It was the end of a seismic Sunday afternoon in the Premier League title race and Jamie Redknapp had the hump.
The much-heralded three-horse race had seemingly been reduced to a thoroughbred and two nags, and Sky pundits were assessing the impact of home defeats to Arsenal and Liverpool on both the title race and the battle for fourth place.
An increasingly common gamble for broadcasters this season has been to launch Opta’s prediction model (aka the supercomputer) at crucial points in the conversation. Seeing a nice and understandable percentage chance that your team finishes can be comforting or worrying – but as 2023-2024 reaches its peak, the voices of dissent are increasing.
“Opta is giving me a bit of a hump” 😂
Aston Villa have a 70% chance of finishing in fourth place 📈 pic.twitter.com/OekJSmdtsi
– Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) April 14, 2024
It seems fitting that a week after learning that Chelsea had spent the same amount on agent fees this season as they did on making Terminator 2, football talk has recoiled at the thought of machines. Our League is a proud maze of history, passion, belief, tactics, late goals and even more belief. How can you trust a computer – which has never played the game – to know what’s going on?
And more importantly, why do the numbers keep changing every week?
What we need first is to analyze how exactly the supercomputer works.
It should be emphasized that this is a probabilistic model; it’s not about someone sitting in a room looking at the rankings and making a good old guess. What’s actually happening is that a big (maybe super) computer estimates the outcome of each remaining match based on a team’s current strength (based on Opta’s Power Rankings, another model!) and odds from the betting market. The busy machine then simulates a season’s remaining games, not once, not twice, but 10,000 times and constructs an average ranking from that set of 10,000 simulations.
So, if we look at the development of the title predictions after the weekend’s match, we can see that Manchester City’s chances of winning the championship have increased from around 40 to 70 percent. Arsenal and Liverpool are now on 18.3 percent and 11.7 percent respectively, which might look bleak if you support either of those teams, but it means that while the supercomputer was running through all 10,000 simulations on Sunday night, Arsenal have emerged as champions 1,830 times and Liverpool 1,170 times. This looks a little better, doesn’t it? Because bigger numbers are bigger.
Some people expect too much from machines. If the computer is so great, they ask, then why didn’t it know that Manchester City were going to be in a much more dominant position after this weekend? Well, because like you or me, the supercomputer can only react to what has happened so far, and theorize (the humans) or simulate (the supercomputer) the rest of the season. Few people saw Liverpool and Arsenal lose at home – and neither did the machine in most of its simulations. But it happened, and we all have to adapt to the future we live in now.
There’s a reason why when the much-hated Biff Tannen traveled from 2015 to 1955 in Back to the Future Part II, he gave his younger self a sports almanac and not a predictive model. The first contained all sports results from 1950 to 2000 – and events that you know happened (e.g. between 1950 and 2000) will always trump predictive modeling.
Some will continue to wonder what purpose this technological advancement really serves if it only puts a number on the feelings we already have. But from the moment someone (and in this case it was actually someone sitting in a room with a pen) constructed the first leaderboard in September 1888, football became a game of numbers. The complexity and scope of this information may change, but more information is rarely a bad thing.
Even if Arsenal and/or Liverpool have even a 0.1 percent chance of winning the Premier League this season, there is still a chance of it happening. And although it seems illogical for a supercomputer, the most predictable emotion among football fans is hope.
(Top photo: Hulton Archives/Getty Images)