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Gameweek 5 Preview and Projections

Fixture difficulty

Brentford still have the hardest next set of 6 fixtures with both Manchester sides and Liverpool to play over the next 6. This certainly looks more difficult in comparison to Wolves, who play all 3 of the newly promoted sides in the next 6 gameweeks.

Title Race

The ‘Recent Change’ on the graphic shows from Saturday to Sunday on gameweek 4 and so this is why we see a small decrease for Arsenal, since both Liverpool and Manchester City picked up wins on Sunday. However, the model still very much so favours Liverpool at 54.7% likely to pick up the Premier League Title. This is bound to increase this week with both Arsenal and Manchester City taking points off each other.

Race for Europe

While still too early to be looking at the race for Europe in the Premier League with so many different permutations of which spots will be for what European competition, it’s interesting to see Spurs already back up in the fight for a UCL spot given where my old model was projecting them at.

Relegation Battle

Only teams with a 5% or more chance of relegation are shown on this graphic; the trend again is from Saturday to Sunday in gameweek 4.

This 5% or more means Manchester United just about make it on this, which of course, if they fail to pick up any result against Chelsea, would likely mean they slip further down this table.

What it does tell us, though, is that the relegation battle could be the closest we have seen in years, with 5 teams all ranging from 53.7% to 41.0% likely to be relegated.

How does the Fusion-Sim 1.0 Model see Gameweek 5

The focus, as expected, will be on the biggest game of the weekend, Arsenal vs Manchester City. The model favouring the home side projected to score 1.69 expected goals.

Aston Villa, despite not scoring at all this season in the league, the only team to do this in the top 7 English tiers, have the same expected goal tally as Arsenal.

Surely they score against Sunderland, right?

The most for sure win of the week, according to the model, would be Liverpool at home in the Merseyside derby, with the home team at 70.1%. In reality, this is probably slightly lower than the model expects, it just sees the data of the two teams and not the fact that it’s a huge derby game!

That’s it for this week’s Matchday Digest, hope you enjoyed this brief preview and catch you next week!