Arsenal at Manchester City Preview

Is it just me or is it extremely weird to have Arsenal playing just a couple days from now?

I guess in the sense that typically after the summer off-season, there is a certain cadence to how things go and that leads to a huge build up to the first match of the season. This over 100 day break is unprecedented in the middle of the season and soccer has easily been among the least important things.

I suppose that some of the regular things that happen in the summer are starting to get going. There is a major transfer rumor about Thomas Partey (which is quite controversial right now and because I am a content producer I should weigh in on that) and then there is the contract sagas for Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Bukayo Saka starting to move in to concerning areas.

The last thing that is nagging me is how in the hell do you account for a three month break when you write about things from a stats perspective? My best guess is that you have to be even less certain about things than you would (or should) have been before the break.

Enough preamble I guess let's get into the Arsenal at Manchester City Preview.

This shouldn't be surprising but Manchester City are a better team than Arsenal and even though they won't be winning the Premier League are easily one of (if not) the best team in Europe.

I don't expect that this will be a particularly even battle between the two teams but it will be a very interesting test of how Mikel Arteta sees his team and how they should take on matches like this. It will be interesting where on the two kind of extremes he chooses to go towards with the Arsene Wenger style of playing to his team's strength vs the Unai Emery style of looking to neutralize the opponents strength.

I think that because of where this falls on the schedule of things that we might see a higher return to playing more towards the Emery style with more time to train for a specific opponent in mind compared to the weekly league grind where there just isn't that much time to put in specific game plans.

Premier League Season Simulation

I am not one to write code.

I work with people who do that and keep the hell away from that because I will break things. Given that I decided to write some very bad VBA code that simulates the rest of the Premier League Season.

It is based on the other simulations I have run and posted here and like those it is untested for accuracy.

Here is what I got for the rest of the season:

Click to make bigger

According to my model the title is all but decided for Chelsea after Tottenham lost on Firday. Even with Arsenal winning Sunday they are still way outside the top four spots.

Man City is in the best spot for top four at 91%, Liverpool is next at 65% followed by Manchester United at 59%.

Premier League Top 6 Stats vs the Top 6

One of the things that has become apparent this season is that the top 6 (really top 5 but I will be nice and include Arsenal in this discussion) teams are significantly better than the rest of the league this year and the results against each other have been what is driving the places in the table.

Given that, I thought that it would be interesting to pull the stats from the database I have been working on all season and compare how the teams have fared against each other:

Offense vs other Top 6 Teams
	xG		SoT xG		Big Chances		Danger Zone		Shots
Team	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank
Chelsea	1.10	3	1.16	3	1.45	3	3.73	7	9.00	7
Tottenham Hotspur	1.02	4	0.90	10	1.22	5	3.11	13	10.78	4
Liverpool	1.26	2	1.48	1	1.60	2	5.40	2	12.10	2
Manchester City	1.52	1	1.24	2	2.18	1	5.45	1	13.36	1
Manchester United	0.86	7	0.82	9	0.86	11	4.14	4	11.57	3
Arsenal	0.83	8	1.12	12	1.00	6	3.78	6	9.33	6
Defense vs other Top 6 Teams
	xG		SoT xG		Big Chances		Danger Zone		Shots
Team	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank	Per Game	Rank
Chelsea	0.79	3	0.75	2	0.88	3	3.03	1	8.61	3
Tottenham Hotspur	0.86	4	0.90	4	0.94	5	3.56	5	8.88	4
Liverpool	0.95	5	1.07	8	1.31	9	3.37	4	8.00	1
Manchester City	0.75	2	0.82	3	0.79	2	3.03	1	8.09	2
Manchester United	0.73	1	0.71	1	0.65	1	3.18	3	9.06	5
Arsenal	1.11	8	1.17	9	1.33	10	4.64	8	10.91	6

I was a little surprised but based on the stats Manchester City have the best record thus far against the other big teams. Chelsea have been second best followed very closely by Liverpool.

Manchester United are the fourth best team, with a very good defense against the the big teams (I would rank them second behind City) but that has come at the expense of producing offense or watchable matches.

A bit surprisingly Tottenham are the fifth best team, their defense is good and not far off the other teams but on offense I still think that they are way over performing their stats. Maybe they really are an awesome long range shooting team and that they can turn high volume of low quality chances into goals and wins on a regular basis I just think that betting on it to continue next season would be a risky proposition.

Lastly is poor old Arsenal. They don't have a stat where they rank better than sixth at against the top teams. They are the worst team on offense and the worst team in defense. There really isn't anything else that can be said about this.