Gameweek 24 (Bournemouth Win EPL Sim)

Welcome to The Matchday Diget, here is everything you need for Gameweek 24

Gameweek 24 is the first double gameweek of the season, with Everton vs Liverpool having their match rescheduled.

Liverpool though has a trip to Bournemouth which is most likely going to be the most important match of the weekend at the top half of the table Bournemouth in some run of form is expected to score 1.43 goals against Liverpool.

Nottingham Forest's most likely clean sheet will come at home to Brighton, with a 39.8% chance of a clean sheet. The team is expected to concede just 0.92 goals.

At the other end of the table, Ipswich plays Southampton, which could be one of the biggest games in terms of relegation chances this season. Ipswich won the game in 44.3% of my model’s 10,000 simulations. Southampton survives in just 5 of 10,000 simulations currently, so any points lost here could reduce their survival chances to one not seen in 10,000 simulations.

The most sure result of the gameweek looks to be Liverpool beating Everton in their game midweek at 65.1%, this is closely followed by Chelsea beating West Ham at 64.7%.

Manchester City seem to be back on form after beating Chelsea and have a current probability of 0.4% to win yet another Premier League. It’s a big few games for Liverpool as winning both games in this gameweek will push their title chances into the 95% or higher but dropping any points with City gaining momentum could flip the title race on its end.

Not to mention after their 5-0 loss to Bournemouth, Nottingham Forest now doesn’t appear on the plot, they do win the league a handful of times as do Bournemouth now winning twice out of 10,000.

Southampton are so likely to be relegated that my plot rounded their chances up to 100%. To be exact they currently stand at 99.95%.

Leicester took a big step towards surviving after that win vs Spurs going from above 90% to now 69.9%.

This could swing back the other way if Ipswich beat Southampton.

Looking ahead

According to my fixture difficulty grid which changes teams’ ratings based on whether they are playing at home or away, Ipswich actually have the easiest run over the next 6 gameweeks while Manchester City still have the most difficult.

Now take this projected Expected Goals and Clean sheets with a pinch of salt as my model is still not fully complete and I am working on this to make it as good as possible to give better insights.

An example of where my model is currently falling it seems is on teams like Nottingham Forest. Yes, they do have one of the best defences in the league but they have a very difficult next 6 fixtures, yet still are 3rd in the most expected clean sheets over the next 6 gameweeks with 1.80. I think this is slightly too high…

Bournemouth Win Premier League?

Bournemouth have a 2 in 10,000 chance to win the Premier League according to my model which simulates the remaining games 10,000 times. Sim 6,983 is one of the two simulations in which they won the title.

Try to ignore Southampton on just 7 points at the bottom of the league in 20th place, winning just 1 game all season.

Liverpool also has quite some falloff in this universe losing 7 of their last 16 games to finish just 4th and Chelsea fall outside the top 8.

It’s fair to say this simulation is very very unlikely, but I thought it a fun one to include for this week’s special.