Three stories from the English Premier League including SportNation’s AI painting a familiar year-end picture, a report on how the ‘Big Six’ remain the ‘Big Six’, and VAR promise.

A week after the English Premier League (EPL) released their 2019/20 fixture list, the bookmaker SportNation.bet plugged the details into artificial intelligence burrowed deep within their subterranean magma, and the tale forced out of the rooftop was a familiar one.

AI predicts that Manchester City will once again turn the EPL into a sprawling necropolis with only Liverpool having a bookmakers chance of creating an upset.

History doesn’t favour the AI’s choice of winner, with only Manchester United ever winning the title in three consecutive seasons, first in 1998/99, 1999/00, 2000/01, and then again in 2006/7, 2007/8 and 2008/9, making it more of a mountain range than a hobbit hill of a task.