In mid-December, Phil McNulty, the BBC’s chief football writer, offered us his predictions for the rest of the English Premier League season. My interest in football is limited but I found McNulty’s efforts fascinating. Even the most sceptical about football can learn a great deal from the episode.
A brief piece of context for those sceptics. Chelsea, the champions, had just played Leicester City, a team that had been relegation favourites just a few months before. Leicester won the game. This result would have been surprising had it not been set against the even more surprising pattern of the season. Champions Chelsea had slumped towards the bottom of the league after producing an unprecedentedly appalling run of form; Leicester, meanwhile, were top of the table. Nobody was shocked to see them vanquish Chelsea but it felt like a significant moment nonetheless.
What of McNulty? At the beginning of the season, he had predicted that Chelsea would be champions again, while Leicester would finish in the bottom three and be relegated from the Premier League. Both of those outcomes are now inconceivable. After admitting that his initial prediction had been about as wrong as it is possible to be, McNulty proposed a new set of predictions.