Predicting how all 20 Premier League teams will finish the season

Ten games in, and it’s just as we all suspected. Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool were the clear top three heading into the Premier League season, and Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool are the current top three.In other words, you could’ve taken a two-month nap the night before the Liverpool vs. Bournemouth season-opener and you wouldn’t have really missed anyth– OK, fine. Beyond the top three in the table, pretty much nothing has gone to plan.Man City lost two of their first three matches. Liverpool won five in a row and then lost four in a row after they lost four matches — total — last season. Bournemouth, who lost 75% of their backline to big-money transfers to big-name clubs over the summer, have the same number of points as Liverpool, as do newly promotes Sunderland, who finished fourth in the Championship last season.The points gap between Arsenal in first and City in second is the same size as the gap between City and Brentford, who are 12th. One spot lower, in 13th? Newcastle, who are currently ahead of Barcelona and Liverpool in the Champions League standings.And after two straight years of all three promoted sides immediately getting relegated, instead it’s West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Wolves who comprise the bottom three. They’ve combined for three wins and four total manager firings; every other team in the league has at least three wins, and they all have the coach who was on the sideline when the season started.Now, the 10-game mark is when we’re supposed to start to get a clear idea of what’s happening, when the random swings of the first few months of soccer start to coalesce into something real. At least, multiple studies have found that a team’s collective performance, as measured by a number of different team-strength metrics, starts to become predictive of that team’s future performance right around now.I’ve written about this so many times that I fear I will soon develop a very specific kind of hand arthritis from the repeated motion of my fingers toward these letters, but my favorite single-number to project future team performance is what I call “adjusted goal differential.” This comes from a study by former AC Milan data researcher Ben Torvaney, which discovered that a blend of 70% expected goals and 30% actual goals better predicted future point totals than either goals or xG alone or any other blend of the two.Knowing that, I then looked at the relationship between a team’s adjusted goal differential after 10 games and their points won over the final 28 matches. Based on data from the past 10 Premier League seasons, a team with a neutral adjusted goal differential after 10 matches would be expected to win 1.39 points per game for the rest of the season. And then every goal increase of adjusted goal differential increases the point per game expectation by 0.47 points.Of course, 10-game performance can’t tell us everything; otherwise, we could just shut up shop right now and give these guys seven months off until the men’s World Cup.