Arsenal on the precipice of the title challenge
Looking at Arsenal's title challenge, checking in on the top seven mini league, and looking at Almirón's finishing
A month ago I wrote this:
Running a simulation where I only change Arsenal’s results it means basically taking 13 of the next 15 points (if Manchester City drop any points along the way that would only help). If Arsenal get wins against Leeds, Southampton, Nottingham Forrest, and Wolves while getting a draw against Chelsea they will very likely go into the World Cup break with title odds in the 20-25%+ range.
I got the team that they ended up drawing against wrong but it was not wrong about the direction of the title odds with those kinds of results.
In the latest simulation after the previous weekend’s matches, Arsenal are up to 22.5% for the title.
This compares favorably to FiveThirtyEight who has them at 22% but a bit bullish compared to the 17% implied from the 6.00 odds from the betting markets.
Arsenal in a pretty rarefied air with their current start (less so if you just look at 13 match runs but it is more fun to use the clean endpoint of a season start) with their run of 11 wins, 1 draw, and 1 loss. My preseason prediction of 72 points is looking quaint with Arsenal only needing 38 more points over the next 24 matches to hit that.
Arsenal are on the precipice of a true title challenge and it is fully deserved.
Top Seven Mini League
I was curious about this so I thought it would be interesting to look at how the top teams have done playing against each other. Getting results in these matches isn’t really necessary for a top-four challenge if you can win the matches you are “supposed” to win, but I do believe that winning a title requires at a minimum not dropping a ton of points in these matches where losses are top of the table six-pointers.
Arsenal are doing really well on this measure, winning 3, drawing 0, and losing just 1. They are backing this up with the second-best goal difference and the best-expected goal difference.
The battle for the last two spots in the top four could be interesting (it might actually end up just being the last spot if Newcastle continues on their current path). There are several teams that have the projected 4th place cut off inside of their projected spread of outcomes.
There is also a World Cup coming up that we haven’t had to deal with and we don’t really have any prior experiences to point to, to help guide our expectations for what this might mean.
One of the other things I might consider adding is something that looks at January net transfer spending as something that feeds into team ratings. It seems like it will be a wild ride when we get back from the World Cup.
Miguel Almirón's hot finishing
Miguel Almirón of Newcastle is currently finishing his chances out of his mind.
He has 7 goals over his last 7 Premier League matches. He is doing this from 2.9 expected goals.
The crazy part is that before this hot run, Almirón was a pretty “bad” finisher according to xG and I think really helps illustrate that even for a player that has a sample of 175 shots it is still hard to say with a lot of confidence how good a finisher a player truly is.
For the current season, this is what his goals scored looks like compared to his expected goals.
He is certainly in the middle of a hot finishing run.
This is how it looks over his time in the Premier League:
One of the peculiar things about Almirón is that he might just be a streaky player (or weird things can just happen over small sample sizes, especially for a player that doesn’t take a ton of really high-quality shots.)
A lot of his goal production has come in short bursts where he scores in bunches before he goes back to seeing his goals dry up. It is a fun story to try and tell a story around but I am not sure there is anything more than a player that takes a decent amount of low and medium-quality
shots and sometimes there is the chance that these start going in.
Week 16 Odds
It is the last weekend before all the Leagues take a break for the World Cup.
One of the things I will be looking at is if players going to the World Cup will take it easy. We have seen a few players pick up injuries and have to drop out, I wonder if that will be in the back of people’s minds leading to potentially a lower intensity weekend compared to normal.
🤠 Yee Haw! Enjoy your weekend.