xGunners: Week 12 Premier League odds

Arsenal are on a 15 match unbeaten run that they look to continue against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday. During this run Arsenal have scored 36 goals and conceded just 13, averaging 2.6 points per match but have played at a level well below the point return.

Below is the detailed simulated odds for Arsenal vs Wolves and the Manchester Derby plus odds for each match in this game week.

Arsenal vs Wolverhampton Wanderers

Arsenal favorites in this match but I think this will be a very tough match.

Wolves are not the usual newly promoted team, they combine a very good defense with an offense that is a solidly mid-table. My model thinks that there is a good chance that Arsenal are able to score in this match, but I think that breaking down Wolves could prove to be difficult and similar to the match against Sporting.

I am predicting a 1-1 draw.

Manchester Derby

In the Manchester Derby, I along with my model have Manchester City as big favorites. Manchester United have won three matches in a row but have not looked good doing so. Against Newcastle, it took a late comeback to get a win where Newcastle dominated the early part of the match before looking to defend. Against Bournemouth, they again played very poorly early before getting another late win. Lastly against Juventus, it took a free kick goal and an own goal.

I have a feeling that this will be an ugly match, for both Manchester United and the casual fan.

The Rest of the matches:

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.