Wednesday 14 August 2013

RACE to Goals Model: League Predictions

At the end of my introduction to the RACE to Goals Model, that you can read here, I mentioned that I would like to look at how teams performed from a defensive point of view, and to check  how reliable the metrics are year on year.

Whilst I have done those things, I haven't had the time to sit down and write about them. But I have been able to create a model (well, I created a few slightly different versions and picked what seemed the best) to predict this season's league table, so I will at least get that posted prior to the season starting so that I don't let bias from early results get in the way.

The model is a variation of the Shot Dominance model, as coined by @mixedknuts (here), which is itself a variation of the Total Shot Ratio (TSR) model that has been looked at in legnth by @JamesWGrayson (such as this), and a good summary of TSR by @TheM_L_G can be read here. What differentiates the RACE to Goals Model is that it includes the quality of chance that those metrics are missing based on the metrics from my earlier piece, and I hope to go into more detail in later posts.

For the promoted teams I did not have the data available to do the same analysis, so a simply did a regression of goals scored and conceded in the Championship since 2000 for promoted team compared to points scored the following season in the Premier League.

The model predicts that Man City are the clear favourites for the title, and that there will be another very close battle for 4th place, whilst down at the bottom, Fulham, Newcastle Southampton and Norwich could well be in trouble. Of course the model does not take into account any managerial changes or player transfers, which could change team strengths significantly. Personally, I'd expect Newcastle and Southampton to do a little better and be replaced by Sunderland down towards the bottom, whilst common sense would say that Chelsea should challenge at the top, but other than that, I think the predictions are reasonable.

Anyway, here's the predicted table.