Forecasting attendance at Oldham Athletic v Brentford

This coming Saturday, Oldham Athletic entertain Brentford at Boundary Park. The visitors travel 162 miles to get to the game, and are in uncharacteristically low a league position, at 19th. Brentford are a slightly larger team than Oldham, their average attendance last season being about 17% higher. Oldham's form has taken a dip since the last home game, and as is the usual way with form, one can express it in either a very positive or very negative light. Oldham are without a win in four games now, and have picked up only 4 points out of a possible 12. On the other hand, they have lost just one game in the previous nine. Nevertheless, the prefererred econometric model from my paper provides a forecast of 4799 for this match.

Given the 5,000 barrier was broken in the previous home match, also against a team visiting from London, one might venture to suggest this prediction is a little low. The naive random walk forecast will be another 5,014 attendance, while a moving average of the previous six matches, bouyed by the 6080 Carlisle gate, would predict 5024. An average of these three forecasts would give 4946. The forecast from model averaging is suitably too high at 7559.

Above hoping that my prediction is somewhere in the right ballpark, I also hope Oldham might win - we have a historically good home record against Brentford, and they appear to be having an off-season, so here's hoping...