xGunners: Week 8 Premier League Simulated Odds

Arsenal continue #Project24 visiting Fulham at Craven Cottage. Liverpool and Manchester City have a top of the table clash in the blockbuster match of the weekend. While the other top teams all are big favorites in their matches. Oh, and there is also that midtable team Manchester United, who will attempt to halt their current crisis, hosting Newcastle United.

Fulham vs Arsenal

Arsenal are heavy favorites, and I think this is a very favorable match up for Arsenal.

Fulham are similar to Arsenal, expect that they are not as talented. They try to play attacking football but often leave themselves open to the other team. Currently no team has a worse defense than Fulham. Hopefully, Arsenal will be able to take advantage of this and get their offense clicking.

There are three more matches in #project24 before the slate gets more difficult, it is time to get things moving in the right direction. Thankfully even though Arsenal haven’t played well they did get the needed results and banked those points.

Getting the full 24 is looking more and more likely with each passing win.

Liverpool vs Manchester City

Liverpool were fortunate to get a draw against Chelsea last weekend, played poorly against Napoli in the Champions League and now have their biggest match of the season. It has been a brutal stretch for the Reds, and they have some big odds to overcome.

I was a bit surprised how much my model favored Manchester City in this matchup, even with Liverpool getting the home field advantage in this match. I think this just shows how big the gap is at the of the table; even with how well Liverpool have played so far this season, I still have them as 17% worse than Manchester City.

It should be a fun match.

The Rest of the matches:

If you are interested in the detailed odds (like the ones for Fulham 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 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:

After seven matches, we are starting to see the beginnings of teams separating into a few groups. There is the top two fighting for the title (at least until this weekend), the rest of the top six fighting for the last two spots. An actual mid table of teams comes next, followed by six teams that are already in trouble in the relegation fight.

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.