Good point – in terms of probability the home team has about a 50% chance of not getting three points so indeed the draw doesn’t look as bad.

The expected points are what we would see if the teams played a large number of games, and so in that sense they don’t apply to a single game. However, I think it’s useful for a team to have an idea of a par score – even if they will never get 1.75 points from a single game, it gives a sense of how damaging a draw is (-0.75) and how valuable a win is (+1.25).

Loving your blog by the way!

Here’s an alternative view.

A home team with an initial Expected Points of 1.75 as you say will probably win 50% of their games and draw 25% and lose 25%.So when they draw a home game they are equalling or bettering the number of points they would expect to gain in 50% of their home games.That doesn’t paint the home draw in such a bad light.

Expected points are derived from longterm probabilities,so it’s difficult to use them to evaluate a single game result.

Mark

http://thepowerofgoals.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the feedback!

I should have mentioned that in the article – the highlighted cells indicate where the expected points value is less than one. So 0.99 shows up as highlighted (it gets rounded up to 1.0) but 1.01 does not get highlighted as a draw would be 0.01 points below expectations.

Ian

But nice article, and I think that you are right about your assumptions on 1 pts. won contra 2 pts. lost.

Regards
Daniel