Checking in on the title Race
It is Liverpool's to lose but there is the potential for it to still be interesting
I was very down after Arsenal drew Fulham. That was a performance from Arsenal that will very often have a team leave a tricky away ground with all three points and with Liverpool not playing would have pulled them within 4 points. Even with Liverpool having a game in hand it would have been a big psychological boost.
Instead, the bounces went against Arsenal and of picking up a solid point on expectation and a point on what Liverpool would be expected against Everton they left with the opposite.
I was looking at things and thinking that the title was probably a real long shot and that set me up for a surprise when I ran my simulation Monday night.
Latest Simulation
It is still not great for Arsenal because of the reasons above but it is under a six-point gap for the final expected points total and still some good overlap for Arsenal to the right-hand side of the distribution with the expected total that it will take to win the League.
The reason for this is that Arsenal’s team rating went UP after against after the Fulham match even if they dropped points. They have opened up some daylight in the expected rating between themselves and Liverpool and especially Manchester City who have fallen hard and quickly.
There is no sugar coating that this is not where Arsenal would want to be when they imagined how the season started at this point and it is a monumental hill to climb. It is also significantly less bad than I had hoped it might have been if you had described to me the injury situation and dealing with still having 10% of the team’s minutes played down a man.
Here is the latest summary of the simulation.
Is Chelsea in the race?
This is becoming a bit of a question here and I think that they are just on the edge of things right now. I usually use an informal 10% chance as the cut off for this as my cut off and that puts them just on the edge of the race.
The overall performance this season does show them not far off Arsenal and a bit behind Liverpool but in roughly the same tier here for how they have played in the aggregate this season.
They have also made a big improvement over the last three seasons as the massive volume of bets in the transfer market has given them a talented team as they figured out who is good and how to start getting them working together.
This team has taken a big step forward and they look primed to be dangerous for the short and medium term with the young talent that they have accumulated.
One of the things that makes me still have some doubts about this team is that some of the good numbers here are built on their big wins and that they are still perhaps just short of the week in and out level of consistent that is required to push for the title.
Chelsea are playing well. They have a lot of talent. They have the benefit that they are not in the Champions League where the first team is forced to play every three days and have a big squad.
They might also not be quite as good when the game is close as the overall numbers suggest and if they don’t get that goal that pushes them from +1 to +2 they look good but short of title winning good.
They have won four in a row and five of their last seven in the Premier League and I wouldn’t want to face them right now. They are just on the outside of the race (everyone kind of is) but they are a dangerous team.
Liverpool’s to lose
The title is clearly tilted in Liverpool’s direction.
They have been the best team in the Premier League this season and have run out to a big lead that is pushing to levels where no team that has gotten this big of a lead, this early in the season has not won it.
It would be a very good job from Arne Slot to take the very good squad he was given and be able to make a few tweaks around the edges of how they play and get them title number 20.
The team has been consistently good this season and outside of the loss to Nottingham Forest have had even the moderately close matches on xG go their way without any other major footballing’s to drop points.
This consistent very good play is one of the worries that I have about the team not being able to be caught. They have weaknesses in the team and it might be just short of the ELITE numbers that we have seen from Manchester City, Liverpool, or even Arsenal recently but as of right now, they just don’t have many stinkers of games.
Adding in their performance in the Champions League where they have navigated a tough schedule shows that their performance in the Premier League is not a fluke.
This is a very good team, maybe the best in the World right now.
It is their title to lose, hopefully Arsenal can make it interesting for them.