European football is nearly back.  The English Premier League returns this week and Italy returned last week with the Coppa Italia Semi-Finals.  Meanwhile, in Spain, despite playing in empty stadiums, the Mallorca versus Barcelona match saw a fan rush the field.  Finally, the New York Times reports that nobody understands why Ligue 1 is the only top European football league to cancel its season.

While football returned in Italy last week, Serie A won’t return until this weekend.  I now turn my attention to Italy and Serie A, as I have already discussed what could have happened had the season not been suspended in France, Germany, England and Spain.  

I followed the same approach for Serie A as I had for the previous discussions.  I used DataRobot and historical data from Data Sports Group to build models that would predict the winner of any matchup in the top five European football leagues.  Taking into account both teams recent form, the performance of their players and the quality of their opponents, I used DataRobot to train models that would predict the winner of any matchup.  We used these models to predict the knockout stage of the Champions League.  These predictions are built using these models to simulate the remaining matchdays 10,000 times.  For each team, we calculated the average number of wins, draws and losses over those 10,000 seasons to build an average final table.

Unlike last week, where we saw a fair amount of movement both at the top and bottom of the table in La Liga, the table for Serie A remains far more stable.  The simulation expects Juventus to maintain its one point lead on Lazio and hold on to top spot in Serie A in what looks to be an exciting final twelve matchdays.  Inter is expected to hold onto the third spot, with Atalanta remaining in the final Champions League qualification spot.  For the Europa league, Roma, Napoli and Milan remain in fifth, sixth and seventh place respectively and all qualify for the Europa league.

In the relegation zone, there is a little movement, SPAL and Brescia swap the bottom two spots, while Lecce is able to climb over Genoa to avoid relegation.

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Written by Andrew Engel