6 gameweeks in – that’s enough for my ratings to work fairly well so let’s make see how League 1 is shaping up for the season:
Table 1
Light yellow highlight = Relegated from the 2024/25 Championship
Light blue highlight = Promoted from 2024/25 League 1
- “Schedule” is equivalent to the expected goal difference per game of a league average team playing each team’s fixtures
- “PERFORMANCE RATING” is equivalent to the expected goal difference of each team in a game against a league average side (neutral ground)
Points of interest
- Cardiff’s high-performance level immediately stands out. It’s unlikely this performance level won’t regress downwards (using weak prior assessments of their level and simply the fact the top performing team is probably due negative regression) but I would certainly say they are favourites to win the league.
- Port Vale don’t have many points, but I rate their performances as 3rd so far! My ratings include a 20% weight on goals for/against – their performance levels would comfortably gap 3rd place if credit for goals were removed (which may not be an unreasonable thing to do for 6 games).
- A lot of teams new to League 1 this year are performing strongly – this could be bad news for last year’s league 1 teams that expect to be improving or holding position this year.
For fun I’m going to compare my expected points totals for each team to Spreadex’s and come back at the end of the season to review how my predictions performed compared to theirs:
Ideally, I’d probably regress my ratings for teams like Cardiff and Peterborough, but I haven’t sorted out a quantitative method for this yet. That’s part of the challenge though – can my ratings perform as well as the points spreads of spread betting companies simply using only 6 games of action?
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