Robbed and blessed: the Premier League table nobody puts on the wall

There is a table nobody wants to read in September. It replays every match a thousand times inside a computer, counting only the chances each side created and allowed. No saves, no woodwork, no refereeing. At the end it says how many points that performance was worth on average.

We call it the Meritometro. You, depending on your club, will call it science or slander.

If you support Bournemouth, sit down

Three points in five rounds. Points deserved: 7,76.

That is a hole of nearly 5 points, the biggest in England. And it is not about the football: Bournemouth have produced 8,10 expected goals and scored 6, and they have conceded 8 from 6,99 worth of chances. They lost the plot in exactly one way, by being ordinary in front of goal at both ends on the same afternoon, five weeks in a row.

We wrote about them twelve days ago, after the 2-2 with Brentford: 20 shots, four clear chances missed, two goals scored from the two worst efforts of the day. Nothing has changed since.

Right behind them sit Nottingham Forest, 5 points from 9,17 deserved, and Sunderland, 4 from 7,69. Forest have the fourth best defensive record in the league by chances allowed, 5,01 expected goals against, and they are 16th.

If you support Manchester City, enjoy it while it lasts

Fifteen points. Deserved: 9,59.

That is the biggest positive gap in the Premier League, and it comes from a very specific place. City have won three matches this season in which the model gave them less than 1,6 expected points, including the Manchester derby, which finished 1-0 with expected goals of 0,94 to 1,14 in United's favour on shot quality and 12 box entries to 2 for the home side.

Behind them, Newcastle United have 8 points from 4,29 deserved, and Hull have 8 from 5,46. Hull are the strangest team in the division: 16 box entries in five matches, the fewest in England, 38 conceded, and they are eighth.

The awards

The most robbed match of the season is Coventry against Hull in round two: 2,05 expected points for the home side, zero on the board, a 1-0 defeat. The biggest gift therefore goes to Hull for the same ninety minutes: three points from a performance worth 0,64.

Coventry then did to someone else exactly what had been done to them. At the City Ground on 19 September they beat Nottingham Forest 1-0 with 0,69 expected goals against 1,32, and walked off with 2,16 points more than they had earned. If you want proof that the ledger does not settle in a straight line, that is it.

The "there is a goalkeeper living in here" award goes to Everton, who have conceded 3 goals from 7,20 expected against. Brighton are second at 3,63 goals saved, Brentford third at 3,50.

The opposite award, the one nobody wants, goes to Chelsea: 12 goals conceded from 10,30 worth of chances, and a 7-point haul that flatters nobody.

And then there is Tottenham, who deserve a category of their own. Two goals scored in five matches from 5,82 expected goals, 36 box entries, and 2 points. They are not playing badly. They are simply not scoring, which in September looks like a crisis and in November usually looks like a bad month.

What happens next, and sorry about this

These gaps close. Almost always, and they do not ask permission.

Not because football is fair, but for a much more boring reason: luck does not repeat, structure does. A team that saves four goals in five matches will not save another four in the next five. A side that has thrown away five points will stop throwing them away. When it happens, the papers will write that Bournemouth have turned a corner and that City have dipped, and nothing will have changed at all.

That said, if City are still doing this in March, the problem is ours and not theirs. That is part of why football is worth watching: sometimes the accounts refuse to balance for months, and those months win titles.

We are back on 10 October, and the fixture built in a laboratory for this table is Liverpool against Manchester City on the Sunday. One side takes what it produces, the other has been taking rather more.

T.L.

The verdict match by match is in the Meritometro, which compares real points with deserved points. For those who want the models and not the headlines, there is the Nerd Zone.