University professor calculates chance of West Brom winning PL promotion
West Brom are very likely to win promotion from the Championship, according to a study by professor James Reade and his team at Reading University.
As reported by BBC Sport, Reade used the same method as what they use to predict things like inflation or gross domestic product to work out what the remaining fixtures of the Championship season could be.
It is understood that out of the 10,000 simulations, the Baggies finished second 43.9 per cent of the time and would be crowned Championship champions 39.6 per cent of the time. That means Albion’s chance of promotion is a huge 83.5 per cent.
As for current leaders Leeds, they finished top 54.8 per cent of the time and were second in 35.1 per cent of the simulations. Marcelo Bielsa’s team have an 89.9 per cent chance of promotion based on these findings.
“We look at all the scorelines in the history of football essentially, and that gives us a sense of how likely a team is to score zero, one, two, three, four goals and so on,” Professor Reade told BBC Sport.
“You look back at previous matches and say when a weaker team was playing a stronger team, how many will they have scored if it was this point in the season, if this had just happened, and so on. What that gives us for each team and each match is an expected number of goals.”
If this is how they work out how the Championship table should finish then we are all for it but it seems as though if the season is scrapped early, West Brom and Leeds would be handed promotion to the Premier League.
It isn’t entirely fair on teams in the chasing pack like Fulham, Nottingham Forest and Brentford but Albion and the Whites have been in the top-two almost all season and they deserve automatic promotion the most.
In other West Brom news, Kyle Edwards says which Albion team-mate gets on his nerves the most.