Other club football

The Mathematical Certainy Club (or whatever Guru called it the other day) strikes again!
Glad to be an apparent member, even if I only got in on a scholarship.

Yes, but it would mean we are one of the teams that has ever performed the best from this point onwards. The distribution, if you want to get stats about it, would suggest it's unlikely we finish that high.

I really enjoy a statistic that genuinely surprises me.

Liverpoo too?

I've had mockery in previous seasons for saying the first target is always 40 points

I do think the relegation barrier will be higher. But 40 may be a stretch. I think we did this last season or the season before but it’s been while since a team went down with 40 points. West Ham in the early 2000s? And then a couple of teams in the 90’s?

We are currently 4th favourites to go down on oddschecker. OPTA, which got a number of things wrong last season, has us 4th from bottom just behind Leeds.

I think we are better off than we have been so far this season. Despite Brentford, Nuno was running out of gas and middle-lower teams had adapted to his ways. Anyone fancies themselves against an Ange team. I think Dyche will be taken a bit more seriously, the team appear to have a bit more mojo.

Obviously Muff will now tear us a new one…..

The first target is 12 points

Palace had 3 points after 8 games last season. Finished 12th. I don't think that is unrealistic. We can win the FA Cup and Europa League as well, good season.

The stats are actually quite funny.
After 8 games, if you're on 3, 4, or 5 points then top half hasn't happend.
6 points and a team has finished 6th.
2 points and a team has finished 8th!

The average final position for 4 or 5 points is 17th (boo)
For 3 points, it's 16th!
For 2 points, it's 15th!
I'm guessing that's a sack-the-manager threshold or something.
Stat link

Bookmakers and opta use very similar modelling, so that’s not too surprising.

The fact that opta have us finishing above our current position is a good thing (if you take it in any way seriously). But generally it tracks pretty close to league position (for obvious reasons). Their model simply can’t track the fact that we had an unsuitable manager for the last batch of games and they won’t discard those results as irrelevant. If we won the next three (unlikely, but not impossible) both of those indicators would change quickly.

But you need to cross reference that with our xGa% and our dPr value and our KMA probability to arrive at a true prediction.

Or you could just do the sensible thing and apply context, which is that most teams that have the same points total at this point of the season are probably newly promoted or in an FFP mess, neither of which applies to us. You're making an excellent case for why stats in isolation are sometimes misleading, and often completely fucking useless.

It's more to do with no one else wanting to play in goal. Probably.

Some West Ham fans think Nuno is sabotaging them because he hasn't been allowed to bring his coaching staff. He's made some odd selection choices but it looks to me like he's trying to work out what he's got. He must have known when he was appointed that he would be stuck with their old boys coaching team.

Just seen leicester are in the bottom half of the championship, level on points with derby. Shows how quickly things can spiral if you get relegated.

Getting out the championship is HARD.