English Premier Soccer League in 2008/9

The table below shows the points gained by all teams in the English Premier Soccer League at the end of the 2008/9 season.

  Team Pts
1 Manchester United 90
2 Liverpool 86
3 Chelsea 83
4 Arsenal 72
5 Everton 63
6 Aston Villa 62
7 Fulham 53
8 Tottenham Hotspur 51
9 West Ham United 51
10 Manchester City 50
11 Wigan Athletic 45
12 Stoke City 45
13 Bolton Wanderers 41
14 Portsmouth 41
15 Blackburn Rovers 41
16 Sunderland 36
17 Hull City 35
18 Newcastle United 34
19 Middlesburgh 32
20 West Bromwich Albion 32

Evidence of skill?

A quarter of the matches in 2008/9 were draws, so we will conduct a simulation with a model in which all teams are equally matched and:

From each simulated league, we will summarise the spread of points at the end of the season using both their range and their standard deviation. After 100 simulated leagues, these measures of spread are shown below.

The actual spread of points in the 2008/9 league was much higher than those that appeared in the simulations with equally matched teams, indicating that there was indeed a difference between the skill levels of the best and worst teams in the league.