We're saying that if both teams continue accruing points at the same rate, they'll finish with 62 and 57 points, respectively. However, recent history suggests City are much more likely to significantly improve on that ratio than we are - after all, in six out of the last seven seasons, we ended up with somewhere between 64 and 70 points. So City's performance can still be considered an anomaly at this point while our own is only slightly lower than our usual standard.
I can't speak for City's actual performances this season because I haven't really seen them play. Our own give precious little reason for optimism that we can somehow be much better. The most likely scenario, by far, is that we end up in the high 60s again - standing still, in other words.
You have began extrapolating, so let's extrapolate properly.
We had 66 pts last season because the 2nd half gave us a lot of pts.
Our breakdown by match days was:
01-18: 25 pts, ranked 8th, with a gap of 27 pts with the top team.
19-38: 41 pts, ranked 3rd, with a gap of 6 pts with the top team.
At the same stage last season (8 matches), we had 9 pts, with a gap of 15 pts with the top team.
Right now, we have 13 pts (+4 pts) and a gap of 7 or 4pts if we count the game in hand with the top team.
It's much more manageable.
Why do we say we can still do it if the 1st half is better than last year?
Because let's look at the season right before (66 pts too).
Our breakdown by match days was:
01-18: 29 pts, ranked 6th, with a gap of 19 pts with the top team.
19-38: 37 pts, ranked 3rd, with a gap of 17 pts with the top team.
The first half was bad but the 2nd half is always at least 3rd best, and last year, the gap was reduced from 17 pts to 6 pts.
Our goal this year is to fix no matter what the first half pts tally and the gap to the top.
And so far, we are on track.
Come the 2nd half, since Ole has a history of making the team run twice consistently over 18 games, we can finish strong.
This is an useless exercise because only real results matter, but if we take our current pts tally of 13 pts in 8 games and do a simple extrapolation, we are talking about getting 29/30 pts in the 1st half. This is a progress of +1 pt vs 2 years ago and +5 pts vs last year.
We then apply the 2nd half, which can be 41 pts, or higher.
Even if it was 41 pts, we finish at 71 pts.
Considering the trend of having improved 4 pts between the 2 season, and imagining we improved 4 more pts, it's 75 pts.
That's for me where we could end up.
This doesn't account for the fact that the first 3 or 4 games show a real fitness issue and we might discover form much faster even in the first half.
In this case, any improvement over the 30 pts we can do in the first half will translate in us benefiting with high pts tally. Could we reach at least the 80 pts to finish the league in a reasonable position? That is to be seen.
There is a lot of work there but if we want to extrapolate, that's the minimum level we should get into.
To be fair, I think it's even best to split the analysis by 4 because each 2 or 3 months has its own challenge, but we can start with a 2 halves vision, since United under Ole seems to be performing really well in the 2nd half, clearly.