Who wins in the Bundesliga title ‘race’? Which clubs will qualify for the Champions League? Who will be scrapping for survival? Fear not, our trusty supercomputer has the answers for you.
Who Will Win the Bundesliga?
The word ‘titelrennen’ doesn’t get much use in the Bundesliga these days; it’s in deep hibernation. It translates as ‘title race’ and according to our supercomputer, don’t expect it to emerge after an extended winter break when the Bundesliga returns either.
Bayern Munich have a 98.09% chance of retaining the German top-flight title for the 11th year in a row. An unprecedented, almost offensive, run of success.
The supercomputer is as sure as it can be (allowing for some craziness) that Bayern will win it again this season. They are four points clear of Freiburg in second but they are miles ahead of everyone else in basically every other metric.
They press, score and create more and concede less than everyone else in the league by an order of magnitude.
Julian Nagelsmann has lost Manuel Neuer for the rest of the season after a skiing accident and Lucas Hernandez tore his ACL during the World Cup with France. Sadio Mané is still recovering from leg surgery that saw him miss the World Cup but it shouldn’t matter. Their superiority across the pitch and on the bench means their march to a 32nd Bundesliga trophy looks inevitable.
If there is to be a challenge, RB Leipzig are the team to watch.
When the Bundesliga returns next Friday, the two teams play in a classic six-pointer between two ‘contenders’. Leipzig have a 1.05% chance of breaking Bayern’s hold. Suffice to say, we won’t be holding our breath.
Which Bundesliga Clubs Will Qualify for the Champions League?
Every Bundesliga discussion starts with Bayern Munich. But that’s not where it ends because in Germany, the magic really happens in the tier below the Bavarians. There are five teams with probabilities that range from 44.63% to 81.32% of making the 2023-24 UEFA Champions League.
RB Leipzig and league upstarts Freiburg are most likely to finish second and third with Borussia Dortmund and Eintracht Frankfurt battling it out for the last place in Europe’s elite competition according to our predictions.
Freiburg’s Vincenzo Grifo is tied for the top scorer title in the Bundesliga alongside the irresistible Jamal Musiala of Bayern Munich; both of them scoring nine goals.
The club’s fans have never had the chance to whistle the Champions League anthem live at the Europa-Park Stadion in southern Germany. The closest they came was in 2012-13 when they finished fifth, pipped at the post by Schalke 04 for that last, elusive spot amongst Europe’s elite. They also finished third in 1994-95 but that was before the Champions League expanded.
Dortmund – the last team to interrupt Bayern’s run of Bundesliga success back in 2011-12, have already lost six games this season but would be a lot closer to the top if it weren’t for a disastrous sign-off before the World Cup. They lost to Wolfsburg (2-0) and Borussia Mönchengladbach (4-2) and find themselves on the outside looking in. They are sixth but are predicted to improve and most likely finish fourth.
If the teams mentioned above are made up of (mostly) likely lads, then Union Berlin – with a 37% chance of Champions League football next season – are the most unlikely. They finished with 57 points last season and have improved every year since they were first promoted into Germany’s top flight. They finished 11th in 2019-20 (41 points), seventh a year later (50 points) and then fifth last season. Year-on-year improvement but how high can they climb?
Who Will Be Relegated from the Bundesliga in 2022-23?
Schalke are locked in an entirely different fight than the one which saw them pip Freiburg to the last Champions League spot almost a decade ago.
The Gelsenkirchen faithful will be hoping their side can avoid being banished to the 2. Bundesliga having won just one game in their last nine — they lost the other eight. It doesn’t look promising at the moment and the supercomputer backs up the eye test. It gives them an 89.36% chance of dropping out of Germany’s top flight. They have nine points so far, but they should be able to improve on their worse ever points total (15), which they set two years ago as they plummeted into the second tier. Scant consolation, really.
Hertha BSC, Stuttgart, Augsburg, Bochum are the most likely candidates to join them in the bottom two.
Bochum are the front-runners for automatic relegation with a 32.79% chance. Based on the supercomputer’s calculations, Hertha have a 21.42% likelihood of such a fate and a 17.52% chance of a relegation play-off. The same four will likely battle it out for the relegation play-off too. It’s tough and it’s tight at the bottom.
Koln might get dragged in but there’s only a 7.64% chance of that happening. As we can see there is a clear cut off between Koln in 13th and Augsburg in 14th. It would take a seismic collapse from any of the teams currently sitting 13th or higher to get themselves dragged into the scrap at the bottom of the table.
How Does the Supercomputer Model Work?
• Opta’s League Prediction model estimates the likelihood of teams finishing in each position in the competition. We can therefore see how successful a team’s season is likely to be, whether it’s their relegation or title chances.
• The model estimates the probability of each match outcome (win, draw or loss) by using betting market odds and Opta’s team rankings. The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performances.
• The model considers the strength of opponents by using these match outcome probabilities and simulates the remaining fixtures in the competition thousands of times. By analysing the outcome of each of these simulations, the model can see how often teams finished in each league position to create our final predictions.
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