their focus on producing quality shots at the expense of high volume while the other teams all to various extents look to have more shots.

For example, I have Arsenal breaking the 80 point barrier in just 1.5% of simulations compared to 2% for Chelsea, 3% for Tottenham, 3.6% for Liverpool, 10% for Manchester City and 2.5% for Manchester United.

It should be an interesting season and I will do my best to try to run this simulation every week or so to be able to see how things progress as the season goes.
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This article was written with the aid of StrataData, which is the property of Stratagem Technologies. StrataData powers the StrataBet Sports Trading Platform, in addition to StrataBet Premium Recommendations.