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English Premier League 2013/14 Preview: Predicted Table

A totally unscientific look at how the Cartilage Free Captain staff think the upcoming English Premier League season will play out.

Shaun Botterill

Earlier this week, MCofA released his projections for this season. They were totally scientific and based on important things like numbers and math. The rest of us on the staff are not nearly as intelligent as him, but we are all capable of typing words into a spreadsheet, so we came up with our own predicted table. We polled all 11 of the contributors to this blog (11? We really need to sell off some guys.) to get the aggregate table you see below.

Club Average Position Top 4 Relegation
Chelsea 1.5 11 0
City 1.7 11 0
Spurs 3.5 10 0
United 3.6 8 0
Arsenal 5 3 0
Liverpool 5.8 1 0
Swansea 7.3 0 0
Everton 8.3 0 0
West Ham 9.7 0 0
Southampton 11.3 0 0
Aston Villa 11.6 0 0
Norwich 12 0 0
Newcastle 13 0 0
West Brom 13.2 0 1
Sunderland 14.5 0 1
Fulham 14.5 0 1
Cardiff 16.1 0 1
Stoke 16.8 0 7
Crystal Palace 18.8 0 11
Hull 19.9 0 11

As you can see this table also involved math. We had to calculate averages and whatnot. Though, if I'm being honest, MCofA did that for us too. Almost everyone on the staff picked either Manchester City or Chelsea to win the league title. Petrilli was the lone outlier. He picked Spurs, because, why not? On the other end of the table Hull City and Crystal Palace and Hull were unanimous selections to go down.

Only Ed thought that Spurs would finish outside of the top four. Most of the rest of us had Spurs finishing either third or fourth. The biggest point of contention among the staff seemed to be just where Arsenal and Liverpool would finish. Some, like myself, believe that Liverpool have leap-frogged Arsenal and could easily find themselves in the top four this season. Others still believe that Everton and or Swansea are better than Brendan Rodgers' team and as a result have them finishing in sixth or seventh.

Another club that was all over the map in our predictions was Aston Villa. The Villains ended up 11th on average, but some had them as high as eighth, while others thought they would be lucky to avoid relegation. The whole middle of the table was a bit of a cluster simply based on the fact that the difference in quality between 8th and 13th isn't all that much.

Basically this table shows that the staff here believe City and Chelsea are head and shoulders above the rest of the league. After those two clubs the closest competition will be between United and Spurs for the third position and then Liverpool and Arsenal will duke it out for fifth. In the end, our totally unscientific table isn't all that different from MCofA's. This, obviously, shows that just watching football and thinking things are just as good of prediction tool as spreadsheets and numbers.

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