Welcome to The Matchday Digest!

Finally, after a boring international break, we are back to the Premier League. This instalment of the newsletter is just focusing on everything Premier League related, as from here on out, I’ll be separating the FusionSim updates and Gameweek Previews.

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Gameweek 4 Preview and Projections

Fixture difficulty

Brentford, who have had a rough start to the season now face the most difficult next 6 fixtures out of any team, with all three of Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool to play over the next 6 gameweeks.

Whereas Leeds, who have only scored a single goal so far, have the easiest set of fixtures on paper.

Title Race

If you have not seen it already, I have launched my latest model, which I am calling the “1.0” model, since it’s the one I wanted to launch with FusionSim, but it was not ready in time.

This takes alot of the feedback I had been getting around the predictions about them being too ‘jumpy’ or too ‘reactive’, and also not covering a wide enough range of probabilities, and it tended to be far too certain, far too early.

Above are the new 1.0 model title race projections; these have Chelsea much more in the fight than the previous model I was using.

The plot above shows these new improvements with the title race so far being much less volatile, and with the biggest changes coming from Man City dropping points and Liverpool beating Arsenal.

Race for Europe

It’s still far too early to be looking at European spots, as England should be getting a 5th Champions League spot, but it's interesting to look at the model changes and how the 1.0 model allows for plenty more miracle-type runs, with even Sunderland still making European football in 0.7% of 10,000 sims.

Relegation Battle

The relegation battle is where it gets interesting, with 5 main contenders for relegation emerging, all with chances of all least 30% or higher of playing in the Championship next season.

With the projected gap between West Ham (16th) and Sunderland (20th) to be just 5.2 points, it could be a battle for ages to survive the Premier League.

The +17.8% jump at West Ham surviving in one gameweek is large, but this is because the difference is from the Saturday in gameweek 3 to the Sunday in gameweek 3.

Gameweek 4

Who would have thunk it! Liverpool has the highest chance of a clean sheet this week away to Burnley. With Burnley themselves having a 0.1% chance, less than Manchester United's clean sheet probability of 12.6%, I think that still goes to show how poorly rated United are in the model.

Arsenal are projected to score the most goals at 2.38 expected goals. However, this will be an interesting tie as it’s Anges’ first game back and the models’ first chance to judge how much better or worse he might make them long term.

Arsenal start with a 67.4% chance of taking all 3 points off Ange in his first outing, with the model not seeing manager changes as they can be very hard to quantify from a purely data POV this chance is probably lower in reality, as how Forest play is likely to be very different from what we have grown accustomed to over the last year.

The most 50/50 tie of the weekend on paper is Bournemouth vs Brighton, with the model slightly hedging its bets on the home team, but only just.

That’s it for this week’s Matchday Digest!