Hope is not a forecast.
One page per Premier League round. Every fixture called from the ledger: shots, expected goals, home and away splits and last season's base rate, with the uncertainty written down next to the call. No tips, no odds, no selections. Just the numbers, read honestly, by Adrian Dane.
The Stat Man is Adrian Dane, a football betting analyst and sports writer with over thirteen years inside the betting industry, and the founder of The Sports Guru. He writes on odds, probability and statistical modelling, and he has followed Grimsby Town home and away for most of his life, which he describes as an education in variance.
In July 2026 he published The Stat Man, a 571-page book on football statistics and the betting markets: 32 chapters in six parts, more than fifty original infographics and five appendices. It teaches readers to convert a price into a probability, build Poisson and Dixon-Coles goal models, put expected goals to proper use, spot when luck is masquerading as form, and survive the variance that empties most bankrolls. Its promise is stated on the cover: no tips, no selections, and no promise of profit.
"Every football bet is a probability wearing a disguise. Most punters never take the mask off."
These pages are that method applied in public, one round at a time. The book explains the machine. The Stat Man previews on The Sports Guru show what it says about this weekend's ten fixtures, and then come back the following week to say whether it was right.
Most previews start with the story and go looking for numbers to decorate it. These start with the numbers and let the story fall out of the gap between the table and the ledger.
Each team gets its own paragraph built from the ledger: points, goals for and against, home and away splits, shots and shots on target, expected goals for and conceded. When the table says one thing and the shot count says another, the preview tells you which one to believe and why.
No fence-sitting. Every game ends with The Stat Man's call, one line grounded in the figures just shown, with the uncertainty attached: "a draw, leaning Liverpool" is a call. The numbers describe what has happened; they do not promise what will.
You will not find a price, a stake or a sure thing on these pages. The calls are readings of the evidence, written for readers who want to understand a match, not to be told what to back. The same rule runs through the book.
Every figure comes from a named, archived source: the football-data.co.uk results files and BBC Sport's match statistics pages, aggregated on our own transparency tables. Expected goals come from one provider per season and are never blended with another's.
A newly promoted side is never a blank page. Their full lower-division season is pulled, aggregated and analysed with the same rigour, carrying an explicit asterisk that the numbers were earned against weaker opposition. Analyse, do not dismiss.
Last week's calls are quoted back in the next preview, hits and misses alike. A method that only reports its wins is not a method. The point is to be honest about being right for the wrong reasons, and wrong for the right ones.
The same five steps every round, so that a reader can follow the reasoning from the raw file to the call.
This season's results file and last season's full ledger for the top flight and, for promoted clubs, the second tier. Every source is archived before a single number is used.
Two or three rounds are a small sample. Last season's thirty-eight games are the base rate the early numbers are judged against, so a hot start has to earn its place in the reasoning.
Shots, shots on target and expected goals say where the goals should have come from. Where the points disagree with them, the preview names the culprit: finishing, goalkeeping, or the regression that is about to arrive.
One line per fixture, grounded in the paragraphs above it, with the lean and the doubt both stated. Hope is not a forecast, and neither is a hunch.
The next preview opens by quoting the previous calls against the results, then carries on. The record is the whole point.
Each preview leans on a few ideas from the book. The plain-English explainers live at statman.uk; the previews use one gloss sentence and get on with the football.
Every Stat Man preview published on The Sports Guru, newest first. New previews land ahead of each Premier League round and are listed here automatically.
3 previews published so far, newest first.
Two rounds in, and the table is doing its favourite early-season trick: telling stories the underlying numbers refuse to sign. Hull have won both games while being out-shot in both. Aston Villa have taken 13…
One round of football has been played and the table has already started telling stories: Hull above Manchester United, Brighton top on goal difference, Aston Villa bottom. Every one of those lines is a single…
Last season's full ledger, top flight and second tier, disagrees with the summer's talk often enough to make ten calls worth writing down.
Stat Man previews also appear in the Football section and the full article index. Prefer them in your inbox? The Sunday newsletter carries every one.
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