Should Liverpool or Man City be Premier League title favourites?

Football trader Jason Murphy gives us the inside info on the Premier League title race betting.

Should Liverpool be favourites to win the Premier League?

Some people are suggesting so given Manchester City’s injury troubles and with Liverpool five points clear after five matches.

To try and measure this we need to look at goal supremacies. The difference in terms of goals between teams and what difference a key player may make to the supremacy and match prices.

At a neutral venue with two evenly matched teams the goal supremacy is zero. No difference between the sides or the chances of winning means both sides are 7-4 to in 90 minutes.

A team 0.5 better than the opposition would be around 11-10 and 1.0 of a goal better would be 8-11.

Barcelona might be rated around two goals better (3-10) than most teams in La Liga but if Lionel Messi is missing the price drifts.

This has happened several times already this season. They went from 1-5 to 2-5 at home to Betis, 4-11 to 8-13 at home to Valencia and 2-7 to 4-9 away to Osasuna.

The average change in supremacy is a drift of 0.65 of a goal for these three games, although there were other mitigating circumstances to the price drifts outside of Messi's absence.

We will attribute half of this to Messi’s injury meaning we assign a value of 0.325 to the greatest player ever to play the game. It's subjective whether you make this bigger or shorter and it is also dependent on who is replacing him and his importance to the team.

For further context the biggest swing I could attribute to a player in terms of team importance last season was Wilfried Zaha at home to Southampton.

Crystal Palace opened evens but went off 6-4, about 0.4 of goal and looking at team news for that day I would give the full 0.4 swing to Zaha’s unexpected absence.

Can we now apply this methodology to help inform title prices? Pep Guardiola started with Aymeric Laporte and John Stones in the first league game against West Ham so let’s assume that is his first-choice pairing.

I have Laporte as Man City’s best centre-back and 0.05 of a goal
better than Stones and Nicolas Otamendi (both of whom I rate the same) and 0.1 of goal better than Fernandinho.

Laporte gets injured and is replaced by Otamendi (-0.05
worse). Stones then also gets injured and his replacement will be Fernandinho (-0.05).

With both centre-backs missing, it compounds the loss further. Hence, the sum of parts are worse as there is less stability and familiarity which is important in building a solid defence.

So, I allow an additional -0.05 for this. This gives us two adjustments that we can use for City’s fixtures.

It's -0.05 worse when Laporte is missing and therefore Stones and Otamendi play and -0.15 worse when Laporte and Stones are missing. You will notice that I still do not consider this to be as bad as Barcelona missing Messi or Palace missing Zaha.

City are expected to win and dominate against Watford, Palace and Villa coming up. I am not concerned about what happened against Norwich. You will get caught out every now and then because of individual mistakes.

Otamendi is a good defender. He made PFA Team of the year in 2018 and him and Fernandinho are a more than capable centre back pairing for these games.

It is in the bigger matches that the difference becomes more noticeable. Away to Liverpool it can make the difference between City being favourites or underdogs.

You can use your updated supremacy/prices for the remaining fixtures to simulate out how many times City or Liverpool win the league. My results would suggest that if both squads were full-strength then you would have City 4-6 to win the title. Adjusting the supremacies and prices for the games that Laporte is possibly going to miss and the sim moves Man City out a tick to 8-11.

Whether Stones misses five games or eight games doesn’t move the outright price. If he was missing more difficult games or out for the same period as Laporte then we would expect City price to drift another tick to 4-5.

Other things that compilers must adjust supremacies for are subjective: motivation and pressure.

Come April, if both are still in the Champions League, City play Liverpool the weekend before quarter-final first legs.

City will surely prioritise winning the Champions League whereas Liverpool would want the Premier League.

Another factor is how much does pressure and randomness come into it? Liverpool didn’t bottle it last season. It was incredible what they achieved but how do odd-compilers account for Jordan Pickford or Hugo Lloris handing Liverpool wins at Anfield last season.

Their second last game this season will be Chelsea at Anfield, how do you account for the pressure in that game? What price a Liverpool slip?

Liverpool have had an easier start to the season in terms of match prices. The home games to Newcastle and Norwich rank as two of the easiest games they will play this season (38th and 34th on paper).

Is Laporte as big a loss as what Virgil Van Dijk could be? Not for me.

I think Van Dijk is bigger - 0.15-0.2 - if I had to put a figure on it. However Joe Gomez and Joel Matip are stronger than Stones and Otamendi.

If Liverpool beat Chelsea away on Sunday (sixth most difficult
game), and Stones is out longer than expected, then I would still only have a Liverpool title win at evens.

A sim still has City slight favourites but I think motivation balances it out over the course of the season and means we are in for another titanic title battle.

So should Liverpool be favourites? Not yet.

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