Expected Point Analysis of Huddersfield's First 8 Games

Expected Points

 Here’s a quick look at the expected points from Huddersfield Town’s first 8 games this season compared to the corresponding games last season (Cardiff for Stoke) as well as our first 8 games last season.

(The expected points would be higher if I had not included the expected goal total from the penalty awarded on Danny Rose, as it was never a penalty, but for the sake of objectivity I have left it in).

First let's look at this season’s expected points compared to the corresponding fixtures from last year. I think the first thing it shows is that we were right to be worried after the first 3 games, the performances were clearly worse this season (also worse compared to our opening 3 games last season) and we hadn’t even earnt a whole expected point in that time, the results and performances were bad.

I also believe that this has had a knock on effect as to how people have viewed the games since then, as a lot of people have seen the results not improve and figured because to start with results and performances were bad the performance must still be bad or at least could be better. Since then however we’ve clearly done a lot better compared to last year and have been severely unlucky to only get 2 points from the 5 games, which would suggest that soon our results should start to improve and our expected and actual points total will come in line with each other, there is still plenty of reason to have hope.

Comparing our opening this year to last its interesting to see that we have picked up nearly the exact same expected points over 8 games, despite facing a much tougher set of games this season, this would suggest that as a side we have actually moved forward this season (somehow) and the club should continue its upward trajectory soon. The big difference here appears to be a greater number of expected points in this season's away games compared to either set from last season.

 This suggests that we will have to rely less on our home form this season, which given our current run is probably excellent news, and will hopefully mean our away support is not met with the same 2-0 loss every single time. It’ll be very interesting to see if we can keep this up as the season continues, as it will be proof that we can adapt effectively to a major problem from last season.


Simulation of Season so far

Probabilities calculated using a Monte Carlo simulation run 100,000 times based on the distribution for each game. Each games distribution was calculated by modelling the probability (from xG) that every shot in each game was scored to work out the probability of each score line and then summed per result. This method only concerns itself with match outcome and not GD.

The probabilities listed in the table quantify how unlucky Huddersfield have been so far showing that 90% of the time we would have more points by this stage, this adds further weight and evidence to the idea that we should see an improvement soon and that the first win isn’t too far around the corner. Also looking at this our most likely total at this stage would be 7 points which I think most of us would take from our opening 8 fixtures and while we would be able to be more positive if we had those points, I’m confident that we’ll soon see a big improvement in results and will start climbing the table.

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