The Premier League is back and there are plenty of matches that catch the eye:
Manchester United vs West Bromwich Albion.
This stands out firstly because it is the only match we’ve predicted a 2-0 home win (see Score Picks Most and Cond in the table below).
Secondly, looking at the likely outcomes, bookmakers seem to come to the same conclusion. We have a 75% likelihood of a home win and they have 72% (see Outcome Probs for our prediction, Mean Odds for bookmakers).
Man Utd are predicted to score at least 2 goals (Expected goals. Home 2.31), whereas West Brom are predicted to score quite a bit less than 1 (0.64 Expected goals, away).
On the other hand, as my fellow Scorecasting Economist James Reade points out this week in Forbes, playing West Brom can be extremely bad for managers!
Whatever happens, Man Utd (and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer) need a league win as they are only 14th in the league at the moment.
Elsewhere in the league, bookmakers tend to favour Manchester City to a greater extent than we do against Tottenham (We have Tottenham with a 31.4% chance of a win, bookmakers 23.2%; with away wins at 39.9% for our model and 52.9% for bookmakers).
Bookmakers on the other hand have Liverpool v Leicester as looking a bit closer than we do (64.3% home win for us and 49.3% home win from bookmakers).
Plenty of other games catch the eye – Chelsea looking likely to carry on winning, likewise Aston Villa with some close games predicted for Wolves v Southampton and Sheffield United v West Ham.
