Gunners to win Premier League. Probably.

Will Wagstaff • 1 February 2023

Premier League title is Arsenal's to lose

With the Premier League transfer window now closed thoughts turn to who will win the title, which teams will qualify for European football and which will be relegated.

We have developed a predictive model which helps us answer these questions.

Our predicted final Premier League standings is based upon probabilities. To generate the probabilities we use results from this season and previous ones to model the number of goals scored in a match as a Poisson distribution (the probability for a team to score one goal, two goals, three goals and so on in a match). We then identify parameters to represent a team’s attacking strength, defensive strength and home advantage. Applying this model to the remaining Premier League fixtures we can predict the final standings probabilities.

The probabilities suggest that Arsenal will win the league from Manchester City. We give the Gunners a 56% probability of winning with City on 43%. These are decent odds in the Gunners' favour and the title really is theirs to lose. 

We predict that Manchester United and Newcastle will join them next season in the Champions League. We predict that Southampton, Everton and Bournemouth will go down. 


We have also drawn up a heatmap showing the probabilities for the position each team is likely to finish in. This shows that Manchester United has a 37% probability of finishing 3rd ahead of Newcastle. The Magpies are predicted to finish 4th but the model is close as to whether they finish 3rd, 4th or 5th.


Usual Champion League stalwarts Liverpool and Chelsea are not predicted to finish in the top 4. Of the two, Liverpool has the highest probability of qualifying at 39%. Chelsea is predicted to finish in 7th or 8th place. At this point it should be pointed out that the model does not take into account the impact of transfers in or out of the squad during January's window. We saw last year that Newcastle's spending helped improve their league position and with Chelsea having spent heavily in the window, the same could happen this year. Injuries, managerial changes and players coming in and out of form will also have an impact on where teams finish.


Premier League Probabilities Heatmap 


At the bottom, although the model predicts Southampton, Everton and Bournemouth will be relegated, it will be very close. Nottingham Forest, Wolves, Leeds, Leicester and West Ham are all in the relegation mix.


We will update the model in April and publish the results then. Last season our model successfully predicted the winner, Champions League placings, Europa League and Europa Conference qualifiers plus the bottom 3 to be relegated. All in the correct order. 

Back of the net. 

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