Welcome to the Matchday Digest, with the Premier League 2024/25 season over, these newsletters will continue weekly, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at upcoming content and or additions to my website and in general, all the stuff I am working on!

Currently, my 2025/26 code is running, trying to find a season in which every single team has won the Premier League, and we are still stuck at 19/20 teams. No awards for guessing which team it has not found yet! (Sunderland!)

However, yesterday we did complete the number of sims needed to see every team at least relegated once from the Premier League

Of course, it took the longest to see reigning Premier League Champions Liverpool relegated from the League. Taking around 250,000 sims. That was to find them just in 18th too. The table showing this will be out soon on my TikTok page!

Interestingly, both Everton and Fulham were relegated alongside Sunderland in the first simulation meaning that 2 of the 3 newly promoted clubs survived!

Abit more technical, but how we go about doing this is my model is predicting a score for every single game in the 2025/26 season, at the end of this, it compiles the table, which would be the result of all the predicted scores. It then checks if the table has a new team relegated that we have not seen before, if yes, it saves that table along with the full season of results it predicted to get to that point, if no, then it discards that season and moves on.

So using that knowledge, you can better understand how it takes Liverpool so long to be relegated, as we need it to predict a set of results for Liverpool which sees them get 40 points (ish) or less which would be very rare. Liverpool only really got upset once this season by Nottingham Forest early on in the campagin but in this sim they lost to the likes of West Ham, Brighton, Bournemouth, Brentford, Forest (Again) and Man United AND that was just at home too.

Sneak Peek

Here is the first sneak peek of what version 1 of my model (which I used for last season) is predicting as the matrix output for the 2025/26 season.

Key points are,

Liverpool are favourites for the title, but are closely followed by Arsenal. 39.6% Liverpool, 38.2% Arsenal, 15.9% Man City.

Sunderland are relegated in 99.3% of 10,000 sims. Finishing last in 92.2% of them!

Man United are as likely to win the league as they are to come last! Their relegation chance is at 6.7%.

Hopefully, by this time next week I will have the data up onto the site and so I can share screenshots from that too! Lots of behind-the-scenes updates have been made to the site so the frontend is not looking much different but its working much better!

As always, thank you for all the support and welcome to all the new newsletter subscribers!