liverpool fans are no doubt finding the Premier League mesa highly attractive but the truth is that at this stagecoach of the season it remains profoundly flawed, skewed as it hush is towards teams that have had favorable fixtures and a couple of chancy results. Thankfully, though, we have been able to right some of these wrongs, allowing one side to make an demonstrable case for the title of great overperformer if not, in the end, dislodging Jürgen Klopp ’ s entertainers from acme spot. The biggest problem with the real postpone is that, in these inactive early days before every team have played every other team, it does not reflect the quality of opposition each side have faced. This can make quite a difference and promptly alter perceptions of teams ’ relative merits. so swansea ’ s plight, marooned as they are in 19th place in the table, appears less dreadful with the cognition that they have had by a distance the most unmanageable opening 11 games of all top-flight teams. They have already played eight of the top 10, including all the top four, while West Brom have played only four top-half sides, three of them at home. conversely Pep Guardiola ’ s impressive start to the season at Manchester City loses some of its shininess with the realization that his side have probably had the easiest open run. They alone are yet to play any of the top four sides ( obviously being one of them reduces their chances of doing so ), and they have beaten merely one of the four top-half teams they have faced. elsewhere, whereas Liverpool are circus tent despite having already visited Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham, Arsenal are however to play an aside game against a team ranked higher than Watford ’ s one-eighth place.

To illustrate the dispute in regular difficulty, Swansea ’ s inaugural 11 opponents have won 194 points this season and have an average current league position of 7.9, while Manchester City ’ s have won 140 and sit a humble 12.3. probably the fairest way of differentiating between the trouble of fixtures indeed far played is to use the total points won by each team ’ south opponents excluding games in which that team have played, by which metric Swansea, Liverpool, Tottenham and Leicester have had the hardest starts and Stoke, Manchester City, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth the most square. In an attempt to make the mesa more brooding of the quality of opponents faced, we weighted points according to the timbre of the teams they were won from, making a victory wrested from one of the circus tent teams importantly more valuable than a similar result against, say, Sunderland, who until this weekend had been handing points out like lollipops on Halloween. In this reimagined table Liverpool remain top and Sunderland bottom but City drop from third to fifth, Stoke from 12th to 16th and Burnley rise from ninth to sixth. Of course, not all results this season have been deserved, which brings us on to the reasonably worry issue of Expected Goals. To reach this statistic Opta “ meter the quality of a prospect and the likelihood a particular shot is scored based on distance to the finish, angle to the goal, whether or not it was a heading, whether or not it was assisted and a assortment of other factors ”. It is regularly dismissed by some commentators, presumably because it sounds obviously farcical, but has proved an unusually well index of actual performance.

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Having done their sums and simulated all matches played this temper 250 times, Opta have found that some teams should in truth have well more points than they do and others have taken more than they in truth should have. To make our table more reflective of what is by rights average, but without wholly redrafting the league based on something that makes Craig Burley terribly angry, we have added or subtracted half the number of points Opta believe each team should or should not have won. This gives us a more fair reflection of actual accomplishment this season to date but no sense of who are achieving more than they truly should be. This is where money talks. obviously one would expect those sides that have spent most heavy on their squads to be the most successful on the field ( wages are broadly a more authentic index but this season ’ sulfur remain unavailable ). Using figures from the CIES Football Observatory we ranked teams by the price of their current squads and awarded them an extra half a bonus league sharpen for every military position away from the top of the extravagant table they sit. While most of the exceed six survived this change, extravagant Manchester United were sent spiralling down to 13th and bargain basement Burnley abruptly hit the top four .Sean Dyche

Sean Dyche ’ sulfur Burnley have been beating the odds so far in the Premier League and deserve to be even higher than their current ninth set. Photograph: Ian MacNicol/Getty Images Sean Dyche ’ s side have had one of the toughest starts and faced it with the division ’ randomness bum police squad, yet they continue to harvest points with rare abandon. In those metrics that tend to mirror fairly close the quality of the teams who earn them, clock and again Burnley stick out for the wrong reasons. thus, for model, the Premier League ’ s real-life top six are besides the six teams with the most touches in opposition penalty areas and are all in the top seven teams ranked by average possession and by the difference between the number of shots taken and shots conceded. Burnley find themselves 19th, 20th and 19th on those tables, their abject operation rivalled only by Hull ( 20th, 17th and 20th ). And still they are soaring. They say the table does not lie but occasionally, and for all sorts of reasons, it can be economic with the accuracy .