Projected English League Championship Winner: Queens Park Rangers

In yesterday's post I reviewed my projection methods for the Premier League.  Today I will apply the same to the League Championship which is one level down from the Premier in English football.  Each year 3 teams from this league move up to the Premier, switching places with the bottom 3 teams from that league.  The top 2 teams move up automatically.  The 3rd team is determined from a playoff involving the 4 teams that finish the season placed 3rd through 6th.  So doing a projection for this league requires projecting the outcome of the playoffs in addition to projecting the final league table.

First lets show the projected final standings:

		Overall
Pos	Team	P	W	D	L	GF	GA		GD	Pts
1	Queens Park Rangers	46	27	15	4	74	27		47	96
2	Cardiff City	46	24	11	11	71	51		20	83
3	Swansea City	46	24	10	12	62	41		21	82
4	Norwich City	46	20	19	7	73	56		17	79
5	Reading	46	20	18	8	77	52		25	78
6	Burnley	46	20	17	9	69	54		15	77
7	Nottingham Forest	46	19	19	8	59	41		18	76
8	Leeds United	46	17	20	9	86	76		10	71
9	Watford	46	18	16	12	81	69		12	70
10	Millwall	46	16	17	13	57	47		10	65
11	Hull City	46	15	19	12	51	47		4	64
12	Portsmouth	46	18	10	18	62	62		0	64
13	Leicester City	46	17	12	17	69	70		-1	63
14	Ipswich Town	46	15	12	19	61	62		-1	57
15	Bristol City	46	14	15	17	60	65		-5	57
16	Middlesbrough	46	14	12	20	59	69		-10	54
17	Barnsley	46	13	15	18	53	66		-13	54
18	Coventry City	46	12	14	20	51	60		-9	50
19	Doncaster Rovers	46	12	14	20	63	82		-19	50
20	Crystal Palace	46	13	10	23	43	70		-27	49
21	Derby County	46	11	12	23	54	66		-12	45
22	Scunthorpe United	46	10	8	28	43	79		-36	38
23	Sheffield United	46	8	11	27	41	72		-31	35
24	Preston North End	46	5	14	27	49	84		-35	29

I'm not exactly going out on a limb by predicting a title for Queens Park Rangers.  Through games of March 8th, they are leading by 7 points with 10 games left to play, a comfortable if not insurmountable lead.  QPR is the class of this league.  They are outscoring their opponents by an average of 0.972 goals per game.  Next best are Reading and Swansea City with an average margin of 0.472 goals per game.  More on these two teams later.

The playoffs for this league match up 3rd vs 6th and 4th vs 5th.  Each pairing plays 2 games, one at each team's home ground with the team scoring the most goals moving on to the playoff final.  The playoff final is a single game played at a neutral site, London's Wembley Stadium.  My method for projecting the 3/6 and 4/5 results is the same as I use for the regular season projections.  However, since the playoff final is at a neutral site I can't use home vs away comparisons.  Instead I take the total stats (home + away) for each team to project the final score.

Based on the projected standings above, these will be the first round matchups:

Swansea City vs Burnley and Norwich City vs Reading.

Here are my predictions for the games between these teams:

Playoffs
Home	Projected Goals	Away	Projected   Goals
Swansea City	1.078	Burnley	0.397
Burnley	1.742	Swansea City	1.266
Norwich City	1.500	Reading	1.661
Reading	1.475	Norwich City	1.345

Swansea City is the stingiest team in the league at home, only allowing 0.389 goals per game so I expect them to shut down Burnley in their first game.  Burnley should bounce back at home, but not by a large enough margin.  I have Swansea going to the final with a higher aggregate score:  2.344 - 2.139.

Norwich and Reading is a pretty close matchup on both ends of the playoff.    My rule of thumb is that a difference of less than 0.5 goals means that the two teams will most likely tie.  It comes down to the decimal points here so I have Reading moving on 3.136 - 2.845.

So the playoff final will be Swansea vs Reading.  Here is my projection:

Play-off Final	Projected Goals		Projected Goals
Swansea City	1.174	Reading	1.202
Playoff Champion
Reading

I give Reading a slight edge here.  As I mentioned earlier, these two teams both outscore their opponents by 0.472 goals per game.  So how do I break this deadlock?  I looked at the strength of schedule (SOS) for each team by taking the average margin of victory (MOV) of each team's opponents and adding it to the team's MOV to get an adjusted MOV.  This is a method known as the Simple Rating System (SRS) used to rank teams in other sports which I have decided to apply here.  Check out this site for a detailed description.

Reading's opponents have an average MOV of 0.033.  Swansea's have an average MOV of -0.023.  These averages are what I will refer to as SOS.  Reading's opponents have on average outscored their opponents while Swansea's have on average been outscored.  This means that Reading has played a tougher schedule than Swansea.  When we adjust each teams MOV by their SOS, Reading is now at 0.505 and Swansea at 0.449.  This difference will lead to a higher projected score for Reading.  Please note that the quality of these two teams is very comparable.  If I were to assign a probability I would say that I'm 51% certain that Reading would win this match.

In my next post I will be predicting the results of this weekend's matchups in the Championship.