We predicted six champions before the season started. We got all six right.

Posted on by Tony Attwood
By Tony Attwood
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The last three posts have been talking about corruption in football.   Where corruption is taking place on a major scale it ought to be possible to predict who is going to win the league, and have already mentioned in an earlier post that at the start of the 2018/19 season, Untold made a series of predictions concerning who would win various titles.
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If the predictions turn out to be accurate that of course does not prove that corruption is taking place, but rather it indicates that corruption might be taking place.  Not necessarily by bribing referees, although that is one possibility, but by engaging in other forms of manipulation.
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However there is no proof – rather an observation that says, the way things are set up in English football makes it easier rather than harder for a would be corruptor to go about his or her business unhindered.
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So, let’s see how we got on.  Here is the list of winners we gave just under one year ago…
  • England: Manchester City
  • Spain: Barcelona
  • Scotland: Celtic
  • Italy: Juventus
  • Germany: Bayern Munich
  • France: PSG

How did they do?

You’ll probably know exactly who did what, but allow me my moment of glory as I go through them all…

Manchester City won the League as predicted, and the FA Cup and League Cup.  Manchester United in sixth place missed relegation by 32 points.  They also missed being champions by 32 points.  It suggests that the sixth placed club is what in the past would have been called a mid-table team, but such was the dominance of two clubs, that sixth spot was in fact mid-table, if you see what I mean.

# Team P W D L F A GD Pts
1 Manchester City 38 32 2 4 95 23 +72 98
2 Liverpool 38 30 7 1 89 22 +67 97
3 Chelsea 38 21 9 8 63 39 +24 72
4 Tottenham Hotspur 38 23 2 13 67 39 +28 71
5 Arsenal 38 21 7 10 73 51 +22 70
6 Manchester United 38 19 9 10 65 54 +11 66

Arsenal, despite the endless nay saying in the media, missed the Champions League by only two points – ie one win.  The draw with Brighton was what did it for us.

Commenting on City’s FA Cup win, the Guardian carried a piece headlined, “Manchester City’s sky blue smashing of Watford proves football is broken,” which was pretty much our point when we made the predictions.  There are few doubts in Euro football these days.

Barcelona won their league with a goal difference of double that of their nearest rival.   And once again the team in fourth – a champions league position – was closer to relegation than they were to the club at the top of the league.

# Team P W D L F A D Pts
1 Barcelona 38 26 9 3 90 36 +54 87
2 Atlético Madrid 38 22 10 6 55 29 +26 76
3 Real Madrid 38 21 5 12 63 46 +17 68
4 Valencia 38 15 16 7 51 35 +16 61
5 Getafe 38 15 14 9 48 35 +13 59
6 Sevilla 38 17 8 13 62 47 +15 59
7 Espanyol 38 14 11 13 48 50 -2 53
8 Athletic Club 38 13 14 11 41 45 -4 53
9 Real Sociedad 38 13 11 14 45 46 -1 50
10 Real Betis 38 14 8 16 44 52 -8 50
11 Deportivo Alavés 38 13 11 14 39 50 -11 50
12 Eibar 38 11 14 13 46 50 -4 47
13 Leganés 38 11 12 15 37 43 -6 45
14 Villarreal 38 10 14 14 49 52 -3 44
15 Levante 38 11 11 16 59 66 -7 44
16 Real Valladolid 38 10 11 17 32 51 -19 41
17 Celta de Vigo 38 10 11 17 53 62 -9 41
18 Girona 38 9 10 19 37 53 -16 37
19 Huesca 38 7 12 19 43 65 -22 33
20 Rayo Vallecano 38 8 8 22 41 70 -29 32

Celtic won the league in Scotland by nine points, and indeed completed the treble treble (ie winning the two cups and the league in one season, three seasons running) which rather suggests that our guess of them to win the league was not that much of a punt.

Celtic won the league by nine points and were 20 points ahead of the club in third place.  33 points ahead of the club in fifth…

P Team P W D L F A GD Pts
1  Celtic 38 27 6 5 77 20 57 87
2 Rangers 38 23 9 6 82 27 55 78
3  Kilmarnock 38 19 10 9 50 31 19 67
4 Aberdeen 38 20 7 11 57 44 13 67

Meanwhile in Italy Juventus spent the whole season out of sight of everyone else and ended up once more still out of sight.   With one game to go it looked like this…

Team P W D L F A GD Pts
1 Juventus 37 28 6 3 70 28 +42 90
2 Napoli 37 24 7 6 72 33 +39 79
3 Atalanta 37 19 9 9 74 45 +29 66
4 Internazionale 37 19 9 9 55 32 +23 66
5 Milan 37 18 11 8 52 34 +18 65

In Germany it was a much closer race than of late after Bayern made a poor start but even so they still came back to win the league right at the end.  That is eight times in a row, as with Juventus, or something like that.  Counting these up I am losing the will to live…

# Team P W D L F A GD Pts
1 Bayern München 34 24 6 4 88 32 +56 78
2 Borussia Dortmund 34 23 7 4 81 44 +37 76
3 RB Leipzig 34 19 9 6 63 29 +34 66
4 Bayer Leverkusen 34 18 4 12 69 52 +17 58
5 Borussia M’gla… 34 16 7 11 55 42 +13 55

Which leaves France.

Team P W D L F A D Pts
1 PSG 37 29 4 4 104 32 +72 91
2 Lille 37 22 9 6 67 30 +37 75
3 Olympique Lyonnais 37 20 9 8 67 45 +22 69
4 Saint-Étienne 37 19 8 10 58 40 +18 65
5 Montpellier 37 15 14 8 53 41 +12 59

And again we got it right.  And PSG were so far out of sight they also almost got a goal difference of double the team that came second.

So, without any particular insights and certainly no special knowledge, we predicted who would win six European Leagues and got it right each time.

Which raises the question: what does that tell us about these six European leagues?   My answer is simple: that they are utterly predictable.   We’ll do the same predictions again for next season and again get most of them, if not all of them, right.  At least I suspect we will.  It doesn’t tell us that football is fixed – but if football in these leagues were fixed, the results would be as we see now.  The same team winning the league season after season.

Now the people who don’t buy into this philosophy argue that in England and Germany Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund ran the champions close.  And of course that is true.  They did.   But even so the predicted champions still won.

In England the media spent the whole season telling readers, viewers and listeners what a wonderful team Liverpool were, but even with what was, we were told, the best Liverpool team this century they still couldn’t win the league. The last time they won was 1990.

And they told us it was the most exciting title race in years because… well, it is always the most exciting title race in years.

And that is how football goes.  It is now, at the top, predictable, because money always wins.  As I tried to point out in a recent article, sometimes the unexpected happens, but not often.  In fact, in terms of the champions this year, not at all.

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2 Replies to “We predicted six champions before the season started. We got all six right.”

  1. Also interesting to note that a team can lose more that a third of their epl games ,and still qualify for the CL !

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