Ferguson needs to look at the bigger picture for excitement
What is Sir Alex Ferguson talking about? He says he is sorry that the title race is always two teams duking it out. He wants more openness. What does he mean? Look at the graphic. The Barclays Premier League is wide open. Almost anyone could go down. That is the conclusion of the Fink Tank Predictor, and I suspect you would like to know how we got there.
Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham take the goals and shots on goal over the past two seasons and weight them so that the most recent results count most strongly. Using this to assess the strength of each team, our model takes the fixture list and simulates the season thousands and thousands of times.
The fact that team performances fluctuate randomly is also simulated. The outcome is the table you see on this page - the probabilities for each team finishing in any one of the 20 positions in the Premier League. We also show the mean table, showing you where you should expect your team to finish.
Two health warnings before I go on. The first is that this represents the best prediction you can make at this point, but you can be certain that things will not finish exactly as our mean table suggests. Why? Because the league season is not long enough to iron out the huge amount of luck involved.
The second is that we have taken no account of transfers. This may seem a terrible failing, but how much do we know about the impact transfers will make? You might have been tempted to boost Chelsea last year, after Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko arrived, but it would have been a mistake. Add in transfers and you are replacing science and data with hunch. Our system learns from results and that is the best way to make predictions.
Now, the data itself. First, we make Chelsea (51 per cent), not Manchester United (32 per cent), favourites for the title. Indeed, they are more likely to win it than at this time last season, because of a fall in Arsenals and Liverpools chances. But we still give Arsenal a 10 per cent chance of title glory, compared with Liverpools 6 per cent.
Second, the gulf between the big boys and the rest remains. Tottenham Hotspur have a 19 per cent chance of a Champions League place but virtually no hope of winning the Premier League title. Rather oddly, the model also rates Blackburn Rovers, although most pundits would not have picked them out in a lineup.
Finally, the relegation battle promises to be fascinating. There are ten clubs with a more than 10 per cent chance of being relegated and only one team (Derby County) with a more than 50 per cent chance of going down.
The openness means that Roy Keane has a 79 per cent chance of keeping Sunderland up. It also means that Sven-Göran Eriksson has a 17 per cent chance of seeing his first season end in catastrophe.
The figures will be reassuring to Reading (only 5 per cent chance of relegation), but it is difficult to know if our data will alarm the fans of Wigan Athletic (36 per cent) and Fulham (25 per cent) or be slightly less bad than they thought. Then there are Everton. They have an 11 per cent chance of relegation, yet a sliver of a chance of finishing in the Champions League places. They are the poster boys for the biggest truth about football - even with our sophisticated modelling, it is an incredibly difficult game to predict.
On this much, however, we can be certain. Ferguson need not worry. An exciting season is ahead of us.
