Premier League 

10 September 2021

Premier League football returns Saturday lunchtime, following the international break.

A number of key players are now unavailable due to either injuries or Covid-related restrictions (including the two Brazilian goalkeepers, Ederson and Allisson and strikers from the same teams (Man City and Liverpool), Gabriel Jesus and Firmino).

You would expect most of the biggest teams squads will be able to absorb this but both these teams have away games that might be a bit tricky. Our model has both City and Liverpool drawing 1-1 against both Leicester and Leeds but we still favour each of these teams, Liverpool at 46% and Man City at 53% to win. Bookmakers mean odds agree with this but have an increase in confidence by around 8-9% (see below).

Premier League – Expected Goals, Most likely winners, most likely scores (and exact scores odds) and bookmakers, Mean odds:

After three games in the league so far, just one team has managed to win them all – Tottenham – and they kick off the weekend away to Crystal Palace who haven’t managed a win yet but do have two draws. They also are predicted to draw 1-1 with our model favouring Tottenham at 44.5%, bookmakers having them 5% higher on 49.5%. In the table above you can see that a 1-1 draw with Palace is in fact the second most likely of all the exact scores across the league this weekend at 12.7%.

In total there are six other unbeaten teams (including 10th placed, newly promoted Brentford) and also eight winless teams, with three at the bottom having lost all three games, Wolves, Norwich and Arsenal.

Arsenal are apparently quite likely to escape from this part of the drop-zone this weekend, with a 2-1 win the most likely score in their home game against Norwich. We have an Arsenal win at 61.4% likely with bookmakers only 2% higher. Wolves on the other hand may manage to get a 1-1 draw away to Watford with that exact score at 12.8% likley (the highest odds for an exact score in our model this week).

There is also much fanfare of course over the return of Ronaldo. The game is at 3pm so won’t be on TV in England but according to our model he is unlikely to make much difference to the result.

Man Utd are predicted to win 2-0 against Newcastle with a win 68.5% likely in our model (bookmakers, who do take into account Ronaldo’s appearance have Man Utd on 80.2% to win with a Newcastle win at just 6.5%)