WHO is the fifth best club in England? No, not Arsenal. You are making the mistake of using the league table. That tells you only how many points each club have. Give up? The answer is Reading.
The data on goals scored and conceded and on shots on target that has been assembled by the Fink Tank allows us to produce a 92-club table without divisions. Goals and shots in lower divisions may be easier to obtain than in the Barclays Premiership, but our model provides a weighting to offset this. The top four are Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal, in that order. Then come Reading. In a match between Reading and Spurs on a neutral ground, we would make the former favourites.
That is all very well, but in the real world there are divisions. So can the same data help to say who is going to win the Premiership? Of course. And that is what Dr Henry Stott and his team have done.
The first step is to take the present Premiership table. The team then used a Monte Carlo analysis to simulate the remaining games thousands of times. Each match pitches two teams of a given strength against each other and we used these strengths to assess the likelihood of different outcomes of a match.
Now, take the outcome of today’s match between Birmingham City and Portsmouth. This will have a big impact on West Bromwich Albion’s chances of relegation. So, since that outcome is uncertain, we look at West Bromwich’s chances in all the different circumstances. Given all the teams in the Premiership and the way their results impact on each other, we have to use thousands of simulations.
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The simulation also accounts for the way teams change during a season, varying the class of consistent sides (such as Fulham) and less than inconsistent ones (such as Everton). In the end, we had a table with the chances of finishing in different positions. (If numbers do not add up to 100, incidentally, it is because of rounding). You can use the grid, for example, to establish relegation chances. Portsmouth’s probability of escaping is 10 per cent.
Want to know the most likely outcome? Take a look at the Fink Tank’s mean league table. Twenty-three points? Sunderland will feel flattered.