A below-freezing Tuesday night in Norway brougth us something we hadn’t previously seen so far this season: a Juventus win in the Champions League. The performance was far from a strong one on the whole, but it proved to be the game in which Juve secured three point in Europe or the first time
So how much has it helped?
Well, for one, Juventus are now actually into the top 24 again, ending Matchday 5 of the UCL league phase in 22nd place. It’s not a huge jump up from the 26th-place standing they had when they took the field in Bodø, but it’s something to at least try and take some positives out of considering how the first half of the league phase went this season.
It hasn’t exactly done much to make the computers think Juve’s going beyond the play-off round, though.
According to Opta’s supercomputer formula, Juventus now have close to an 82% chance of making the play-off round of the Champions League. What happens after that is anybody’s guess — especially since they’re going to be potentially drawn against a pretty strong team with a spot in the knockout rounds at stake. Those chances will, of course, improve in the supercomputer’s mind if they continue to win and get a more comfortable place in the league phase table, but as things stand right now, Juve’s chances of making it past the play-off round and into the round of 16 stand at …
… all of about 2%, according to Opta.
To have even more fun with the supercomputer’s numbers, Juventus also have an expected points total of around 11, which would put them on a number that was less than the previous season when they finished with 12 and recorded a 20th-place finish and got drawn against PSV Eindhoven in the play-off round. (Narrator: it ended poorly.) How much the second season of the UCL league phase has changed our opinion of what is the magic number of points to ensure you’re not totally sweating things out on Matchday 8 is probably around the same 11- or 12-point total as it was last season.
But that expected point total of 10.83 (or roughly 11 if we round up), according to Opta, is pretty much thinking that Juventus will drop points in one of their last three league phase games.
That would be something that means Luciano Spalletti’s task of getting Juve into the play-off round is even more of a tougher task than it already is. No matter how favorable you think Juve’s last three league phase fixtures are — at home against Pafos (24th place), at home against Benfica (3oth place) and then away at Monaco (23rd place) — the fact that it took them until Matchday 5 to pick up their first win of the European campaign tells you all you need to know about how tenuous all of this is going to be.
Maybe the supercomputer ends up being right. Or maybe you’re just going to scream “They play the game on the field and not with the computers, nerd!!!” back at this (and to an extension Opta). Either way, we’ll all know for real a couple of months from now in the final week of January.