xGunners: Week 10 Premier League odds

Arsenal look to complete #Project24 with a trip to Crystal Palace. Tottenham and Manchester City have a top of the table clash in the blockbuster match of the weekend (I am torn on who to root for in these). Complicating Arsenal’s push up the table is the fact that the other top teams all are big favorites in their weekend matches. There is also that midtable team Manchester United, facing fellow midtable team Everton in the race for the final European spot (will the Manchester United being bad ever not be funny?).

Crystal Palace vs Arsenal

Arsenal are heavy favorites, and I am hopeful that they will keep their current winning streak going against a Crystal Palace team that is lacking in attacking talent.

Crystal Palace are not a bad team, but they have lost a big portion of their midfield platform that they built their attacks on. Yohan Cabaye (former Arsenal target) is off in the UAE collecting his retirement paychecks and Ruben Loftus-Cheek is back at Chelsea not playing. With these two players gone, and the frustrating at finishing but good at getting into good scoring positions Christian Benteke injured, the once decent attack is looking pretty poor.

Crystal Palace have gone from being a team producing over 1.5 xG a match last season to grinding out just over 1 this season. That, combined with a mediocre defense, takes them from an about even to slightly positive xG differential into negative territory.

They still have Wilfred Zaha, but while he is a good player for Crystal Palace’s level, Arsenal should have more than enough to cover for him* when he is the their only real offensive threat on the pitch.

*If Granit Xhaka starts at left back matched up against him,I reserve the right to come back and delete that sentence.

Tottenham vs Manchester City

The homeless wonders “host” defending champions Manchester City on Monday Night Football. I full expect Manchester City to win this one; they are probably the best team in Europe currently, and would be favored against just about anyone.

In this one, I am torn between wanting to see Tottenham lose and to see Arsenal move even further ahead of them, as they are a direct “Top Four” rival and it’d be fun to see a true title race this season. Here is to an entertaining draw with two or three red cards apiece.

The Rest of the matches:

If you are interested in the detailed odds (like the ones for Crystal Palace vs Arsenal) I provide these for every match on my Patreon page here.

Finishing Odds

Using the same match odds that I simulated, I also ran 10,000 simulations of the season as a 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 mid-range of possible points (25-50%), yellow the upper half (50-75%) with the black bars representing the 10th Percentile and 90th Percentile:

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. You’ll also find the updates that were made for this coming year on my blog.