xGunners: Week 19 simulated odds

After this round of matches the season will have offically reached it’s half way point but the fixtures will continue to come fast and thick with the traditional Christmas programs testing each teams depth.

The highlight match of this round is Arsenal vs Liverpool which I previewed yesterday. This is a huge match for Arsenal and Liverpool’s fight for a top 4 spot and it will give Arsenal a chance to avenge the embarrassing showing early in the season at Anfield.

Week 19 Simulated Odds

With the huge separation of talents between the “top 6” and the other teams there are some really wide spreads in the odds this week. Manchester City have the highest simulated win percentage of any match this season so far and the fifth highest for the rest of the season.

If Bournemouth manage to win by just a goal or two that might be a pretty good accomplishment.

Simulated finish and points

Using the same match odds that I simulated, I also ran 10,000 simulations of the season as whole. I put a few tables together to show the results in an easily understood (hopefully) visual format.

This table shows the chances of a team’s finishing the season in each of the 20 places in the table:

This chart, a “box and whisker” plot, shows the range of probable points for each team in the league based on the simulations. Gray represents the lower half of the midrange of possible points (25-50%), yellow the upper half (50-75%):

This last table is pretty straightforward. It’s the odds of a team winning the title, finishing in the top four, or being relegated, and the average number of points earned in the 10,000 simulations run for this data:

Team ratings and expected points

Next up: team ratings, which are derived from the inputs that go into the model.

These team rankings use data from the 2015-16 season through the current season. Data that is more recent is weighted more heavily. Rankings are compared to league average, and scaled so that 100 is average. Each point above or below 100 represents 1 percent better or worse than the average team.

Last but not least is expected points for each team this season.

There are two expected points totals shown here. The first is based on the pre-match odds that I do before every match, as I have done above, and the second is based on the post-match xG that each team produces. More information on xPoints can be found here.

If you are interested in the methodology of the model, or for any of the work I do here, you can find that on my personal blog.