xGunners: Week 25 Premier League simulated match results

The Premier League takes a break from the transfer window (maybe they should make the whole thing out of the transfer window) to play some actual league matches, after a weekend off my computer is rested and ready to crunch the numbers and simulate some matches.

Week 25 Simulated odds

Arsenal travel to Wales to face Swansea City who are fresh off a huge win against Liverpool. The simulation model gives Arsenal a 61.3% to win and they are defending 1.9 expected points in this match.

The other big match of the midweek is Tottenham against Manchester United, which will likely see the league premier of former Arsenal player Alexis Sanchez.

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 isn’t great for Arsenal, looking at this Arsenal catching Tottenham and Liverpool is about as likely as Leicester City catching Arsenal.

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.

This article has been corrected to update the Swansea City vs Arsenal detailed simulated match odds. The original image was for the model that used the simulation for Cup matches. Thanks to Wrightmove for helping to catch it.