Graphic: How the final table willl look, statistically speaking

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Just come back from Vegas. Lost £6 at the roulette table. Don't think I'm quite the customer that Bugsy Siegel had in mind when he built the Flamingo.

I stopped playing when I noticed a sign above the wheel with all the numbers that had come up. The moment I realised that the other players thought that there was some sort of pattern, I couldn't go on. It was too annoying.

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The problem with predicting football scores is the opposite - people seem to believe that there is no pattern in the numbers and feel that they would be better off with hunches. Yet by far the best way of predicting results this season is to look at the past two seasons and then add in as little of your instincts as your personality permits.

The Fink Tank's Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham have been joined this season by Dr Mark Latham. I assume you have read his paper, “A dimension reduction model for spatial extreme sea-level events”, in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Now he has turned his attention to the prospects of Wigan Athletic.

The Fink Tank team takes two years of goals and shots on goal and then for each club weights them so that the most recent goals and shots count more. This allows each club to be ranked and the probability of results in each game to be calculated. Allowance is made for the teams' performance to vary across the season, then the season is simulated thousands and thousands of times.The outcome is a table giving the probability of each team finishing in each position and a table representing their average position. The two together show broadly what to expect and how much variability there is.

Numbers to look out for? Manchester United are clear favourites to win the title, although naturally Chelsea are hot on their heels. Once more it would be a mistake either to write Arsenal off or to overestimate Liverpool.

On the other hand, there are a few surprises. The first is that West Bromwich Albion are quite unlikely to go down - we rate the chance of that at only 6 per cent. Set against that, there is the strikingly high chance of Newcastle United being relegated, which we give as an eye-catching 20 per cent.

This is not a predictable league at all. Not only are there four teams with 10 per cent or more chance of winning the title, almost half the teams (nine) have a more than 10 per cent chance of going down - Bolton Wanderers (12 per cent), Fulham (32 per cent), Hull City (46 per cent), Manchester City (23 per cent), Newcastle (20 per cent), Stoke City (61 per cent), Sunderland (46 per cent), West Ham United (17 per cent) and Wigan (25 per cent).

Let the wheel start spinning.

The Fink Tank will return on September 6.