English Football

It’s about beating the teams you should beat – Manchester United

by
matt_the_butch
7 October 2013

Ok, so I know I’m a massive geek, but with all this talk of how poor United’s start has been I thought it would be interesting to look at if their start had truly been that disastrous. Obviously the West Brom result was pretty shocking but other than that United have had a fiendishly difficult start.

What I’ve done, is create a basic set of rules based on the premise that if you beat the teams you should do you’ll end up fighting for the title come May. I know this is a bit crass as it doesn’t take it account teams improving/weakening over the summer, but its just meant as a guide. I’ve then created a table which shows how far off that ideal score each team is.

So it works like this –

Teams should be winning home and away against teams who finished last season in the bottom half (this include newly promoted teams). Teams should be winning at home and drawing away with teams who finished 5 – 10^th last season. Teams should be drawing at home and losing away to teams who finished in the top 4 last season. The league table below is based on how teams are doing in relation to this.

Pos (PL Pos)	Name	Points
1 (3)	Spurs	0
2 (5)	Chelsea	0
3 (1)	Arsenal	-1
4 (2)	Liverpool	-1
5 (9)	Aston Villa	-1
6 (8)	Hull	-2
7 (12)	Man Utd	-2
8 (13)	Swansea	-2
9 (15)	Stoke	-2
10 (4)	Everton	-3
11 (6)	Southampton	-4
12 (10)	West Brom	-5
13 (7)	Man City	-6
14 (16)	Newcastle	-6
15 (14)	Norwich	-7
16 (11)	Cardiff	-9
17 (18)	Fulham	-9
18 (20)	Sunderland	-10
19 (19)	Crystal Palace	-12
20 (17)	West Ham	-14

So if this table is actually anything to go by, United given their tough start have actually had a better set of results than City and teams like Stoke and Swansea have had much better starts than their league position shows.

Also West Ham have had a quietly awful start picking up very few points in games where they should have done better while Cardiff who have looked to have had a good start need to start picking up more points from those teams around them.

Like I said I see the obvious flaws in this system but I think it works as a guideline for how teams are doing, stripping away the complaints we all have about how our team has had such a tough run of fixtures.