Who will win La Liga’s title in 2022-23? Which clubs will qualify for the Champions League and who will be scrapping for survival come next summer? We can speculate, but our trusty supercomputer has gone a step further and crunched the data for you. Here’s what it spat out.
La Liga Season Season Predictions: The Quick Hits
Title favourites: Real Madrid, [a big gap] and then Barcelona and Atlético Madrid
Top Four Finish: The above plus Villarreal
Relegation: Real Valladolid, Girona and Mallorca
Our supercomputer is smug. Smug after successfully predicting England would win the Women’s European Championships earlier in the summer. Too smug, if you ask us, so we’ve put it straight back to work and asked it to calculate every single permutation of how it thinks La Liga will look come May 2023.
And to be fair, it did a good job last season with La Liga, outlining where each club will finish position-by-position, as well as their chances of winning the title, qualifying for the UCL and being relegated to La Liga 2.
It has a reputation to live up to in Spain. Behold, the fruits of its labour for 2022-23:
Let’s break some of the biggest storylines down.
La Liga Title Prediction
The supercomputer predicts with 58.1% confidence that Real Madrid will win the title again, emerging victorious over fierce rivals Barcelona. Victory this season would be Real’s third title in five years and their 36th Spanish top-flight crown overall. Even sweeter for Madridistas is that it would take Barcelona’s title drought to four years and mark their longest spell without tasting success since the turn of the Millennia.
Xavi’s men are next favoured by the supercomputer at 18.6%. He’ll hope a summer of frenzied transfer activity will be enough to get his side back on top. Who knows, that 18.6% could well start rising when (if?) they successfully register their new signings.
There’s a world in which Getafe (0.04%) and Valencia (0.03%) win La Liga in 2022-23. But let’s be honest, it’s probably not in the one we live in.
Who Will Qualify for the Champions League?
At 95.4%, Real Madrid are basically guaranteed to play UCL football next season. Similarly, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid at 78.4% and 71.7% are near-locks. Then it starts to get very interesting.
Sevilla (48.5%) and Villarreal (48.0%) are basically a coin flip each to qualify for club football’s premier competition. But while it’s touch and go if they’ll qualify for the UCL, overall, those sides have a 78.8% and 78.3% chance of playing European football at some level. So yes, Sevilla will win the Europa League and if they don’t, perhaps it’ll be Unai Emery winning something in Europe yet again.
At 24.2% and 20.7% respectively, Real Sociedad and Real Betis are outside shots to squeak into the top four.
Who Will be Relegated from La Liga?
*gulp* the list no one wants to be on.
It’s bad news for two of the three newly promoted teams, as Girona (39.2%) and Real Valladolid (33.7%) look set for the drop. They’ve managed to avoid the ignominy of being predicted to finish bottom, though. That dubious honour belongs to Mallorca, who finished 16th last season, just one point above the relegation zone. The supercomputer reckons they won’t fare so kindly this time.
The third promoted team, Almería, are actually only the model’s seventh-favourite side to go down.
Elche and Cádiz, the latter of whom flirted heavily with relegation last season, are also in precarious positions going into the season.
Predicted La Liga Positions in 2022-23
1. Real Madrid
2. Barcelona
3. Atlético Madrid
4. Sevilla
5. Villarreal
6. Real Sociedad
7. Real Betis
8. Athletic Club
9. Valencia
10. Getafe
11. Celta de Vigo
12. Osasuna
13. Espanyol
14. Rayo Vallecano
15. Almería
16. Elche
17. Cádiz
18. Real Valladolid
19. Girona
20. Mallorca
How Does the Supercomputer Model Work?
• Stats Perform’s League Prediction model estimates the likelihood of teams finishing in each position in the competition. We can therefore see how successful a team’s season is likely to be, whether it’s their relegation or title chances.
• The model estimates the probability of each match outcome (win, draw or loss) by using betting market odds and Stats Perform’s team rankings. The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performances.
• The model considers the strength of opponents by using these match outcome probabilities and simulates the remaining fixtures in the competition thousands of times. By analysing the outcome of each of these simulations, the model can see how often teams finished in each league position to create our final predictions.
Enjoy this? Subscribe to our mailing list to receive exclusive weekly content.