With wins over Liverpool and last seasons’ Champions League runner-up Borussia Dortmund in the last week, Arsenal’s phenomenal start to the 2013-14 campaign has continued for the time being. They now sit five points clear at the top of the Premier League table and look a virtual lock for the Champions League knockout stage, a monumental turnaround for a team that had only claimed fifteen points from thirty and was sitting seventh at this stage of the last Premier League season. The only offseason departures this summer were those the team seemed to push themselves, while the Gunners’ acquisition of Mesut Özil means Arsenal may have benefited the most from the Gareth Bale transfer saga. The combinations of events over the summer meant the Gunners have approached this season unlike the previous two – on a positive note, reasonably full of confidence, and not generally in crisis other than the brief moment of doubt introduced in their opening day home loss to Aston Villa. Since then they have scorched the league for 25 points from 27 available on the back of a 26 goals for/6 against record. Combine this season’s start with their performance since the close of the last winter transfer window, and Arsenal have claimed eleven more points than any other Premier League team over that same time period. It’s enough to make their supporters dream the seemingly impossible – a fourth Premier League title for manager Arsene Wenger and the club’s first since 2004.
Yet there is criticism from some that perhaps this start to the season is a mirage. The resources available to the club, other than Özil, aren’t much different than in years past. Surely the Gunners’ thin squad must regress to the mean at some point. It’s also been noted that Arsenal hasn’t exactly had the most difficult schedule to start the season, with their two wins against top opponents – Tottenham and Liverpool – coming at home. Finally, Arsenal’s been here before since 2004 and failed to seal the deal. As senior ESPN researcher Paul Carr pointed out, Arsenal led the table at this point in the 2007/08 season, and eventually finished four points behind Manchester United. Recent history justifiably makes many skeptical that Arsenal can maintain this pace and finish atop the league come May 2014. So what do the numbers tell us about Arsenal’s start to the season and how it might impact their chances of besting the other nineteen teams in the league?
From a macro view, the six team-level predictive models this blog has been covering since the start of the season have continued to shift in Arsenal’s favor, and the North London club now leads the average of the models. Arsenal’s upward movement has come largely at the expense of Manchester United, who continues to tumble in the eyes of the predictive models. Chelsea’s and Manchester City’s chances have remained relatively constant since the beginning of the season. Bolstering Arsenal’s standing are the three “rolling average” index models – Martin Eastwood’s EPL Eastwood Index, Infostrada’s Euro Club Index, and ESPN’s Soccer Power Index. All three have seen Arsenal’s title odds climb substantially from the beginning of the year. A bit less sanguine on Arsenal’s chances are the resource-based models from Bloomberg and the Transfer Price Index (TPI). On average these two predictive models give Arsenal half the chance of finishing top of the table as the index models do. The betting markets give Arsenal about the same chance of claiming the title as Bloomberg and the TPI. After factoring in the competition faced to date and looking at the remaining schedule, all of the models find Arsenal to be either a title contender or a favorite to win the title. But why are Arsenal doing so well this year? To answer this question we turn to the shots data.
At the micro-level of shots taken and conceded, there may be no better summary than this analysis produced by Colin Trainor for Stats Bomb. In it he explains that his models show:
- Arsenal has conceded near the league average for shots, but has the lowest total shots conceded from prime areas with the highest percentage of scoring a goal.
- Only one team in all of Europe’s top five leagues has a lower expected goals conceded based upon number and location of shots conceded than Arsenal – the undefeated AS Roma.
- On the offensive side of the ball Arsenal sit fourth in most categories, with their current 21 goals occurring in only 10% of Trainor’s simulations based upon frequency and location of shots taken.
Overall, Trainor’s expected goal differential model that takes (1) through (3) and other data into account suggests Arsenal should be third right now, behind both Chelsea and Manchester City. Trainor concludes his piece with the following summary,
I think it’s important for Arsenal fans to recognise [that several models indicate that as good as Arsenal have been they are perhaps in a little bit of a false position.] [T]hey can certainly bask in the warm glow of being league leaders but be aware that the shooting performances suggest that there are currently one or two better teams in the Premier League than the Gunners.
Arsenal don’t get a chance to take on either Chelsea or Manchester City and prove their position within the table until back-to-back games in mid-December. Until then they will run through a gauntlet of mid-table opponents – at Manchester United, Southampton, at Cardiff, Hull, and Everton – that currently fall between sixth and twelfth as of this writing. If the Gunners can successfully navigate the matches until mid-December they will have set up the kind of showdowns against Chelsea and Manchester City that would allow them to put definitive distance between them and the rest of the league just like Manchester United did at about the same point last season. It’s a long way between now and then, and Arsenal are still only slight title favorites with only a 31.1% likelihood of winning the title. They are, however, still the title favorites at this stage of the season, something they’ve not been able to say for a long-time at the Emirates Stadium.
