Now all we need is a super-dedicated-uber-alpha stat rat* in the club's employ to look at our draws and losses (and wins) to gauge how fine (or not) the margins are, AKA are we truly not far off from turning the required amount of those draws/losses into wins. It's possible to approximate items such as 1 goal = x ppg. 1 goal conceded = y ppg. goal difference wrt ppg. Doing that helps you know if we're really close to 2.2 ppg (or even actually performing above it or below it etc.)
*It's also possible for these folk to further fine tune their analysis according to things like opposition strength, formation, individual player statistics etc. And from there the list is literally infinite. You can go so far as to track what the players ate, what boots they wore, when they were in a stable relationship, matchday weather, weather on the day before matchday, etc. You can go absolutely nuts to try and find margins of improvement. This is the kind of sh*t that Liverpool's analytics guy is doing (the one in that article about how their data people pushed for Klopp's hire) It's what Liverpool's owners did with their American baseball team to win championships.
Then do an analysis of how much of the total points the top three (maybe four) clubs have traditionally taken out of the entire supply. There's around 1040-1070 points distributed each season (it fluctuates because of draws, in which case a possible allotted point is removed from the pool), with the top five taking roughly 380-410 and recently the top two taking an increased share. Then gauge how far off we are.
The reason you do these two parts is if 'the money in the game'/'two best coaches in the world' have altered the landscape enough, then historical data is going to be a little bit off and 89-93+ points/2.3-2.4 ppg (or even more) is the new actual title-challenging range. Doing the above helps the club gauge whether that new trend is true and whether it's a good idea to make an extra push and do all sorts of 'weird' analytics things (like
Pool's throw ins) for those incremental ppg gains over the whole season.
The simple eye-test obviously says '
duh-Einstein-the-landscape-has-changed' with Pool/City at 2.5-2.7 ppg. But as we've seen in both cases, a single player/manager addition (and conversely removal) can drastically alter those figures, you might not necessarily have to aim for those numbers mid/long term, and whether you choose to do so is up to the club. Especially if your manager has proven he can beat/match them consistently.