For all the people who can’t be bothered to read this whole post I’ll sum it up really quickly.
Go to WhatEverTrevor, predict the order in which the Premier League will finish, for free, and if you’re right you’ll get £25,000!
I imagine most people will have now followed that link and will not read the rest. But I do want to go on and explain why you are getting this free bet!
One of the main people behind this project is Oxford Mathematician Prof. Marcus du Sautoy OBE, who you may have seen presenting ‘The Story of Maths’ on BBC Four in 2008. He is a great lover of football and has decided to run this experiment. The number of different ways that the League can finish is truly amazing, in fact they are 20! (or 20 factorial which is equal to 2,432,902,008,176,640,000) different ways that it can finish. Now obviously it is not completely random. There are certain teams which we can be pretty certain are going to finish in the top half, and in fact we can probably make a very good guess at the teams that will finish in the top 5. But getting each team in the right order is obviously very difficult! Ladbrokes offer odds of 2,500 to 1 for predicting the outcome of the Premier League (a lot shorter than WhatEverTrevor gives you).
Given the difficulty of the guess, WhatEverTrevor is having a system where you can set up a mini league with your friends, and you will get points for being close. Anyway you can find more information on the About page. But give it a go, what have you got to loose!