Monday 21 June 2010

Just a couple of days ago the odds for the winners of the premier league 10/11 were published.

Chelsea were favourites at 6/4 followed by Manchester United. I'm not a betting man but I was curious about the numbers. The first thing I noticed was that the odds for other clubs decreased in what looked like a logarithmic fashion. I thought I'd investigate further! The first thing I did was average all the odds from different companies and convert the odds to probabilities to win:

.380228 Chelsea
.294118 Man Utd
.125000 Man City
.111111 Arsenal
.066667 Liverpoo
.019608 Tottenha
.003984 Everton
.003984 Aston Vi
.000666 Sunderla
.000500 Fulham
.000400 West Ham
.000400 Birmingh
.000400 Stoke
.000200 Blackbur
.000200 Bolton
.000133 Wigan At
.000133 Wolves

They add up to 1 which is good (I've omitted the promoted sides).

Then I added in the finishing positions from the 09/10 season and converted the probabilities to log probabilities and plotted the 2 against each other on a scatter plot with a linear best fit line.






















There seems to be a clear correlation. Chelsea and Man U are below the line so are expected to perform less well (slightly), Man City and Liverpool significantly better than last year, Aston Villa and Everton worse - Blackburn to get relegated!