Patrick Vieira and Crystal Palace have reached the ten-game mark for the 2020-21 season. As a quarter of the season is already out of the way, it is an ideal time to look at the team's performance.
Beating the Forecasters
The pre-season odds were forecasting doom and gloom for Crystal Palace this season. It was a possible overreaction to several players departing, who were often injured, and a "rookie" manager, at least in the Premier League sense.
Similarly, many analytics companies who set out their estimations for each match provides a neutral standpoint for how Palace are expected to perform.
The alternative is to make a consensus fan prediction, which is more likely to have bias involved.
Taking FiveThirtyEight's model in this example is based on a detailed set of metrics to give a percentage chance for a win, loss or draw in every match. For those brave enough to read their explanation, find out more here. But needless to say, it is a thorough process.
Taking these percentages, we can see how FiveThirtyEight saw Palace's chances in each match. If FiveThirtyEight's estimates give a clear favourite in the game, a win/loss is assigned, where there's no clear favourite, a draw.
Against these estimates, Palace has outperformed where FiveThirtyEight had predicted +4 on points. As expected, the only two projected wins were against Brentford and Newcastle, with draws against Leicester and Brighton.
It'll be interesting to see how these predictions update as the season continues.
The Trajectory
For any team outside of the Champions League mix, there are three clear targets for the season: safety from relegation, competing for a top-half finish, and an outside shot at European football.
Looking at every season from 2000/01 to 2020/21 helps paint a picture of the average point tally needed to achieve those goals.
- For safety from relegation, we took 17th place +1 point.
- For a top-half finish, we took 10th place +1 point.
- For European contention, we took 6th place +1 point.
The average of those seasons gives us 39 points for safety, 50 points for a top-half finish, and 63 points to contend for Europe.
Next comes the projections:
As each game progresses, taking the average point-per-game gives a loose idea of the team's trajectory. While the loss to Chelsea set off alarm bells, and the win over Tottenham arguably gave too many fans too much early optimism, it's easier to judge where the team finds themselves now that Palace has reached ten games.
Multiplying that out is an oversimplification, but it gives an idea of how the team will need to perform to reach their goals over the rest of the season.
The win over Man City made up for the points dropped against Newcastle and Brighton and puts the team ahead of where they need to be for safety after ten matches.
At the bare minimum, this is the pace the team will need to maintain to ensure safety in the first year of the rebuilding project, but the top half is well within grasp.
Strength of the Opposition
It is worth considering just how difficult these opening fixtures looked on paper. Palace has navigated it with relative ease, consistency, and with entertaining performances, which is very encouraging.
When the fixture list was announced in June, especially when paired with all of the uncertainty at the club at the time, the first three months of games looked very tough.
Taking a look at the league finishes from the previous season, this was with good reason.
As it stands, Palace has had the most challenging run of fixtures over the first ten games, based on the year before. Considering that Brighton and Brentford have vastly outperformed their respective ranking from last season, this only added to the potential difficulty level.
What bodes well from the first ten results for Patrick Vieria is that the schedule of games should be "softer" than they have faced to date for the remaining nine games until the midpoint of the season and that the team is already ahead of where many expected.
Turning the domination of possession into dominant wins is the next step.
Expected Points
Using Understat's xPts (Expected Points) metric helps highlight that the current tally of points hasn't been a lucky process but hard-earned.
Based on the quality of chances throughout each game and assigning an expected point split for each team, Palace has underperformed in their results.
That isn't surprising when you consider the domination against both Newcastle and Brighton, despite failing to win.
Based on the performances so far, Understat projects that the team's performances have been worth 14.60 xPts. This would place the team in the 7th spot, six above their current position.
Games aren't won on xG alone, as last season's Brighton will tell anyone, but it's another reason to be optimistic.
The next check in will be after 20 games to see how the team has progressed.