Premier League 6 March 2021

Manchester City v Manchester United

Are Man City unstoppable?

This season, in terms of winning the Premier League, yes

If United win tomorrow, will it change the title race, such as it is?

No, because even if they do win, City have enough to rotate and will win more than enough of their remaining games.

This is first v second but there are already 14 points between the two and Man Utd have drawn four of their last five games. United actually look reasonably vulnerable of not being in the Champions League if two or three teams below them put together good end of season runs and they carry on drawing.

They also have the worst defence of the current top four and the second worst out of current top six.

Man Utd do score goals though and are in fact second in the league only to Man City on that measure.

Man Utd have won quite a few more of the games played between the two clubs so there is some hope, especially as they have won 2 and drawn one of the last 4 match ups between the two.

Man City are showing at 1.88 on expected goals to Man Utd’s 0.7 and are 65% likely to win in our model. Bookmakers have them on similar odds at 61%.

Our model predicts: 1-0 Man City win.

Elsewhere in the league:

For a lot of the games this weekend our scorecasting model is very close to bookmaker mean odds (see table below).

There are one or two exceptions. There is not much between Brighton and Leicester (with each model favouring a different team). Brighton have the joint best defence with Fulham in the lower half of the table and apart from Leeds, the best goal difference in that half of the table.

Our model favours Sheffield Utd over Southampton whereas bookmakers heavily favour Southampton despite their dismal recent form (45% for a Southampton win).

In many weeks of the season, our model has slightly underestimated Everton. This week is no exception, as a draw is predicted with West Brom but bookmakers favour them at 50% compared to just 23% for West Brom.

It’s also one of the few weeks this season we’ve had where there are no teams on above 2 for expected goals.  The game with the biggest difference between two teams this week is between Spurs and Palace.