The Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga (their second division of professional football) are scheduled to finish their season starting this Saturday, May 16. This will mark the first of the Big Five European football leagues to reserve play, and the first attempt after the French Ligue 1 decided to end their season. La Liga, Serie A and the Premier League will be watching in anticipation of starting their season.
In light of the Ligue 1 decision, this could not have been an easy decision. On April 3rd, it was reported that over a third of the teams in the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga would need to declare bankruptcy if the season wasn’t completed. However, while the COVID-19 pandemic is improving in Germany, the Bundesliga’s original plan to resume last Saturday was delayed after three employees of 1. FC Köln tested positive on May 1.
Beyond the immediate challenges of navigating the pandemic and the risk and fallout from positive tests, the last nine weeks of matches will need to be played in a very different environment from the first 25. These matches will be played without fans in attendance and the league is currently discussing if additional substitutions will be allowed and what to do if some players test positive and the team doesn’t have enough healthy players available.
These questions have caused a rift in the Premier League as six teams have pushed back on the fairness of completing the season under these sort of different circumstances and the economic result of relegation on these teams.
With the resumption of play in Germany, we will be able to see how the teams perform in these new circumstances, but the criticism of the Premier League teams left us at DataRobot curious with what might have been had the season completed as planned and looking forward to comparing this to what actually happens.
To predict what we would have expected, we used the models and approach we developed to predict the knockout stage of the Champions League using data provided by Data Sports Group. We used DataRobot’s models to predict which team would win each match to simulate the final nine 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.
We expect Bayern Munich to increase its lead and win the Bundesliga by five points. Meanwhile, RB Leipzig and Borussia Dortmund will continue their fight for second, with RB Leipzig expected to gain three points on Borussia Dortmund and finish in second place. Borussia Mönchengladbach will maintain its two point lead on Bayer Leverkusen to lock up the final Champions League spot.
The fight for the Europa League qualifying round continues as we expect Schalke 04 to drop from this position and 1899 Hoffenheim to jump VfL Wolfsburg and SC Freiburg into the sixth position.
The relegation zone remains relatively unchanged, we only expect Weder Breman to pull two points ahead of Fortuna Düsseldorf for the relegation play-offs and Fortuna Düsseldorf and SC Paderborn to be relegated to 2. Bundesliga.
While there is no guarantee that this is what would have happened, we are curious to see how the remainder of the Bundesliga season plays out in a quite different environment.
Contact our Sales Team to learn how you can apply predictive analytics, machine learning and AI for your sport business.
Written by Andrew Engel
