Football's £100m Game

Joe Ryan contributed to the writing of this blog

Cameron Heath and Joe Ryan, of Barnett Waddingham, attempt to predict this season’s football results in The Actuary on-line. Here we give you a flavour of what they had to say.

Predicting football results is notoriously difficult, just ask ‘Lawro' . But can we do any better by simply looking at the statistics?

Promotion to the Premier League from the Championship is estimated to be worth around £100m. So we thought we’d have a go at predicting who would win the jackpot this year?

Our aim was to forecast the top six after 46 games using statistics alone, with no expert (or amateur) judgement clouding our prediction.

Here is the top seven at 22nd February, when we ran our model. To see how we think the table will look at the end of the season check out our article.

Our stochastic model forecasts the result of every match from then to the end of the season. This allowed us to predict what the table would look like at any date and plot our expected path for each club.

To read the full article, in The Actuary, including how we came up with our predictions click here.