Why Brighton Should be Happy Playing at Neutral Venues
The Premier League is trying to find many different routes to try and finish the remainder of the matches this season. The latest, a proposal to play at neutral venues, has been met by objection from a number of the clubs in the bottom-six who fear that playing games away from their home stadium, and the familiarity and advantage that brings, could eventually lead to them being relegated from the Premier League. Survival in the Premier League is extremely important as it brings with it a windfall of £200 million and that is a loss that some clubs never recover from.
Brighton’s chief executive, Paul Barber, was one of the first people to speak out against the idea of playing at neutral venues. On the face of it, Paul Barber’s statement regarding Brighton’s strong home form comes from the fact that Brighton have only lost four of their home games and looking at the home table, Brighton are at the top of this table when comparing teams from the bottom-six.
However, while looking at the home and away forms of the bottom-six teams, and their composition of home versus away fixtures, it seems very strange that Brighton would come out and issue such a statement.
Reason 1: Brighton’s home form only looks good because of the fixtures they have left.
Brighton’s home form is as good as it is because they are still yet to play Liverpool and Manchester City at home. All of Brighton’s remaining home fixtures — Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal and Newcastle United, are daunting. In fact, if we look at the remaining home fixtures for the rest of the bottom-six teams, all the other teams can be expected to pick up more points than Brighton at home from these set of fixtures.
Using an algorithm which looks at the points per game (PPG) at home for the bottom-six clubs against the away PPG of their opponents (discussed in detail below), Brighton can only be expected to pick up 3 points from these 5 fixtures (draws against Arsenal, Newcastle Utd and Manchester Utd). West Ham and Watford are each expected to get a win over Aston Villa and Norwich City respectively whereas Bournemouth, Aston Villa and Norwich are expected to get a range of 5–6 points from their remaining games. Thus, at the end of the Premier League season Brighton would have 21 points at home, only West Ham Utd, Norwich City and Southampton would have picked up fewer points at home through the course of the season.
Reason 2: Brighton’s away form is better than their peers
Brighton’s away fixtures, on the other hand are much easier than their peers. Bournemouth, Aston Villa and Norwich would be lucky to get a point from any of their away matches. Fixtures highlighted in yellow are where the teams can be expected to get at least a draw.
Also, looking at the proportion of points from home matches this season from teams in the bottom-six, only West Ham (56%) have lower than Brighton’s current share of 62%. As already mentioned above, this proportion for Brighton is only likely to fall further.
Reason 3: Neutral venues would give Brighton a competitive advantage
We look at two possible scenarios of how the remainder of the Premier League fixtures could be played out and how the bottom-six clubs would be affected in both these scenarios.
Scenario 1: Remainder of the season to be played at neutral venues
Algorithm: Team A is considered to be the bottom-six team in question and Team B is considered to be their opponent. The difference of PPGs of Team A and Team B are calculated for the entire season (as there is no data for matches played at neutral venues). If this difference is above/below a certain threshold, calculated using Interquartile range of the PPGs of all the premier league teams this season, Team A’s result is either a win, draw or a loss.
An example using the Burnley v Brighton fixture is given below:
If the difference is between -0.5 and 0.5, the result is a draw. If the difference is below -0.5 then Team B is awarded a win and if the difference is above 0.5 then Team A is awarded a win. Using this logic, Brighton would get a point from this fixture.
Scenario 2: Remainder of the season to be played at Home/Away Venues
Algorithm: Similar to the above logic except instead of using PPGs of the entire season we break this up into home and away PPGs for Teams A and B. Using the same fixture as above, this would mean we look at Burnley’s home PPG and Brighton’s away PPG.
Since the difference is -0.8, Brighton would lose this fixture. Thus, if the same fixture would be played at a neutral ground as supposed to home/away venue, Brighton would gain an additional point.
Expanding this algorithm to the remaining fixtures of the bottom-six teams, we can project the additional points these teams are likely to accrue from the two different scenarios.
From the bottom-six, Brighton is the only team to not be disadvantaged from playing at neutral venues.
Given Brighton’s horror run of home fixtures and their comparatively better rate of picking up points away from home as compared to the other teams scrapping to avoid relegation, Brighton should actually be welcoming the proposal of playing at neutral venues instead of leading the campaign against it.
