I admire the aims of the APLT--which, IMO, is essentially to try to account for strength of schedule instead of just looking blindly at the league table, as well as having a better sense of how likely a title challenge is looking--and I understand that you value the simplicity, but I think the huge jump between what's expected in a 3 pointer and a 1 pointer really undermines that value. Just as one example, if Aston Villa had gotten 2 more points in the whole of last season, we'd be 2 points better off in the APLT, a huge difference at this stage of the season. In reality, a title challenging team probably can expect to get something like 2.3 points (to just pull a number out of my ass) away at the previous season's 14th placed team and 2.1 (if there's even an appreciable difference) at the previous season's 13th placed team. So there's really a tiny difference in expected point value for the games, but a huge difference in what the APLT expects.



Of course, you can quite reasonably respond that that is a much bigger problem at the extremes (i.e. 14th vs. 13th rather than 17th vs. 3rd) and that it evens out eventually, but the regular table evens out eventually too. The point of something like this is to "even things out" ahead of time. To do that effectively, I think you'd have to figure out expected point totals for each game in decimal points. Of course, that would require a lot of data collection and analysis, and would defeat the elegant simplicity of the current model, but I think that's the only way you could accurately account for schedule strength in a table like this. Turning it into a function with huge jumps really undermines its effectiveness, even if it is compelling, and perhaps psychologically useful.



I think this is underscored by the several other models that have been put forward in the thread--which all have a similar rationale and goal--all of which show significant differences. I certainly don't mean to dismiss the work everyone has done in this thread--and I quite enjoy the charts, especially the new one that shows how many more points we can drop home and away an expect to hit our goals--but I think, after 11 games, the real table is more trustworthy than the APLT.