EightyFivePoints

In my last blog , I demonstrated that the weekly EPL predictions of Mark Lawrenson (for BBC Sport ) and Paul Merson (for Sky Sports ) consistently beat the betting market. Betting a constant amount on their predictions ( home win , away win  or draw ) over the last 3 years would have resulted in an 8% profit, on average, for both pundits. I also showed that a lot of this performance is down to their ability to predict draws, something that the bookmakers – and most statistical models – are quite poor at doing. So far I’ve treated Lawrenson and Merson’s predictions separately, but what if we combine them? Can we improve their predictive power? They may feature on rival networks, but in this post I’m going to look at what happens when Merson and Lawrenson work as a team. Consensus Forecasts From the 2014/15 season through the 2016/17 season there were 1101 EPL matches for which Merson and Lawrenson both made a prediction. But how frequently did they make the same  prediction? T