Relegated Leeds are back in the country’s second tier following three consecutive seasons in the Premier League and life at the new level will begin with the home clash against Cardiff City on Sunday, August 6.
The season itself starts next Friday night when Southampton visit Sheffield Wednesday and football statisticians at BetVictor have built a predictive supercomputer to simulate the upcoming campaign producing a prediction of how the final Championship table will present itself after 46 games.
The supercomputer adopts the Monte Carlo method and at its heart is a Python-based match simulator that uses two Poisson distributions – one for the home team and one for the away team – to anticipate the number of goals each team could score in a match.
A Poisson distribution is a powerful mathematical concept that predicts the probability of a given number of events (in this case, goals) happening in a fixed interval of time. The key input to a Poisson distribution is the 'lambda' (λ) value, which represents the average rate of an event's occurrence.
Their supercomputer uses the match simulator to predict the outcomes of a full season's fixtures. The simulation is run 10,000 times, following which the average standings and probabilities are calculated which leads to a final table and full range of ‘average’ points of each side.
BetVictor have used Manchester City playing at home to Arsenal as an example. In their simulator, they first compute the λ for Man City, using both xG (Expected Goals) and actual goals scored per match based on their last 19 home games.
This gives them an 'attacking lambda'. For instance, with an xG of 2.24 and actual goals per match of 3.16 whilst playing at the Etihad, Man City's attacking λ is: 2.7 – both xG and goals are used to measure both underlying and actual performance.
Next, they calculate Arsenal's 'defensive lambda' based on their last 19 away games from their average goals conceded per game (0.95) and xGA (1.2) whilst on the road, giving a value of 1.08.
To tailor these λ values to the specific match-up, they adjust Man City's attacking λ by factoring in the strength of Arsenal's defence. They do this by calculating a multiplier, which is the ratio of Arsenal's defensive λ to the league average defensive λ (1.54).
Multiplying Man City's λ (2.7) by this factor adjusts it for Arsenal's specific defensive strength. This adjusted λ better represents Man City's goal-scoring likelihood against Arsenal. The same process is replicated for the away team.
Here is the new supercomputer’s full range of 2023-24 predicted finishing positions, where Leeds feature and the club’s forecast points tally.
