How is the relegation race looking?
How is the relegation race looking?
Who's staying up or going down?
It’s really hard to predict the bottom of the table after this many games. Such is the nature of the beast, a team only really needs to go on a good run to lift themselves out of the conversation. Any of these sides could do that. But nevertheless, starting from 20th place and working up to midtable, let’s assess the bottom ten teams’ chances of staying up or going down.
Stats are from FBRef, except for PPDA which is from The Analyst. Both sites use data provided by Opta.
20. Nottingham Forest
Oh, mate. That brief high of beating Liverpool lasted all of a week before Arsenal brought them back down – all the way down – to earth. Forest just aren’t good. They actually “only” have the second worst xG difference per 90, but other teams nonetheless have more points on the board. FiveThirtyEight have Forest at 71% to go down, with the betting markets around the same.
It’s possible Forest’s chances could actually be worse than that. I assume these models are pricing in some sort of dramatic upturn in Forest’s form, which can happen to very bad teams. One reason it often happens, though, is that they sack the manager who was making bad choices and hire someone better. Forest seem to be all in on Steve Cooper. I think that’s the right decision, but it makes it harder to see a path for this team to improve substantially. They’re the clear favourites to go down right now.