Premier League Predictions: Gameweek 1
Using a Poisson distribution to predict game outcomes
How it works:
In the 2020–2021 English Premier League season, Manchester City and Liverpool had these goal distributions over the 38 games:
If we wanted to predict the outcome of Manchester City vs Liverpool just purely based on goal distribution from last season, we could combine these distributions into a matrix.
Blue cells indicate an outcome in which Manchester City would win, and the value inside the cell is the odds of that result happening. For example, a 2–0 Manchester City win has a 6.094% chance of happening. Red cells indicate a winning result for Liverpool, and yellow cells indicate a tie. Adding all of the blue cells would give us the odds of Manchester City winning. This can be done for the reds and yellows as well.
Gameweek 1 Predictions:
Percentages next to teams indicate the chance of that team winning that game. The third box between each matchup indicates the odds of a tie. (Brentford has a 43.76% chance of winning, Arsenal has a 34.15% chance of winning…
