87. 27. 1.4.
Those are the three magic numbers that have delivered four consecutive Premier League titles for Manchester City. For all the artistry that Pep Guardiola's side can show on the pitch, a new book charting City's rise tells how behind the scenes everyone is working to a number-crunching masterplan.
The Blueprint details how City's performance team have 87 points as the marker needed to win the league based on recent seasons, and it is expected that a minimum of 27 wins will be needed to reach that target - leaving space for six draws and five defeats from the remaining matches.
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In working out how to reach those targets, City analysts found that expected goals (xG) was the key. A relatively recent introduction to the mainstream in football, xG is used to calculate the quality of chances with each shot given a rating between 0.01 and 0.99 for how likely it is to be a goal; if a goal has been scored from that position one time out of 100 (0.01) it is a much smaller chance than 99 times out of 100.
This can help to show how effective an attack has been. For instance, Crystal Palace taking 16 shots against Nottingham Forest on Monday night sounds impressive, but those 16 shots generating 0.9xG between them indicates that the quality of shots was extremely poor with an average of about 0.056 (a 5.6 per cent chance of scoring) from each effort.
City worked out that by averaging a net xG of 1.4 across the season, producing 1.4xG more than their opponents, then that was almost always enough for 27 wins and the magic 87 points. For every game
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