Hi everyone,

Initially I have to apologise for not being around for a while, I’ve been working on another project which I’m sure that you’re going to love which I hope to bring to your attention very shortly once Nik, Jeremy and Neal are on board.

As you’ll remember, I used to create the Poisson perfection fanpost every week (under Bitsketchy) but I unfortunately ran out of time to produce it. Now things are back to normal I may revisit it for next season, assuming readers want it.

I may however have found a temporary solution in the meantime to predicting weekly premier league results......

I noticed on a previous thread that Rodeo and Jeremy were discussing the impact of early season games on his systems performance and it brought to mind an article that I recently read, it comes from www.football-data.co.uk and is the work of Joe Buchdahl. Basically it explains how he mapped the performance of each premier league teams results according to the goal difference achieved over their previous 6 games across numerous seasons. This allowed him to create a usable formula to predict the probability of a match result just by comparing the goals scored by two teams over six weeks of play.

As an interested party, I recreated the process in Excel to make life a little easier, for this week, the probabilities are:

The interesting fact is that the strongest chance of success is Newcastle at home (albeit only just from Manchester City). Additionally, Manchester United is almost equally likely to perform as well and I think that maybe a mix of players from these teams is more beneficial than a focus on just one.

As for Aston Villa and Bolton, we can actually work out the percentage chance of them winning both of their matches by multiplying the percentages for each result. Therefore, it’s a 16.18% chance of Aston succeeding twice and a 13.29% chance for Bolton. I leave it to you to decide if either of these probabilities are enough to tempt you.

If anyone would like the spreadsheet I’m happy to email it out as needed. I wonder if everyone would like me to submit these details weekly?