Aston Villa boss Unai Emery had an unhappy 18-month spell in charge of Arsenal that ended in 2019, but can he get the better of his old club on Tuesday? After the abuse he took from Arsenal fans, I'd love nothing more than Emery to go back to the Emirates and win, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. He absolutely didn't deserve that. Some of those fans should take a long, hard look at themselves for the way they mocked him. I hope Villa go there and spank them, just because of that. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 19 - which includes the final games of 2025 on Tuesday, 30 December and the first matches of 2026 on New Year's Day - he takes on singer-songwriter Tom A Smith, who is a Sunderland fan.

Arsenal are sitting top of the Premier League at Christmas, but it is BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton who leads the way when it comes to predictions. I'm number one at Christmas - again, said Sutton, who as a player led the Premier League table at this point with Norwich in 1992 and Blackburn in 1994, and went on to win the title with Rovers. It's a big deal for me to be top, as well as for Arsenal . AI is the go-to for virtually everyone in the world whenever they have to ask anything, so the fact that I am beating it - and let's face it, I have stuffed it for half a season now - is pretty incredible. It says a lot about me, and I'm delighted. Rather than asking AI about everything, maybe people should come to me to tap into my intelligence instead?

Aston Villa are going for a fourth successive Premier League victory when they travel to Brighton on Wednesday, but should Unai Emery's side change the way they have been scoring goals on their winning run? There is apparently some debate about whether Villa's xG (expected goals) is unsustainable because they are scoring from long range, but that's nonsense, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Villa have good players who can shoot from the edge of the box, so are you seriously going to tell them not to shoot now, because of xG? Give me a break. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For the midweek fixtures in week 14, he takes on musician, author and Fulham fan Felix White. White is the guitarist with The Maccabees and 86TVs. His new book'Whatever will be, will be: A Matter of Life and Football' is out now.

This study develops a hierarchical Bayesian framework that integrates expert domain knowledge to quantify player-specific effects in expected goals (xG) estimation, addressing a limitation of standard models that treat all players as identical finishers. Using 9,970 shots from StatsBomb's 2015-16 data and Football Manager 2017 ratings, we combine Bayesian logistic regression with informed priors to stabilise player-level estimates, especially for players with few shots. The hierarchical model reduces posterior uncertainty relative to weak priors and achieves strong external validity: hierarchical and baseline predictions correlate at R2 = 0.75, while an XGBoost benchmark validated against StatsBomb xG reaches R2 = 0.833. The model uncovers interpretable specialisation profiles, including one-on-one finishing (Aguero, Suarez, Belotti, Immobile, Martial), long-range shooting (Pogba), and first-touch execution (Insigne, Salah, Gameiro). It also identifies latent ability in underperforming players such as Immobile and Belotti. The framework supports counterfactual "what-if" analysis by reallocating shots between players under identical contexts. Case studies show that Sansone would generate +2.2 xG from Berardi's chances, driven largely by high-pressure situations, while Vardy-Giroud substitutions reveal strong asymmetry: replacing Vardy with Giroud results in a large decline (about -7 xG), whereas the reverse substitution has only a small effect (about -1 xG). This work provides an uncertainty-aware tool for player evaluation, recruitment, and tactical planning, and offers a general approach for domains where individual skill and contextual factors jointly shape performance.

Arsenal's 10-game winning run was ended by Sunderland before the international break, but will the Premier League leaders bounce back against north London rivals Tottenham on Sunday? I feel like Arsenal are miles ahead of Tottenham at the moment but Spurs boss Thomas Frank will have a plan for this game, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Frank will try to nullify Arsenal, who have not always been at their scintillating best this season - but Mikel Arteta's side usually still find a way to win. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 12, he takes on singer Olly Murs, who is a Manchester United fan . Murs' new album, Knees Up, is out on Friday.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, applying RL to open-domain tasks faces two key challenges: (1) the inherent subjectivity of these tasks prevents the verifiable rewards as required by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR); (2) Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on external reward mechanisms. To overcome these limitations, we propose Self-Examining Reinforcement Learning (SERL), a novel self-improving framework where the LLM serves as both Actor and Judge. SERL introduces two synergistic reward mechanisms without any external signals. On the one hand, to improve the Actor's capability, we derive rewards from Copeland-style pairwise comparison judgments across a group of generated responses. On the other hand, a self-consistency reward that encourages coherent judgments is proposed to improve the Judge's reliability. This process refines the Judge's capability, which in turn provides a more robust reward for Actor. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing self-improvement training methods. SERL improves the LC win rate of Qwen3-8B on AlpacaEval 2 from 52.37% to 59.90%. To the best of our knowledge, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among self-improving approaches. Furthermore, it achieves a performance comparable to significantly larger models like Qwen3-32B, demonstrating superior effectiveness and robustness on open-domain tasks.

Is this the beginning of the rise of the machines? Last week saw AI triumph outright for the first time in our Premier League predictions battle, although BBC Sport's own expert human, Chris Sutton, points out he is still top of the overall league this season. This time, as well as AI, Sutton faces a different hi-tech challenger. His guest opponent for this weekend's fixtures is a computer game: Football Manager 26, the latest edition of the long-running management simulation series. The FM26 game engine has played out this weekend's matches and you can see its results, including goalscorers and red cards, below. Miles Jacobson, the studio director of Sports Interactive, the company behind Football Manager, also joined in.

Brighton have won at Old Trafford in each of the past three seasons but can Manchester United get the better of them on Saturday? People get angry whenever I don't back United to win but why should I trust them? said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. They got a great result against Liverpool last time out, but it would be typical of them to follow that by losing this game. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week nine, he takes on The Charlatans guitarist Mark Collins, who supports Manchester United. The Charlatans' 14th album, We Are Love, is out on 31 October and they tour the UK in December.

Something has got to give when Crystal Palace host Liverpool on Saturday but will it be the Eagles' unbeaten record or the Reds' 100% winning start to the season? Palace are an unbelievable team under Oliver Glasner, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. They lost Eberechi Eze to Arsenal over the summer but they just seem to have got on with it, and they are so well organised. So far, Liverpool have had this great habit of just finding a way to win despite not being at their best - which is a worry for the rest of the Premier League - but this is a really tough test for them. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week six, he takes on rappers Kidwild and Blanco, who support Tottenham and Manchester City.

Forget Liverpool against Everton or Arsenal against Manchester City, the big fixture this weekend is Chris Sutton versus AI chatbot Copilot. Sutton claimed on this week's Monday Night Club that he is more intelligent than AI and the stats do support him, at least when it comes to football scores anyway. He is top of the BBC predictions league table (see bottom of page) so far, with three wins in the first four weeks - and he has beaten AI every time. I am 4-0 up on AI - I don't know if it feels pressure, but it should, Sutton said. Also, why is it not going to the best source? AI, however, does not agree that Sutton has superior intelligence, and seems to suggest that it is a bit early for him to be celebrating. When asked'are you worried that Chris Sutton is cleverer than you?' Copilot replied not in the slightest.