09 December 2023 , 07:45
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Thankfully, football isn't scripted.
But what if it was? Ahead of the 2019/20 campaign, BT Sport punished 'The Script of the Season'. The document was produced with the help of data experts at Google Cloud, Opta and Squawka to determine where each Premier League team would finish. These experts crunched the numbers for every fixture to determine the final table.
As is always the case with these things, the table was significantly incorrect. Manchester City were predicted to become the first team in history to win four consecutive English league titles, but they finished second. Sheffield United were tipped to finish bottom of the table, but they shocked the Premier League by securing a top-10 finish.
By March 2020, it was clear BT Sport's script was way off the mark. But Mirror Football decided to copy the rest of the script for the remaining games to predict how the season's finale would play out. English football was suspended in that month due to the Covid pandemic and didn't resume until June, when Liverpool belatedly cinched the title.
That's where it all starts to get a bit creepy. Mirror Football's revised script predicted Liverpool to finish as champions on 99 points... which they did. Manchester City were backed to pick up 83 points, but their actual tally was 81. Of course, it's a lot easier for us to predict the final two months of the season than for BT Sport to call the whole thing.
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In terms of the top four, Leicester (remember when they were in the Premier League?) and Manchester United were tipped to finish third and fourth respectively, with Chelsea in fifth. As it turned out, the Foxes lost three of their last four games to finish in fifth! The Red Devils clinched third, while Frank Lampard's Chelsea finished fourth.
Chris Wilder's Sheffield United defied the odds to finish ninth in 2019/20 (Getty Images)Can you script football? Let us know in the comments below!
Sticking to the script, we thought the rest of the top 10 would be Arsenal (sixth), Tottenham (seventh), Wolves (eighth), Burnley (ninth) and Sheffield United (10th). But that was completely wrong. Spurs (sixth) and Wolves (seventh) finished above Arsenal in eighth, while the Blades pipped Burnley to ninth on goal difference.
In terms of relegation, it seemed as if Aston Villa and Brighton would join Norwich in dropping to the Championship. But, once again, that prediction was way off the mark. Bournemouth lost six times after the restart to the slip into the bottom three, while Watford lost their final three games to finish 18th. Villa survived relegation on the final day of the season thanks to Jack Grealish's last-minute equaliser at West Ham.
BT Sport, which was rebranded as TNT Sports during the summer, revisited the script themselves in ahead of the season's finale. They admitted: "We felt the time was right to acknowledge what was obvious to many fans, pundits and players from the start: data and science cannot predict the beautiful game. Football cannot be scripted."
And that's why we love it so much.