Man Utd, Nottingham Forest and other teams who are not as bad as you think they are
We’re huge fans of Opta’s Expected Premier League Table. Partly because it can be genuinely interesting and insightful. But also because we remain convinced it obscures at least as much as it reveals and is in some part a giant mischief machine designed to generate narratives.
You don’t have to be a tinfoil merchant to think a table that says Man United should actually be above Chelsea just before they meet in the league with United at peak beleaguerment isn’t having a bit of fun with us all.
Same with the idea that Brighton and Nottingham Forest should in fact be on the same number of points and locked in a battle for Champions League football.
To paraphrase the legendary Sideshow Bob: “Expected table? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for expected chemistry? Do they?”
No, they don’t. But it doesn’t mean the expected table has no value at all. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, it was insisting to widespread derision that Fulham, Bournemouth and Tottenham might all in fact be a bit less sh*t than they appeared to be on the surface.
Since then, a trio of teams who had at the time of those prognostications managed a combined zero wins between them in 18 games have picked up six wins from six and skipped jauntily toward the refuge of mid-table, in accordance with the prophecy.
So it seems only sensible to consider who else might in fact be due for a turning of a corner. Here are the ‘top’ five teams currently most significantly underperforming their xPts in Opta’s unblinking eyes.
5) Fulham (-3.1pts)
The pressure that was mounting on Alvaro Arbeloa has eased significantly with a couple of extremely welcome victories in recent weeks, but Opta still reckon Fulham ought to have the equivalent of another win on their tally, believing Fulham’s efforts this year to have been the precise equal of Leeds’.
For what it’s worth, Leeds are also the team whose level is most accurately reflected in the boring actual table, according to the numbers here. Opta have Leeds down for 11.1 points at this stage, and they’ve actually picked up 11. Given it remains impossible to get 0.1 of a point in the real table, you’d have to say that’s about as close as you can reasonably ask to get.
READ: Premier League underrated XI includes Leeds trio as ‘Big Six’ players snubbed
4) Manchester United (-3.7pts)
Hello, hello. What are you doing here? Imagine if Manchester United are accidentally getting it exactly right in deciding to just stick with a seemingly failing manager because their vast array of cooks would rather let the broth spoil than agree on a replacement for Michael Carrick?
It is still nevertheless worth noting here that United are currently so very bad that even with a start that might be unfortunate in its extreme levels of woe, their rightful tally would still only lift them into mid-table nothingness.
They are 11th in the Expected Table. They’re still not good. They still wouldn’t be happy. But it does point to a decent chance of being able to win the fight against relegation, at least.
“It is at best a mid-table team,” says Wayne Rooney. Damn right.
3) Bournemouth (-4.6pts)
Even with back-to-back wins their still way off the Champions League-bothering total Opta reckons they should have managed, all things being equal.
There have been some conspicuously irritating dropped points for Bournemouth before those much-needed wins, most notably in a pair of 2-2 draws against Newcastle and Brentford.
2) Sunderland (-4.8pts)
There’s a wider sense that Sunderland might have been guilty of self-fulfilling themselves into second-season syndrome as they sit forlornly at the bottom of the pile and already starting to wonder whether being in Europe is actually such a good idea after all.
The key issue for a Sunderland side still with just a solitary win to their name in the Premier League this season isn’t just how conspicuously they’re underperforming their xG, but in how wastefully they’ve scored the goals they have managed.
They’ve only scored six goals in eight games against an overall expected total of almost double that at 11.4, but also contrived to effectively waste half the goals they have managed by having Brian Brobbey score three of them in a game they still lost 5-3 against Manchester City.
Magnificently, they still managed to undershoot that day, with an xG of 4.32, but it still leaves the picture across their other games even bleaker at three goals from an xG just above eight.
1) Nottingham Forest (-7.9pts)
That really is a startling number of points. It’s a rounding error away from a point a game, which it goes without saying is not the sort of thing you want to extrapolate across the course of a season. Manchester City could quite easily get a 50-point penalty and not underperform their xPts by quite such a wide margin.
The concern for Forest is that, as with so many others on here, it’s not remotely hard to work out why they’re underperforming, and it does reduce hopes of a reversion to the mean.
Forest’s problem is the simplest yet most profound football has to offer: they can’t put the ball in the net. This reached a sarcastic low in the absurd 3-1 defeat at Selhurst Park, a game in which Forest should have been out of sight long before getting sucker-punched in the dick.
It’s the most extreme but far from only example for a team that now find themselves the joint-lowest scorers in the division despite Spurs giving them a four-game headstart in that regard.
Who could possibly have foreseen that Liam Delap might not be the answer?