Premier League Projections: Now in Technicolor!

I've been saving my numbers every week after posting the projections in order to track the movement of the different clubs. What is tracked here is not just how many matches a side has won, lost or drawn—though of course that matters—but also the strength of their underlying numbers. So with Swansea in the last few weeks, they have dropped quite a few points, but the underlying rating of their team quality has only continued to improve and so their chances of making top four have dropped a lot less than you'd expect for a team with only seven points so far this season.

Let's see if this works. As a note, the color palette here is not ideal, and there are too damn many Premier League clubs whose primary color is red. There should either be more clubs using unusual colors like Hull City and Norwich, or the Premier League should eliminate several sides. I am not a crackpot.

Top 4 and Title Races

We would expect these two races to track each other directly, for obvious reasons. There are some slight differences, but it is mostly a matter of scale.

Title first...

And top four...

You can see the continued improvement of Arsenal after a slow start, the decline of Manchester United, and the roller coasters being ridden by Liverpool and Spurs. Above it all stand Manchester City, clearly the favorites but not able to open up a significant lead on the rest of their competitors.

Relegation Race

And so with the relegation race. Here it is:

You can see Sunderland's free fall, represented here as a climb due to the wonders of data visualization. My very rough preseason numbers treated Crystal Palace and Hull City roughly as equals, but Hull City have done much better than expected while Palace have remained bottom just about all the way through.

Is this a fun way too look at the data? I was thinking of trying to do some visualizations every month or so, if people enjoy it. Let me know.