"Liverpool are going to win the Premier League ...
...
...
... right?"
While normally you need a $500,000 MRI machine to image the human brain, I have just given you direct access inside the mind of most Liverpool fans, at some point, over the past four months.
It has been a foregone conclusion for everyone else for a long time now, but Liverpool fans remember when Steven Gerrard slipped. They can't forget how they finished one point behind Manchester City twice. Or how about those multiple losses to Real Madrid in the Champions League final? That time they beat Manchester United twice and still finished behind them in the table? And don't forget the, you know, entire modern history of the club.
Of course, those doubts have mostly evaporated by now. Despite some hiccups in the second half of the season -- the draws with Everton, Manchester United and Nottingham Forest; the losses to Plymouth Argyle in the FA Cup, Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League, Newcastle in the Carabao Cup, and Fulham in the league -- Liverpool are six points away from clinching their second-ever Premier League title. ESPN BET isn't even taking bets on the title race anymore.
But let's just say that the unthinkable did actually happen: that Liverpool somehow didn't win the Premier League. What would that disaster scenario look like?
Thanks to 10,000 simulations from the analyst Simon Tinsley, we can sketch out a pretty specific and plausible picture of the rare-but-still-possible scenario where Liverpool don't win the Premier League.
How to predict the Premier League
At his site Analytic Football, Tinsley maintains Premier League and Championship projections throughout the season. They're the best publicly available projections I've seen, and he uses a combination of goals, expected goals and penalties to create team ratings that represent how many goals we'd expect each team to score and concede on a neutral field against the average Premier League team. The ratings are then updated after each match.
Here's how overall ratings for Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City have developed since the start of last season:
With the ratings, Tinsley then projects the remaining Premier League schedule and uses that to come up with estimated season-end point and goal totals, plus probabilities for the title race, Champions League spots and relegation.
For example, his model rates Nottingham Forest as the 14th-strongest team in the league right now, but it still gives them a 63% chance of playing in the Champions League next season. They've banked the third-most points already, their remaining schedule isn't that hard, and not enough of the challenging teams are expected to go on a late-season run.
To come up with the probabilities, Tinsley simulates the Premier League season 10,000 times using the implied probabilities for each matchup remaining. Whatever percentage of time, say, Chelsea finishes in the top five of those 10,000 seasons becomes their probability of qualifying for the Champions League. (Currently: 31%.)
As of now, Tinsley's site lists Liverpool with a 100% chance of winning the league, but that's only because the model rounds up. I had Tinsley run another round of 10,000 simulations, and Liverpool won the league in 9,971, meaning there were 29 times when Liverpool didn't finish first.
Here's what that 0.29% chance of Liverpool failing to finish first looks like.