tomsky_11

Also nice as we've never had a 69 point season. Other less sexy possible points finishes we've never had previously: 52, 65, 66, 67, 71

Maintaining current manager ppg this season, final table will be: 3 Man Utd 75 4 Newcastle 71 5 Villa 65 6 Brighton 63 7 Spurs 62 8 Liverpool 58 Looks great, but I think we've got the biggest ask to maintain our level, especially given fixtures. Liverpool should really pick up with their games. And Spurs 4 points from 3 games under Stellini probably a bit low as expectation for remainder of season. Shows how much we need Man Utd and Newcastle to drop off as well.

Europa League Final 2024 is Dublin...

Fulham, Brentford, Spurs and us are the only top half teams they play. And all at home where they've only lost once (against Leeds weirdly) all season in league. Another home game against Forest, plus Leeds, West Ham, Saints and Leicester away. They do only have 3 away wins this season though.

Tbf I said near perfect (ie. not perfect, because I do not see us winning every remaining game) and hope one of them tanks. I agree on current form 5 is entirely possible. I wouldn't say as likely as 2 though. 4 maybe, but these remaining fixtures are tough on paper add about 12 games ago I had us getting 2 wins and 10 points from last 7 as well, though in a slightly different configeration to above. I think the Fulham is a must win. Wolves should be as well, with the caveat that it's a derby and they set up very well last time against us, with their manager probably having more experience facing Emery recently than others. Brentford win would be very nice and looking more likely as their form dips, but not essential. Wins in any of the final three are huge. Spurs most likely for me, then Brighton if only because of home advantage. Anything from Utd and Liverpool away a bonus.

8th still, though odds of higher places have obviously increased. Their top 8 and % chance of the named team being in that position are: 1 Man City 65.6% 2 Arsenal 34.4% 3 Man Utd 72.0% 4 Newcastle 58.4% 5 Liverpool 30.3% 6 Brighton 29.1% 7 Spurs 29.8% 8 Villa 49.7%

I've mentioned the method they've used and how it's probably underestimating us becuase it's impacted by last season and our results under Gerrard this season as well. And over estimating the likes of Chelsea and Liverpool based on their results this season. It is adjusted after every game so recent form does impact it (eg. the Newcastle result caused the biggest game-on-game increase of the season in our ranking score on the site, which used to make the predictions) though historical data, especially for someone like us with such a drastic management change mid season, will probably impact more than it should. From the predictions it looks like there's definitely a weighting for home and away and possibly related to the form of the respective teams home and away as well. I doubt it factors fixture congestion into it. IMO the 60 point finish is only slightly below my initial expectations for these fixtures, which have us on 61, and 64 if adjusted in line with over performance to date. And they're not far off what I predicted for other teams about 10-12 games ago (I actually have Liverpool getting more) but have a bit more work behind them than my off-the-cuff predictions from months ago, so thought they'd be a reasonable benchmark for what we might be up against and where we might be sat in the table at various points.

Are we turning that down?! Plus the extra £2-3M for the higher PL place. Plus anything else we make outside of competition payments, eg gates, commercial.

Even if you don't care about the competetion, mad to ignore the potential additional revenue, even if it doesn't compare to CL money. Likely to be far more than anything we'd get from domestic cups next season.

They aren't exact results as suggested by FiveThirtyEight. They have worked on an average expected points from the probabilites they've calculated for each result. Eg they have Liverpool getting 18 points for remainder of season, but the site actually has them as favourites for every single remaining game. The lowest win probabilty they have is West Ham away at 50%. So I've had to judge where they are more likely to drop the 9 points they are expected to somewhere, and have the other teams' predicted final tallies work as well. (I've just edited it to change the Brentford and Southampton results around.

This is about the equivalent of the FiveThirtyEight predictions as of yesterday, with fixtures ordered as they land (in italics are assumed order of unscheduled games), moving to a new row when next fixtures kick off after previous have finished. Has us 5th or tied 5th for most of remainder of season, even following the scheduled 36th game weekend, but final games for Spurs, Brighton and Liverpool push them ahead of us. in the last weeks. Winning every game gets us to 71 so 4th place is a massive ask that requires us to be near perfect and one of Utd and Newcastle to tank badly. 5th is well within our grasp now though.

I think they probably are.` Table is almost identical to the FiveThirtyEight one (only difference is Leicester and Forest swapped, which looks like maybe an error in the graphic, as on Opta site they have Forest as marginally higher chance of 18th but then much higher chance of 19th than Leicester) and FiveThirtyEight, who base their predictions on an "SPI rating", have Liverpool as 3rd best team at present (SPI of 83.8), Brighton 5th (81.3) and us 9th (74.7), with Chelsea 6th (80.1). Definitely feels a little high for Liverpool and Brighton and especially so for Chelsea, and a little low for us, at least since Emery arrived. Summary of how they seem to calculate these ratings is that the have preseason ratings based most on last season's performance and partly on Transfermarkt team values. These are then moved up or down factoring in performances as season progresses. Feels to me like there's probably a reasonable amount of weight on our score from Gerrard, both last season and this, that is bringing our rating down. We started out at 74.1 (Brighton were 73.7 preseason so very similar), dropped as low as 70.0 just before Emery's first game, and have since then improved to 74.7. I assume then that drop in rating of 4.1 under Gerrard is impacting our current rating and leading to a bit of underestimation of us under Emery. They've then worked out probabilities of different results in remaining games using these SPI ratings to give an expected points figure for remainder of season. They have us getting 10 from our last 8 games, Brighton 16 from 10 games and Liverpool 18 points from 9. Basically a big drop in our form under Emery, Brighton pretty much maintaining form and Liverpool pretty increasing theirs. Liverpool I expect to improve tbf, that return doesn't seem unreasonable on paper. I'd probably expect more from them if their away record wasn't so bad. Brighton definitely feels to me a little over stated, especially given how the fixtures are likely to fall with extra midweek games. Prediction expects them to get around 9-10 points from their next 5, which I assume will be: che for WOL MNU EVE. Seems doable but not straightfoward, could easily see them dropping points at Chelsea, Forest (who's home record is pretty good) and in any of those home games, but especially Utd. Then the are expected to get another 6-7 points from final 5 of: ars new SOU MNC avl. Win at home to Saints should be expected, but where do the other 3-4 points come from? Probably us is the next best bet, but could easily see them coming into that game having not picked up as many points as expected and that game being a Euro place playoff essentially. 10 from our last 8 includes Brighton being marginal favourites for the final day. 9 for us up to that point (which feels pretty achievable given current form) and no more than 12 from Brighton which looks enitrely possible with the fixtures, still gives us the opportunity to jump them in a potential all or nothing game.

Feels a bit harsh to lump Everton, Spurs and perhaps even Man Utd in the lucky pile. Ran a quick expected results model myself using xG data from fbref and got the following result likelihoods for our wins... ...draws... ...and losses... For Everton and Spurs the most likely outcome looks like a win, while the Utd game we appear marginally the more likely of the two teams to win. Then with the draws, if the most likely results had occured we'd be a point better off. So being unlucky in the Wolves games has more weigh than being lucky in the West Ham game. Then there's a whole separate discussion around the West Ham penalty and the one we weren't awarded and who had more luck there given the more likely result without the penalty was a win for us. Then I wonder if there is something in the outcome of the shots regards luck. Is it fair to say that we were lucky if we prevented goals via blocks or saves, or is that down to the individual abiltyof our players, and/or collective ability and tactical set up in the case of blocks? Take the Chelsea game for example. They generated 2.18 xG, but for 1.45 of that a goal was prevented by a save or defensive block. We were perhaps more lucky the other 0.73 did not hit the target. They failed to stop any of our 0.91 xG worth of shots, with 0.4 of them resulting in goals. So were we lucky or did our defensive set up and player's abilities earn a result? There's obviously more that just this that plays into shots being blocked or saved, and maybe could do more detailed analysis split blocks and saves or using post shot xg for the later to determine goal keepers ability or luck?

Yes I understand that and wasn't contradicting you. My point being it looks like they weren't even creating good chances, just lots of poorer ones, irrespective of the ability of players having them. The players being bad only compounds this.

FTFY. Shout out to the Sleepytime episode for being one of the best episodes of anything ever.

The stats don't surprise me, especially Brentford given their massive focus on data and where it has taken them so far. I've no doubt that we'll have a gameplan for them, but then so will they for us, and they are clearly good at preventing the kind of chances we want to, while being very good at creating high value chances themselves, something we have struggled more to prevent on occassion.

Possible bad sign for Saturday. Newcastle have the 5th highest npxG per shot in the PL this season, and the 2nd lowest npxGA per shot. Possible bad sign for the following Saturday. Brentford come highest in the former and 3rd lowest in the latter stat, and therefore have the biggest positive difference between quality of shot taken and conceded.

Potter's Brighton also didn't create as high an npxG per shot as we do under Emery. Average for 21/22 season was around 0.084 compared to us at 0.113 under Emery. On defence, Potter's Brighton kept opposition to 0.084 npxG per shot, whereas we are worse under Emery at 0.119. Our number though is heavily skewed by our few defeats coming from a very high number of high xG shots. We actually have outperformed our opponents in this metric in a higher proportion of games than Potter did in 21/22:

One thing I noticed after the Chelsea game was although the xG difference went in their favour, our xG per shot was more than double theirs. We created fewer chances, but this seems to suggest on average each attempt was more than twice as likely to go in. Wondered if this is a consistent trend under Emery and... ...Leeds and Spurs are the only anomalies in this sense in games we didn't lose. Maybe we benefitted from actually hitting the target more in these. (Our on target % overall is on average about 25% better than our oppenents in wins.) Feels like generally though we are getting some gains from taking fewer but better shots and/or restricting our opponents to less high quality efforts. Certainly when we drastically fail in the latter we tend to lose.

Just noticed the order on the Brighton games above is slightly off and they'll have only played Chelsea away in the league in the time we play Newcastle, Brentford and Fulham. Their FA Cup semi comes while we are playing Brentford and then Forest away is a day after we play Fulham. Obviously this is going to add to their games in hand, but it does give us a big opportunity to really open the gap and put the pressure on them, especially if they also drop points at Chelsea. The semi between the Chelsea and Forest games hopefully draws some focus from those games as well. If we can go the next 3 unbeaten and get at least one win, we could be looking at a 6-8 point gap to Brighton, them needing to get something from a Forest side who have been much better at home than away to start clawing that back, with three games in hand that few would expect them to win any of.

Newcastle and Man Utd too far ahead at this point, Fulham and Chelsea too far behind. Outside chance of us catching Spurs with their remaining fixtures looking tough and the management situation there. 3 wins probably enough for them to stay ahead. Brentford probably need 6 wins from 8 to have any chance of 7th. And/or two of us, Brighton and Liverpool tanking. Liverpool should be able to get at least 5 wins from that run. Means be probably need to at least equal it to stay ahead of them. Brighton have 3 should win home games. Maybe then only need the game against us. Looking really likely that game of the last day is going to be crucial.

Seems pretty likely given what they've done with likes of Yardbirds and Pietanic on the concourses.

I’m not sure that will be enough. Fully expect Liverpool to pick up and get 60+ points. Brighton I think have a chance of doing the same. Reckon they finish somewhere either side of 60. So 5 wins from last 8 guarantees at least 62 points. More than likely gets us 7th. Maybe gets us 6th.