Seriously, I spend all day playing around with Excel spreadsheets at work, and sometimes I just want to come home and play with Excel spreadsheets in the comfort of my own living room. I'm a terrible sad case.
But I wanted to mess with unnecessarily complicated formulas to predict the Premier League table at the end of the season, based on who still has to play whom. The aim is to get to a point where my calculations are so weird and complex, yet still roughly justifiable by logic, that the end result is a pleasant surprise to me when I see it. Or an unpleasant surprise as it turns out. I really don't like Chelsea and I was hoping to come up with scientific proof that they weren't going to win it. But still, yay, it turns out that Aston Villa are going to get fourth place!
I won't bore everyone by explaining the calculations used (because I wouldn't know how to explain them comprehensibly, for a start), but I thought I'd put my predictions here for posterity and compare them with how the table looks after everything's done and dusted. I'll bet you a coke it's accurate, because it's generated by Science.
1 Chelsea 85
2 Man Utd 81
3 Arsenal 81
4 Aston Villa 72
5 Liverpool 69
6 Tottenham 68
7 Man City 68
8 Everton 53
9 Birmingham 52
10 Fulham 49
11 Stoke 46
12 Blackburn 43
13 West Ham 39
14 Wigan 39
15 Sunderland 38
16 Wolverhampton 38
17 Bolton 37
18 Burnley 37
19 Hull 37
20 Portsmouth [probably non-existent]
Right, that's enough time-wasting. Time to start doing something productive again.
I fully approve of any projection that has the mighty Sunderland staying up, though I fear our battle against relegation may be as exciting as you suggest. Fingers crossed that we stay a point above the line, rather than below it.
ReplyDeleteWonder if Portsmouth will be able to beat Derby's total for the lowest PL score yet?
It's been a very drastic slide from European hopefuls to relegation-strugglers. Nothing seems to have gone right for them since the beachball, in fact - I suspect some kind of curse that can only be lifted by a trip to the seaside.
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