Data experts predict shock Premier League finishes for Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Chelsea, Brighton and rivals - gallery

Aston Villa will be hoping they can build on from an extraordinary first campaign under Unai Emery as the men in claret and blue head into the 2023/24 Premier League season. The Villans secured European football with a seventh-placed finish last term and new signings have only improved them further.

When Emery took over, Villa were nailed on as bottom-half finishers and all confidence was lost under the previous manager, Steven Gerrard. In just a matter of months, though, the Lions roared on into the top half and then eventually into Europa Conference League qualification on the final day.

An improvement from that could be tricky as the fixture schedule will be more packed than ever. There have also been some tremendous signings made across the division, with other clubs strengthening just as much as - if not more - than Villa.

So how, then, are things shaping up to look by the end of the 2023/24 as it stands? Well, thanks to a new data expert model from BetVictor, a predicted table has emerged following simulations for each team’s 38 matches.

The data experts adopt the Monte Carlo method and at its heart is a Python-based match simulator that uses two Poisson distributions – one for the home team and one for the away team – to anticipate the number of goals each team could score in a match.

A Poisson distribution is a powerful mathematical concept that predicts the probability of a given number of events (in this case, goals) happening in a fixed interval of time. The key input to a Poisson distribution is the ‘lambda’ (λ) value, which represents the average rate of an event’s occurrence.

BetVictor’s system uses the match simulator to predict the outcomes of a full season’s fixtures. The simulation is run 10,000 times, following which the average standings and probabilities are calculated which leads to a final table and full range of ‘average’ points of each side.

With all of that explained, it’s time to flick through the pages to see what the data simulations expect the Premier League standings to look like after 38 matches played for each team. There are rather a few surprises in here, to say the least.