I think people are right to question how good we are relative to other teams. We haven't done enough (yet) this summer to realistically make anything other than avoiding relegation priority number one.
Looking back at the 'relegation watch 2017/18' thread, 50 points is a good enough proxy for safety at this stage (true for 8 out of 11 previous seasons). With a stronger league than last year (all 3 relegated clubs look pretty strong, and the 3 promoted from L1 are probably stronger than the likes of Barnsley and Burton), that seems the right target for now. A good start or run of form and this league makes it possible for ambitions to quickly rise.
Given that we ended on 44 points last season, do we think we are 6 points stronger than last season (against a stronger 'average' opponent)?
But what if 44 points last season wasn't a fair indicator of how bad we were? Then we would need to target more than a 6 point improvement.
Using the Expected Goal (xG) data for 2017/18 fixtures (available from
fivethrityeight.com) I've pulled together a xG-driven Expected Points (xP) table for last season - where there was less than 0.5 between team A and team B's xGs, I've suggested a draw would have been fair and assigned one xP each, otherwise the team with higher xG score is awarded 3 points for 'deserving' to win. As an example, for the 1-0 home win against QPR this model would assign the 3 xP to QPR, as the xG score was 0.17 - 2.01.
Here is how differently the table would have looked at the end of last season:
There are some material differences (mostly because xG is the best of a bad bunch of football outcome predictors - read
here for a much better summary than I could write), but it doesn't feel horrifically 'wrong' to me. Wolves and Cardiff still come out at the top (albeit tied for 2nd with Villa), there is a bit of change in the play off positions, but more meaningful changes at the bottom. Burton finish bottom (they probably did overachieve to finish 2nd bottom), while we finish 2nd bottom with 37 points, and Ipswich take the last spot with 38 - 22 fewer than they actually got, and arguably explains the supporter discontent with Big Mick despite the mid table finish!
So if 50 is the magic number, and we only 'deserved' 37 points last season, we may well be 6 points better this year, but are we 13?