After reading Lawro's comments in his prediction -- that, while many Saints fans would no doubt be expecting a top-half finish, the Premier League is not as easy as that -- I decided to go back through the past ten years and see what, exactly, a team with this sort of first quarter tends to produce over the remainder of the year. Obviously, not all hot-starting sides are alike; for that reason, I've tabulated the results (for any teams posting 2+ points a game through their first nine) without the traditional 'big clubs': Arsenal/Chelsea/Man U/Liverpool, plus Man City after their takeover in '08, and Tottenham from the Redknapp era on.
If anyone has quibbles about that distinction, it only affects two seasons -- City in '07/'08, Tottenham in '05/'06 -- but the intent was to separate out the teams that were year-in, year-out contenders with outsized financial resources, and neither of those clubs really qualified until those points, at least during the '02/'03-'12/'13 period that I was examining.
The first thing to note: this doesn't happen terribly often. There are only nine occurrences (including City/Tottenham's seasons, per above) where a team other than the traditional dominant players produced a start equal or better. That also means that the outlier(s) (that'd be Hull, naturally) move the needle pretty significantly. Anyhoo, below are the average finish in position/points, and points per game over the remaining 29:
Average points through nine games: 19.
Average points finish: 54.8.
Average points per game after first nine: 1.23.
Median points finish: 58.
Average finish in table: 8.56.
Median finish in table: 7th.
Teams finishing in the top five: 3 out of 9.
Teams finishing in the top seven: 5 out of 9.
Teams finishing in the top half: 7 out of 9.
Not shockingly, teams tend to slow down from the two-points-a-game pace. But most of the time, neither do they fall off a cliff...one, Everton in '04/'05, qualified for the Champions League, while two others (Newcastle in '11/'12 and Tottenham in '05/'06) were in the race until the very end, the latter undone only by a dodgy buffet.
Adversity will come, no doubt. But the pronouncements of melty-faced talking heads aside, most starts of this nature are not flukes: the majority of the teams that started as hot as we have ended up having decidedly successful seasons.
If anyone has quibbles about that distinction, it only affects two seasons -- City in '07/'08, Tottenham in '05/'06 -- but the intent was to separate out the teams that were year-in, year-out contenders with outsized financial resources, and neither of those clubs really qualified until those points, at least during the '02/'03-'12/'13 period that I was examining.
The first thing to note: this doesn't happen terribly often. There are only nine occurrences (including City/Tottenham's seasons, per above) where a team other than the traditional dominant players produced a start equal or better. That also means that the outlier(s) (that'd be Hull, naturally) move the needle pretty significantly. Anyhoo, below are the average finish in position/points, and points per game over the remaining 29:
Average points through nine games: 19.
Average points finish: 54.8.
Average points per game after first nine: 1.23.
Median points finish: 58.
Average finish in table: 8.56.
Median finish in table: 7th.
Teams finishing in the top five: 3 out of 9.
Teams finishing in the top seven: 5 out of 9.
Teams finishing in the top half: 7 out of 9.
Not shockingly, teams tend to slow down from the two-points-a-game pace. But most of the time, neither do they fall off a cliff...one, Everton in '04/'05, qualified for the Champions League, while two others (Newcastle in '11/'12 and Tottenham in '05/'06) were in the race until the very end, the latter undone only by a dodgy buffet.
Adversity will come, no doubt. But the pronouncements of melty-faced talking heads aside, most starts of this nature are not flukes: the majority of the teams that started as hot as we have ended up having decidedly successful seasons.
