The odds are clearly much less than this though.....

This factors every single permutation and assumes each team has equal chance of randomly finishing in any position... ala a lotto drawing balls.....

Clearly the odds are...... Chelsea and Man City wil not finish in the bottom half of the table...... or even outside the top six.

If I could be arsed... the way I would approach this problem is to use a normal distribution of each teams likely performance and eliminate all results that are likely to be 2-3 standard deviations outside the expected result 95% to 99.7%
With a team like chelsea this might be as bad as 4th to 6th..... thus eliminating 14-16 random postions.... rinse repeat with all teams.

Posted By: usacanary, Jul 29, 13:22:16