As with Sunday’s—this is imperfect, but in an attempt to preemptively quantify what today’s results mean for Burnley, I…reverse engineered FiveThirtyEight’s SPI? Not quite that, actually. First, Burnley’s estimated relegation probabilities with each pair of results today from Everton and Leeds. After that, I’ll explain how we got there.
| Leeds Result Today | Everton Result Today | Burnley Relegation Probability |
| Win | Win | 75% |
| Win | Draw | 65% |
| Win | Loss | 63% |
| Draw | Draw | 53% |
| Draw | Win | 52% |
| Draw | Loss | 48% |
| Loss | Win | 32% |
| Loss | Draw | 30% |
| Loss | Loss | 29% |
What I did here is take the SPI game-by-game forecasts from the EPL season through Saturday and fit a second-order polynomial equation to them, then adjust home-field advantage to minimize error. The equation ended up being Win Probability = .00009x2 + .0128x +.3907, where x is the difference between the SPI of each team, pulled by six towards the home side. After using that, the probability of a draw was just whatever’s left. It’s imperfect—it’s off by an average of 5% on each probability—but I lack the mental resources to full-on reverse engineer a model like that of FiveThirtyEight.
After doing this, I simulated Burnley, Everton, and Leeds’s remaining games 10,000 times. I did not run the simulations “hot”—this is another difference from FiveThirtyEight, their model accounts for the way each team’s SPI will change depending on future results—but even with this, the 5% error, and an overly simplistic coin-flip approach to who would win between Everton and Burnley if it came to goal differential, I came out with relegation probabilities of 38% for Burnley, 7% for Everton, and 55% for Leeds, which is comparable to what FiveThirtyEight’s process turns out. To adjust for them having Burnley at 41%, relative to my 38%, I gave a blanket multiplier to each eventual conditional relegation probability, getting us to what’s listed above.
Obviously, these are a little wonky—they have Everton winning as a better result than Everton drawing if Leeds draws, which is wrong (this is due to only having roughly 400 simulations for each of those combinations, creating some small-sample noise)—but this is the general picture for today. If both Leeds and Everton win, Burnley’s down to a 1-in-4 shot of survival. If Leeds wins but Everton loses or ties, it’s a little better than 1-in-3. With a Leeds draw, it’s roughly 50/50. With a Leeds loss, it’s a little better than 2-in-3. And for whatever it might be worth, this method was only off by one percentage point on Sunday, as it turned out.
