Only Newcastle and Ipswich have somehow managed to avoid an entirely random Premier League points deduction, with everyone playing at least one extra game.
Supercomputer Chalmers
Mediawatch does not tend to delve too far into the murky world of football supercomputers. Self-service checkouts are one thing but when the robots rise up to get Premier League table predictions completely wrong it can be easily ignored.
Then along comes a supercomputer so brazen, so absurd, so unashamed of its own foolishness that it is practically begging to be mocked.
And really this isn’t the fault of BettingExpert.com, nor their supercomputer BETSiE. No, this is on the outlets so desperate to chug out as much content as possible that they will see those marketing emails land in their inbox and somehow not immediately delete them.
The Sun website are absolutely not alone in that venture but they are perhaps the most dense, producing as they do a graphic to represent this predicted Premier League table. And, well, take a look.
Not convinced AI will take over the world if it predicts Spurs to finish below Man Utd and Aston Villa despite a) having a better goal difference than both and b) everyone playing 39 or 40 games for some reason. pic.twitter.com/0Hq6x6AAqU
— Football365 (@F365) September 24, 2024
To be perfectly clear, not one single team has played the right amount of games, and only Newcastle and Ipswich have not been randomly docked points.
Arsenal hilariously miss out on the title despite deploying enough dark arts to play an extra game over Manchester City. Spurs rack up as many wins and draws as Manchester United and Aston Villa while maintaining a higher goal difference yet they finish below both. Everton scramble to 17th place because even the daftest algorithm cannot override their innate ability to be Everton.
Nottingham Forest having three points deducted is a nice touch but five other teams are in the same boat. The whole thing is a sodding mess, but because The Sun want to play the game we are given tired cliches about how ‘it is set to be a closely run race’ for Champions League qualification and ‘the supercomputer thinks history will repeat itself’ in the title race, all while the copy at no point acknowledges why 90 per cent of the division have had points taken off, nor why every team has played one or two games extra.
The answer is a simple enough issue in terms of rounding numbers up – we know the supercomputer uses decimal points because Arsenal won the title by 0.1 points last season– but it does bring the whole pretence crashing inexorably down when they refuse to actually address it.
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Hot Rod
The Sun website are obviously enjoying themselves because…
‘Supercomputer predicts Arsenal Premier League title boost with Man City to lose 11 POINTS after serious Rodri injury’
Wait, are Arsenal winning the title or finishing second? Even the bots can’t agree. Can you turn a supercomputer off at the back and then on again? Does it need some system updates.
Obviously, by ‘supercomputer’ they mean ‘someone has calculated City’s points per game with and without Rodri and extrapolated that for a points difference over an entire season’. NASA could never.
Point blank
But again, The Sun are not the only ones indulging in what is harmless but also laughable fun. And arguably these offerings are even more ridiculous.
The Metro, for example, say that Manchester City ‘are predicted to pick up 84.5 points’ while Arsenal are‘tipped to once again finish second on 76.6 points’, as if those are entirely normal things which always happen.
They also tell us that:
‘The Supercomputer simulated the league seasons 100,000 times. The Aupercomputer [sic] takes into account all match results from last season (across all competitions), pre-season results and the current season as it progresses, projecting the the season based on both pre-season expectations and xG earned both for and against during the season.
‘It now also integrates team financial data and player values from Transfermarkt. This additional layer of data provides a more nuanced understanding of team capabilities and potential performance variations.’
What the Supercomputer does not do is calculate points totals properly or even assign teams the right number of fixtures.
Next is the Manchester Evening News, who correctly report that ‘BettingExpert.com have attempted to predict how the final Premier League table will look’. They have ‘attempted’ to predict it alright. And Manchester City are winning the title after ‘amassing 84/85 total points’. Presumably they get to pick.
Finally, it’s theLiverpool Echo‘s turn to pretend this is in any way newsworthy, writing that the Reds ‘will finish with 75.4 points after all 38 games have been played’.
Not quite. It’s 39 games for Liverpool, becauseBettingExpert.com is seemingly operated by Richard Scudamore.
READ NEXT:Arsenal ‘have the measure of the champions’; how dare ‘soft’ Pep be happy?
Angel Gabriel
Sitting the supercomputer down for probable hours’ worth of updates, we can instead move on to far more boring things like the actual football. And the Manchester City v Arsenal fallout is still ripe for reporting.
‘WE’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU’ is a choice for the Daily Mirror‘s back-page headline, covering Gabriel’s comments on Erling Haaland. The Arsenal defender ‘has stoked up the title rivalry’ – which ‘BOILS OVER’ elsewhere – by saying: “It’s a battle, a war, so it’s normal to have provocative acts in football, it’s part of the game. Now this is over and we are waiting for them at our ground.”
So to recap: player says level of intensity and physicality in high-stakes game is “normal”, and is looking forward to the return fixture.
It’s a little bit paint-by-numbers really. Gabriel even said he “doesn’t remember” Haaland throwing the ball at the back of his head after the John Stones equaliser. There is not a great deal being ‘stoked’ here.
Except for the Daily Express website, who say ‘Arsenal star Gabriel fires vicious nine-word warning to Man City and Erling Haaland’ because of course they do.
The best bit? Well Gabriel obviously said far more than nine words, in the form of a ‘vicious warning’ or otherwise. They have done the old trick of taking a snippet out of longer quotes for some juicy number headlining. But the part they have chosen –“we are waiting for them at our ground” – only contains eight words.
Maybe they had one deducted by a supercomputer. Dunno.
The most MailOnline headline of all time?
‘The secrets behind Forest’s rise: How more data nerds, window wizardry and BOILED EGGS turned Nuno Espirito Santo’s ‘band of brothers’ from the league’s laughing stock to high-flyers’
It ticks so very many boxes: 427 words long; some entirely unnecessary shouting; the reference to ‘data nerds’ coming from a single throwaway line 19 paragraphs in about how ‘the number of data analysts tripled’. Absolute chef’s kiss stuff.