For the last four seasons I’ve kept a record of the predictions for the Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson and the BBC pundit Mark Lawrenson. The ‘Follow the Pundit!’ section of the website provides updates on the success of these tipsters who systematically predict score lines for Premier League matches.
The stats for this season are based on 367 (Merson) and 359 (Lawrenson) predictions. A similar pattern to past season exists – in any given gameweek the pundits typically call half of the outcomes correctly.
While Merson does slightly outperform Lawrenson again this season, both performed worse when compared to last season.
If you were to place €1 on each of their scoreline predictions, Lawrenson would have actually turned a profit of €58.81 through predicting 12% of the scorelines correctly. Following Merson's scoreline estimates with a €1 stake per match renders a loss of -€47.77.