Premier League would return on Wednesday June 17, with each club having to play 9-10 matches. The league has been on hold since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic and there were long discussions for resuming or not.
Liverpool fans are happy with the restart of the league since their team has a 25-point lead at the top of the table. However there is plenty to play for regarding European qualification positions and a group of teams battling to avoid relegation.
About a month ago, and before the final decision to resume the league, the world’s leading supplier of sports data, Opta, has made a simulation to predict not only the champion, but also the chances for each team to finish at a each position.
How Opta’s Premier League Simulation was calculated:
- The model estimated the probability of each match outcome (win, draw or loss) given each team’s attacking and defensive quality.
- The team’s attacking and defensive qualities are based on four years of historic results, with more weighting given to their most recent results.
- The model took into account the quality of the opposition that a team scores or concedes against and reward them accordingly.
- Simulation of the upcoming matches were done using goal predictions from the Poisson distribution with the two teams’ attacking and defending qualities as inputs.
- The outcome of the season was simulated 10,000 times in order to estimate the likelihood of each team finishing in each league position.
For Liverpool, the chances of winning the league are more than 99.9% since the team could be crowned champions without winning a single game. In fact, a maximum of two wins over the final nine games is enough to seal the title. The simulation predicted that Liverpool would win the title with 101 points.
Regarding the positions for the Champions League, the simulation predicts 2nd Place: Manchester City (99.3%), 3rd place: Leicester City (59.7%), 4th place: Chelsea (39.4%) . With Manchester City probably banned from Europe, the team finishing at the fifth position will qualify to the Champions League. The simulation predicted that Manchester United has 30.3% chances of finishing 5th versus 15.4% chances of Tottenham.
About the relegation (the bottom three teams are relegated) Norwich is doomed to relegate with just 5.7% chances to finish at the 16th or 17th position. At the same time, the simulation predicted that Aston Villa will join Norwich to the championship, with about 40% chances. There would be great suspense on the 18th position, with one of Bournemouth (24.5%), Watford (20.9%) and Brighton (16.9%) probably relegating.
