So, now the dust as settled (although the season STILL isn't over from a UEFA standpoint), let's have a recap of some of the predictions made about how the season was going to pan out.
These predictions were made 54 weeks ago. Blimey. Let's dig in...
Well 2/3 of us got that wrong eh? Standard optimistic Gooner got that VERY wrong. Emery to win a league sounds hilarious
This is more interesting. Nearly everyone saw the LFC/MCFC duopoly continuing. However, Chelsea certainly weren't favourites for top 4 - Arsenal & Spurs over represented (is that a function of most players coming from North London?) Man Utd got 4th eventually - 20% saw that, which is interesting given upcoming predictions....There was 1 vote for "other" too but I can't see who that was so nobody gets to claim Leicester prescience anyway.
More dreadful predicting. Norwich we all saw coming. Nobody saw Bournemouth nor Watford going down. 1 wag thought Spurs might. Or Fulham. Who weren't even in the correct division.
So this was also the least sackingy season for yonks, but it doesn't affect this look at the first manager to go....Solksjaer was the favourite, even if some thought he'd get top 4. 2 people correctly predicted Pochettino who set off a little run of sackings before Xmas, with only Pearson then going later on.
Man City have a fearsome grasp on the League cup and most saw that continuing. Some thought Liverpool might want an early season taste, Spurs was an optimistic shout, whilst Arsenal, Everton and Chelsea were all hopeful punts with no real expectation. Bournemouth - er....well cool guys, cool cool
The Arsene Wenger Invitational was a much more realistic affair. Obviously everyone knew that the trophy belongs in N5, but some thought Liverpool might want their first proper trophy in 14 years, with a few straggly votes for no hopers like Man City, Chelsea, Man Utd and Spurs. Sorry lads. Mikel Knows (in the merry month of August)
Wide range of predictions here. Scores plotted from WhoScored.com and I'm happy to go with them and say Pulisic deserves the plaudits. Maguire, Haller & Pepe maybe scored surprisingly well, so maybe we should all ignore the headlines. Wag who called Rob Holding LANS will be regretting that, as will anyone who thought Moise Kean would do well...
...cos he didn't. He was also predicted to be the worst signing, and you can see just how bad he was. Gomes too....Everton had a good summer....
But another Italian wonderkid takes the plaudits - Patrick Cutrone lasted 5 minutes before going back to Serie A on loan. Milan was no Wolverhampton. Funny people also put in Saliba and any Spurs signings so I had a look at them too - Saliba did ok in Ligue Un in an injury hit campaign, and the Average Spurs Summer Signing Score (ASSSS) was 6.48, which was in fairness, rubbish. That ranged from Ndombele at 6.71 to Gedson Fernandes (remember him) at 6.12 which is woeful.
Finally to the Golden section: We all thought Auba was class and he came pretty close. Aguero and Kane had slightly disappointing seasons, disrupted by injury, Salah regressed to the mean and Mane shared the spoils. You are all very funny now with your historic bantz there (Nick). Jamie Vardy didn't get a look in....
Alisson the clear favourite here. Brav-o was a Brav-e call, as was Kepa who showed nominative determinism isn't always a thing, keeping as many clean sheets as the geriatric Lehmann. In the end, it was Ederson this year, from Pope, so we all got that wrong.
FA Cup results blog to come and then we'll be set for the new season
It's been a while since the usual blogging routine.
Project Restart, Impossibilitee, work & personal lives are not compatible blog-fellows, and for that you all have my apologies. I know lots of you were in the same boat, and the numbers really tailed off - which was partially on me for reducing the reminders, but there was only so much to do.
Given the situation, I thought I'd do it like this - continue as normal, so matchday results below, one large graph and then tables as normal - >2/3 of games as usual. The trophy will go to the winner because the rules shouldn't change halfway through the season just because of a once in a century pandemic that causes life as we know it to come to a shuddering halt. Seems the fairest thing given that, ultimately, it's about predicting results and the matches went ahead, and we were all in the same boat with regard to information shared.
However, to reflect that ~25% of the season was disrupted, and this may have impacted on the leaderboard standings, I'll be asterisking the historical record tab and posting the pre-COVID leaderboard for perusal. Any other ideas, hit me up.
I'll post another blog with the FA Cup results and another blog looking at the predictions made last summer but this one will be plenty long enough so, let's just crack on...
Let's get statty - mega blog so done in table form!
And then everyone's results in a very big messy graph that irritates my DataViz part of my brain
So, to the Leaderboards now. Firstly, a reminder of the Pre-COVID Leaderboard
And now the Final Leaderboard* for those who've played >2/3 of all matches
Eesh. Gavzey the big loser from Project Restart. Life mimicking the football club he purports to support? Nick's also had a bad time, but David & Joe have done well to leap into the top 2 and ensure the trophy returns to what I can only assume is the weekly Friday ritual of drinking from the trophy after close of play whilst singing "Campeones, Campeones, Ole Ole Ole"
EuroClubIndex the best modeller (again), some absolute dross in the middle but avoiding relegation on the final day of the season, is yours truly, which is fundamentally the real win here. Bottom 3 made up of Hillel, Doron and the cherry on the horror-week for Chelsea is Joseph, hamstrung by Frank Lampard eating his fixture list
Leaderboard for remaining participants who didn't meet the threshold for the above leaderboard. Silverman, Gaon & Ruback don't make the leaderboard because they didn't RESTART properly
So that brings the League season to a close. Congratulations to David, trophy will make its way to you shortly.
That was my last blog. It was an example of me being organised and preparing for the weekend - I was aware of the uncertainty ahead, and discussed the possibility of football being held behind closed doors in the future, or even postponed.
It's a salutary lesson to young aspiring football prediction game runners out there that organisation is your worst enemy. Phone it in. Be last minute. Churn out whatever guff your consumers will lap up. Minimal effort for minimal benefit. That's the maxim for life.
Because only THIRTY FOUR MINUTES after the blog was posted, the news broke...
Absolutely infuriating. Made me look like one of those eedjit ITKs on Twitter saying their best mate's son's dog walker's girlfriend saw a certain ginger-bearded Argentine buying a Brie & Grape baguette at the Upper Crust concession at Birmingham New Street station so oy oy get down to the Holte End sharpish with your newly printed shirt and your favourite recreational silicone toy because things are about to get MESSI <eyes emoji ad nauseum>
You only have but one reputation and San Mikel has gone and buggered mine.
So football was postponed, starting with that weekend's fixtures. It's now been 3 months without any football (Bundesliga doesn't count you hippies). Even if you discount international football, which I strongly do, it's been the longest period any of us have gone without football since we gained sporting consciousness. I don't know the upper margin of everyone playing Impossibiliteee, but I'm making the assumption that nobody here was collecting Panini stickers for the 1939-1940 1st Division season...
It was obviously the right thing to do. Have I missed it? Nope. Not even a tiny bit. My bandwidth has been utilised, and even exceeded with other things. I usually enjoy my summer break from football, dipping in with some podcasts but enjoying liberty from the schedule, and this has been that, but with the added benefit of endlessly mocking Scousers for the reverence with which they hold former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Premier League manager Bill Shankly. Perspective well and truly gained for many of us.
What about the return? Well I've made no great secret of my opposition to the league restarting. I make my case on 3 pillars:
Sporting
Health
Economic
Let's deal with the easy one first. Any talk of sporting integrity can go and take a running jump into a Costa Rican island lake containing the reanimated incarnation of the Late Cretaceous period's most fearsome aquatic predator
What integrity? Any momentum has evaporated. The Home/Away advantage reduced if not removed. Fitness and squad management changes - players out for the season now returned and fit, whilst the rest of the squad levels drop. They've literally changed the laws of the game - allowing an additional 2 subs. Contracts and loans - what a mess that is...This is a new mini-tournament, and is in no way a genuine end to the 2019-2020 season. Whatever happens, asterisks will abound. Liverpool's title is going to have a teeny tiny asterisk, but the CL places, relegation and so on will be forever controversial.
Now that doesn't mean that any of the other options were any better from an integrity purpose - null & voiding the league 75% of the way through seems brutal, stopping play and finalising the table based on current position or points-per-game also have their huge downsides - but my point here is that the idea of integrity should not come into play when we talk about completing the season. Beautifully illustrated by the decision to end the season in the WSL, League One and Two and so on. If sporting integrity was imperative, these competitions would be continuing too.
Health wise - my concern is one of unnecessary risk. What is the likelihood of a very fit athlete, or comparatively very fit coach etc getting seriously ill, or dying? Pretty small. But what about all the other cogs that go into restarts - the backroom staff, the team getting the ground sorted and the demands on public services - police and paramedics still need to be assigned, even with no fans. Why are journalists needed to come to matches - famously in shape as many of them are...
What if say Jamie Vardy gets COVID, and takes out 4 teammates and Leicester drop from a deserved Champions League place to 5th or 6th? Touches back to my integrity issue there. Of greater likelihood, as seen in Germany, is the drastic increase in muscle and ligament injuries because of the destruction of any elite level fitness - 10 weeks on an elliptical trainer whilst watching The Last Dance might get you beach body ready but doesn't replicate 90 minutes of Premier League football. So a ruptured ACL here, for no real benefit to anyone, could derail a career. Players are now being asked to play an extended Christmas fixture list, with now proper warm up or recovery period.
There's talk about the boost to the nation's mental health to have some football on TV. Forgive me for my insensitivity, but that can't be the national fillip hoped for when we're by basically any metric, one of the worst countries in the world at dealing with the pandemic, which of course is placed in the context of over a decade of economic instability, huge political turmoil both domestically and abroad and social divisions riven across generational, geographical and social lines now rapidly fracturing into crevasses.
But yeah, watching Andriy Yarmolenko spank a ball into an empty row Z and hearing the echo of a plastic chair rattling reverberating around the cavernous Olympic Stadium is for sure going to give me the pick-me-up I need right now.
So to my mind, this is a purely economic argument. Now I don't purport to have a PhD in economics, nor really understand anything in the Financial Times but I have listened to the Freakonomics podcast, started Economics for Dummies over the lockdown and got in on the ground floor beofre the Sky Digital boom in the early Noughties, so my CV should at least get me shortlisted for the next Chair of the IMF.
Let's be honest. He who pays the piper, calls the tune, and in this case, Sky & BT Sport have locked out the jukebox. Pretty sure that's how the metaphor goes. The Premier League is nowhere near the size industry it likes to think it is BUT we're still talking a several billion pound sector which directly or indirectly employs thousands of people. How many of these people could be redirected into similar fields is academic in the short term - data analysts, sports scientists, retail staff and so on might be able to find new work but won't currently and the government schemes are limited in scope, by political design and economic necessity. Now isn't the time to go into my anarcho-communist rant about how money is all pretend anyway, so we'll take as read that people got billz to pay and leave it there, until the revolution comes. Income streams across most Premier league clubs are heavily biased towards TV money when compared to matchday/sporting revenue or commercial sponsorship deals, and both these areas have taken huge hits, so clubs are reliant on not rebating that lovely TV lucre to, in some cases, literally keeping the lights on.
I do think it's slightly overblown - TV companies go too hard and they kill the goose that had laid their golden eggs but ultimately the threat outweighs any real objections clubs have because their raison d'etre now is to play football AND make money. Global game, global business and all that. Would I be adverse to a reorienting of the sport back to a more local horizon? Nope - I'm not advocating a return to the 1920s of 11 local lads with hobnail boots, but a middle ground of elite sport rooted in local communities, run on not-for-profit models where big money can be spent, but used to boost local sport, community organisations and so on - would that be a bad thing? Lower ticket prices, lower (although still enormous) wages, less banal razzmatazz? I sound very old and ludditey, but I think we've jumped the shark, and Coronavirus has provided us with an opportunity to blow it all up and think about what's dear to us as football fans, and hand-on-heart, even if Arsenal win all their remaining games and sneak 4th and win the FA Cup, I think I'd struggle to genuinely get up for this in the way I would have done 3 months ago.
Bookmark this page and make me eat my words in a few months' time.
So what's going to happen here? Firstly, none of my above issues with restarting the football are applicable to this game - so if they start, so do we. Any M30 predictions already entered will be cancelled and we'll do a redo of that round. I'm looking at the fixtures list and I'll probably put up 3 matchdays at a time as the games come pretty thick and fast, starting on Friday 19th June.
Results posts will be done infrequently to keep everyone updated and we'll keep the FA Cup game going too. If you're not in the Impossibilitee WhatsApp group (strictly business) and want to join, let me know - it'll likely be the fastest and most agile way to stay up to date.
I hope you've all been well over lockdown and continue to stay safe. Check back next week for the predictions blog. And remember:
