What Are The Chances?

Since the Villans have now lost four in a row, after their 1-0 loss to Crystal Palace yesterday, things are getting quite negative. This is unsurprising as Lambert’s side has won only five games at home so far in 2013, with two of the wins coming this season, when six goals have been scored at Villa Park. The Villans do not just have the worst home record in the Premier League; they have the worst home record in the entire football league!

Despite the doom and gloom, things are not yet quite as bad as the 1986-87 season, when the boys in claret and blue earned only thirty-six points in Division One.

With Lambert under increasing pressure and his players under the microscope, I thought I’d try to put things into perspective using some maths.

Calculating probabilities in football is complicated since there are so many variables but for these purposes I will assume an equal probability for all results – win, lose or draw. Therefore, the probability of losing a randomly chosen game is 1 in 3 or 33%. This seems pretty fair since I see Villa as a pretty average team, although the odds of a loss are, sadly, probably slightly higher.

So the probability of losing 4 randomly chosen, consecutive games is 1 in 81, or 1.2%, so very unlikely. Over the course of a league season, however, there are 35 lots of 4 games, meaning games 1,2,3,4, games 2,3,4,5, through to games 35,36,37,38, so the chances of losing 4 consecutive games in a season is 35 in 81, or 43%, which is not really that unlikely.

These probabilities aren’t accurate but I hope that they show that over the course of a season, bad runs and even very bad runs aren’t that unlikely. Hopefully, it is just a bad run at the moment and the players can turn things around sooner rather than later.

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