The Form Table’s guide: who will win the league based on recent form?

 

 

 

• How reporters endlessly knock Arsenal with false “where it all went wrong” tales
• Games against each other: the big seven

By Tony Attwood and a calculator

The two most reliable guides to form are the last six games of each club and the last ten games of each club.   The last six games is the best model in the sense that it reflects the current form more accurately, but it also emphasises any short-term bonus or disruption to the club’s performance – thus for example rewarding a club that has had a few easy games.   

The last ten games gives a better vision of how the club is doing, but of course things might have changed quite a lot since ten games ago, which for most clubs was taking us back to February 4 when Arsenal lost to Everton.  However the last 10 table does normally include games against clubs at the top in the middle and at the bottom of the league.

So the projections that follow start with the number of games played and the points currently showing.   The third column shows how many points the club has got in the last six games, and then the PG column turns that into points per game.

The next two columns do the same with the last ten games.  Then the final columns give the points total based on the form of the last six and the last 10 games continuing to the end of the season.

Thus this sort of calculation is an alternative to the current spate of pundits saying, “I don’t think Arsenal will make it,” etc.  It is not perfect and all sorts of things can go wrong, but there is more logic and sense in this than in the normal “I think” commentaries that we seem to get each day in the day.

But in case you don’t want to fight through all those figures the highlights are printed at the end in the form of league tables based on the last six and last ten games.

 

	Team	P	Pts	Last 6 Pts	Pts PG	Last 10 Pts	Pts PG	Final on last 6	final on last 10
1	Arsenal	29	72	18	3.00	22	2..2	99	92
2	Manchester City	28	64	16	2.67	25	2.5	90	89
3	Newcastle United	28	53	12	2.00	18	1.8	73	71
4	Manchester United	28	53	10	1.67	15	1.5	70	68
5	Tottenham Hotspur	29	50	11	1.83	17	1.7	66	65
6	Brighton and Hove Albion	27	46	11	1.83	19	1.9	66	67

 

The final table is based on the form of the last six games remaining the same through the final matches of the season.

 

	Team	Final based on last 6	Final based on last 10
1	Arsenal	99	92
2	Manchester City	90	89
3	Newcastle United	73	71
4	Manchester United	70	68
5	Brighton and Hove Albion	66	67
6	Tottenham Hotspur	66	65

 

So if either the form of the last six games or the last ten games continues, Arsenal will win the league.  In fact, the same results come out whether we use the last six or the last ten games, throughout the table, except for the issue of the 5th and 6th positions.

There if we follow the last six games it will be a case of goal difference.  On the basis of the last ten games, Brighton take fifth without recourse to goal difference calculations.

To resolve this, the goal difference of Tottenham Hotspur is +12, while that of Brighton and Hove is +17.   So on these parameters, Brighton will take 5th and Tottenham 6th in both cases.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Arsenal	29	23	3	3	70	27	43	72
2	Manchester City	28	20	4	4	71	26	45	64
3	Newcastle United	28	14	11	3	46	20	26	53
4	Manchester United	28	16	5	7	42	37	5	53
5	Tottenham Hotspur	29	15	5	9	53	41	12	50
6	Brighton and Hove Albion	27	13	7	7	51	34	17	46

 

Liverpool’s form over the last six and the last ten games has been worse than Tottenham’s and Brighton’s so there is no need to work out their position at the end.

Indeed the form over the last ten games does throw up some interesting numbers: here’s the top of the table thanks to The Fishy website throughout.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Manchester City	10	8	1	1	25	8	17	25
2	Arsenal	10	7	1	2	25	11	14	22
3	Brighton & Hove	10	5	4	1	19	9	10	19
4	Aston Villa	10	6	1	3	17	13	4	19
5	Newcastle United	10	5	3	2	14	9	5	18
6	Tottenham Hots	10	5	2	3	16	14	2	17
7	Liverpool	10	4	3	3	14	8	6	15
8	Manchester Utd	10	4	3	3	13	16	-3	15
9	Brentford	10	3	5	2	14	10	4	14
10	West Ham Utd	10	3	3	4	11	15	-4	12

 

The position of West Ham in tenth is interesting because they looked far worse than a team in that position in their last game.  Which of course reminds us this is a prediction based on certain parameters.  But at least it is a prediction based on something other than one man’s prejudice, which is what the newspapers usually quote.

No supercomputer was used in the writing of this article.