If you look at the top of the Premier League table, it doesn’t seem like much has changed: Liverpool in first, Arsenal in second. But as you scan farther down, your eyes might start to widen.
Tottenham, OK? Bournemouth, huh? Chelsea? Sure. Ev — does that say “Everton”?
You might take your glasses off and wipe your eyes. Perhaps you’ll want to step out of the room. Then you come back to the table.
SUNDERLAND HAVE MORE POINTS THAN MANCHESTER CITY????????????
Though it’s still early, it has been a wild start to the season. And though it might seem premature to draw any conclusions, the reality is that all the points won and lost already matter just as much as the points won and lost in the spring. Plus, although four games is a small sample, it’s still big enough to start to give us some new information about every team in the league.
So, ahead of this weekend’s matches, we’ve decided to take out our gradebook and give all 20 Premier League teams their marks for the first month of the season.
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The Gunners have been the best team in the Premier League through four games. Now, there’s a separate question about what four games can actually tell us, but Arsenal still haven’t given up a goal from open play, they’re tied for the league lead in goals scored, and they just comfortably beat Athletic Bilbao 2-0 in one of the most difficult road environments in Europe.
If we take a blend of 70% expected goals and 30% goals — what I’ve referred to in the past as “adjusted goal differential” — Mikel Arteta’s side again stands out as the class of the league 10.5% of the way through the season:
So why not an “A”? Well, they dropped three points to Liverpool, their main title rival. Sure, even Arne Slot acknowledged it was a 50-50 game and going to Anfield might be the toughest fixture they’ll play all season, but with Liverpool still struggling to put together cohesive performances, this was about as vulnerable as they’ll be all season. Despite starting off so well, Arsenal are already three points back of first place.
They have two points from four matches. They’ve conceded four goals. They’ve scored zero. And they still haven’t played Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City and Chelsea.
It’s also not as if they’ve been unlucky. Go back and look at that adjusted goal-differential plot: only two teams have worse numbers. This was a team that thought it could challenge for a Champions League place again. Instead, it already looks more like they’ll be in a relegation fight than a chase for Europe.
Given how easy their schedule has been and how they are not suffering through any kind of injury crisis, it’s really hard to think how Villa could’ve started the season off any worse.
Last season, 10 players played at least 2,000 minutes in the Premier League for the Cherries.
Among those players, Illia Zabarnyi moved for €63 million to Paris Saint-Germain, Dean Huijsen went to Real Madrid for €62.5 million, and Milos Kerkez was off to Liverpool for €46.9 million. So, the past two Champions League winners and the defending Premier League champs.
Then Dango Ouattara was scooped up by Brentford for €42.8 million. And Kepa Arrizabalaga went back to Chelsea from his loan and ultimately signed with Arsenal for a €5.8 million fee.
So, they lost half of their core lineup for over €200 million in transfer fees … and they might’ve gotten better? After a highly competitive 4-2 loss at Liverpool to open the season, they’ve won three straight, and were deserved winners in each one. I think we’ve seen enough already: Andoni Iraola is one of the best managers in the world.
In our season preview, I made the case for Brighton taking a big step forward this season. They weren’t great last season, but they had so many young players playing so many minutes that it seemed as if there was a good chance that a bunch of those players would get better at the same time. That kind of simultaneous internal growth leads to sudden, exponential improvement. See: Arsenal over the past half-decade.
Instead, though, Brighton seem like the same team from last season. They’re good enough to beat Manchester City and they’re bad enough to take one point from three matches against Fulham, Everton and Bournemouth. Their points projection from Sporting Index was 54 points to start the season. Four games in? Still at 54.
This team lost its manager, its captain and both of its leading goal scorers over the summer. Though Brentford haven’t been in a relegation fight since being promoted in 2021, the difference between a midtable team and relegation battler is a lot smaller than “coach, captain, and your two best attackers.”
And it certainly looked as if this season could be trouble after an opening 3-1 loss to Nottingham Forest, who fired their coach just a couple of weeks later. They’ve also now lost to Sunderland — but they’ve paired that with a win over Aston Villa and a draw against Chelsea.
No matter the opposition or the location of the match, they’ve pretty much played a 50-50 game all four times so far this season. While that can lead to losses to Sunderland, if you string that out across a full season, it would land you right around 10th place in the table.
Given that their creator-in-chief Mikkel Damsgaard has played only two matches, and marquee signing Dango Ouattara has played only half of the minutes so far, Brentford should feel a little better about avoiding the bottom three than they did just a month ago.
It hasn’t been an easy start to the season, with away games against Tottenham and Manchester United, plus last weekend’s last-second loss at home to Liverpool. And they did win what is likely to be a relegation six-pointer against Sunderland in the second week of the season.
Those points are worth more than any kind of future-predicting underlying performance. Plus, this was supposed to be the worst team in the league, and they’re currently just outside of the relegation zone.
That said, I’m pretty confident this is still the worst team in the league. Sure, they almost drew with Liverpool, but they generated one touch inside of Liverpool’s penalty area and completed 81 passes — total. That’s the fewest passes completed by a Premier League team in FBref’s database, which goes back to the 2017-18 season.
Coming into the Champions League, I saw Bayern Munich as the sixth-best team in the competition and the betting markets agreed. Their odds were right below the top five of PSG, Barcelona, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Real Madrid.
I was less sure of where to put Chelsea — maybe there was a chance they could hang with Liverpool and Arsenal; maybe they were even better than Bayern Munich. After all, they smoked PSG in the Club World Cup final — a result not worth the weight of a normal game but still not something to ignore — and they’d played quite well on the aggregate through the first four matches of the domestic season.
And then Chelsea got dominated on the road against Bayern, so I think it’s safe to say that they’re still a ways away from that top tier of teams.
1:59
Maresca: It should have been a red card for Tah
Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca was furious that Jonathan Tah was not show a red card for a foul on Joao Pedro.
They were on the verge of losing Marc Guéhi to Liverpool on the last day of the window, but the clubs weren’t able to get the deal over the line. That could be a long-term hit to Palace’s competitiveness, as he seems very likely to leave the club next summer for no transfer fee.
But in terms of this season? They’re a much better team with Guehi than without him.
Now, they did lose Eberechi Eze after the season started, but without him, they’re still playing roughly at the level they played at in the second half of last season. In three matches since Eze left for Arsenal, they’ve generated 5.5 expected goals and conceded 2.4.
The schedule hasn’t been too tough since the opener against Chelsea, but this seems as if it’s going to be an upper-midtable team.
Here’s the current top 10 for expected assists, a stat that simply, as Opta describes it, “measures the likelihood that a completed pass will become a goal assist”:
Yes, that doesn’t quite match up with Jack Grealish’s league-leading four assists. But the point still stands: the 30-year-old Manchester City loanee has easily been the most dangerous creative passer in the league through four games. Not only that, his teammate, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, ranks eighth on the same list. Manchester City are the only other team with two players in the top 10.
Obviously, it’s a precarious position to be in — relying on the sudden revival of a 30-year-old Grealish to carry your team — but through four games, he has been able to do it. And if he’s able to do it for a full season, then Everton are genuine contenders for a spot in the Conference of Europa League.
They were pretty much the epitome of league average last season, when they finished 11th with exactly 54 goals scored and 54 goals conceded. This season, they’re … in 11th, with four goals scored and five conceded.
Their best player last season, Antonee Robinson, still hasn’t started a match, and their two big offseason acquisitions, wingers Samuel Chukwueze and Kevin, have played only a combined 15 total minutes.
Though I think the club probably expected to improve this season — and while there’s still room and reasons for it to happen — we just haven’t seen it yet.
This was supposed to be the promoted team that snapped the streak — the one who finally stayed up after consecutive seasons of all three new Premier League clubs immediately being relegated back to the Championship. And through four weeks, there are two reasons to believe that to be true.
The first: They’ve played quite well. Outside of being dominated by Arsenal at the Emirates, they dominated Everton at home in the first match and then played 50-50 games with Newcastle and Fulham on the road over the past two matchdays. This is simply a much higher level of performance we’ve seen from any of the promoted teams over the past two seasons.
The second: As we’ll get to later in this list, the promoted teams aren’t the only bad teams this season.
They’ve won all five games this season with goals in the 85th-minute or later. No, they can’t keep doing that. But also, they won’t have to keep doing that if they dominate the way they did against Burnley:
And Atletico Madrid:
The aggregate of Liverpool’s performances — controlling games, dominating the balance of chances — isn’t exactly what they would’ve hoped for at the start of the season. But they’ve won every game they’ve played and they’ve been trailing for zero total minutes so far this season.
Most promising is that Mohamed Salah looked back to his old self against Atletico, Florian Wirtz had his best game in a Liverpool shirt, and Alexander Isak fit in immediately despite not being fit to play much more than one half.
This is a team with a ton of new players, they still haven’t dropped a point, and it looks like everything is just starting to click.
0:50
Did Isak impress on his Liverpool debut vs. Atletico Madrid?
Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens assess Alexander Isak’s Liverpool debut vs. Atletico Madrid in the Champions League.
They’ve smashed (1) Wolves, who might be the worst team in the league; (2) Man United, who might have the worst vibes in the league; and (3) Napoli, who had a man sent off early in the first half.
They also lost to Spurs and Brighton, and neither result came in the way that City have lost most of their games under Pep Guardiola: a dominant performance in which the opponent just happens to score a couple of bangers. No, both losses were to teams that created enough chances to win.
Despite all of the money spent over the summer and in January, it still doesn’t seem as if City have solved last season’s defensive issues. In the Premier League, they allowed 1.27 xG (expected goals) per game and 19.6 touches inside their penalty area last season. This season, they’re conceding 1.37 xG per game and 24 touches inside their box. Not only is it not better, it might be worse.
0:58
Guardiola responds to Man City not being UCL favourites
Pep Guardiola speaks about Man City not being one of the favourites to win the Champions League and Kevin De Bruyne’s return.
Before the season, Sporting Index projected United to finish with 59 points. Four games in and with multiple crises already on the books, United are projected to finish with 58 points.
This was a lower-midtable team last season, and now they seem like a middle-midtable team this season. Anyone expecting too much more than that was unable to separate the name on the front of the jersey with what we’ve seen on the field for the past two seasons and for the majority of the past half-decade.
Of course, that also doesn’t mean that Ruben Amorim is doing a good job. He’s just doing a job, like we’d expect any average manager to do: This team is no better or worse than when he arrived. And if a manager refuses to deviate whatsoever from not only his preferred playing style but — ridiculously — from his preferred formation, you really want to buy into that way of thinking only if you’re confident the manager is going to make your team better.
If Amorim is just going to get this team performing roughly at its talent level, then it’s not worth rebuilding the entire squad toward his myopic vision.
1:41
Why Ruben Amorim won’t change his system at Manchester United
On “The Football Reporters” podcast, Rob Dawson explains why Ruben Amorim is sticking to his Manchester United system despite growing pressure for change.
They’re still one of the favorites — and would probably be my pick at this point — to nab fifth place and the likely Champions League place that comes with it. But since the season’s started, they’ve lost their best player to another team in the Premier League, spent a lot of money on two replacements who made the top three on my “worst transfers of the summer” list, tied Aston Villa despite going a man up early in the second half, went down a man in the first half when they hosted Liverpool, tied Leeds, beat Wolves only 1-0, and lost to a Lamine Yamal-less Barcelona at home 2-0.
Some of those were not as bad as they sound. They outplayed Liverpool despite the man disadvantage, and the game against Barcelona was pretty even — save for two fantastic Marcus Rashford finishes. So, they’ve played reasonably well against two of the five best teams in the world. But they’re undoubtedly in a worse place than they were when the season started.
1:50
What can Newcastle take away from Barcelona defeat?
Don Hutchinson believes Newcastle played “a fantastic game” despite losing 2-1 to Barcelona in the Champions League.
You fire your manager after three games and replace him with a manager who is his exact tactical and philosophical obverse? Yeah, you failed the test.
0:49
Gab & Juls blame Postecoglou for Forest’s late collapse vs. Swansea
Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens react to Nottingham Forest’s 3-2 loss to Swansea in the Carabao Cup.
I had pretty low expectations for Sunderland before the season. They were OK in the Championship last season — just the seventh-best xG differential — and they didn’t have the profile (read: defensively strong) of the kinds of teams that have typically stayed up. Typically, teams who “win the offseason” and spend a ton of money on a ton of new players also underperform expectations.
But even with that loss to Burnley, Sunderland already have seven points. Now, we should be very skeptical of any team that loses to Burnley, and last weekend’s draw with Crystal Palace had nothing to do with Sunderland’s performance as a team and everything to do with goalkeeper Robin Roefs standing on his head for 90 minutes.
But much like with Leeds, the Black Cats have been competitive in almost all of their matches. And “having a really good shot-stopper” might be the No. 1 pick in a “things you want if you don’t want to be relegated” draft.
More simply, though, they’ve already built up a four-point cushion on 18th place. Among a group of teams that are only going to finish the season with 30 to 45 points, it’s a sizable gap.
Yes, they’re tied for second place and they’re 1-0 in the Champions League. And sure, their adjusted goal differential is sixth-best in the league. But if we only look at expected goals, then Spurs have basically been Fulham — an exactly league-average team:
Like with United, that is an improvement on last season. But unlike United, this team went through an injury crisis last season and has most of those players back in the lineup, so we should naturally expect them to improve.
Given that they made a handful of expensive signings to improve the team and given that their schedule really hasn’t been too tough, I’d expect them to be a little better than even on xG through four matches.
It’s pretty bad — but it’s not quite as bad as it looks.
West Ham have three points, they’re currently in 18th, their minus-7 goal differential is tied for worst in the league, and their 11 goals allowed is two clear of anyone else. They lost 3-0 to Sunderland and Tottenham; they lost 5-1 to Chelsea. Their points projection has dropped from 45 points preseason to 38 points today. This team is in serious danger of being relegated.
And yet, per ESPN BET, four other teams are more likely to be relegated than they are. So, what gives?
Pretty simply, they can’t keep conceding goals this way. Those 11 goals allowed come from 5.5 expected goals allowed through four matches. And it’s not really even down to that much bad goalkeeping, either. Their opponents have turned those 5.5 expected goals, as measured before a shot is taken, into 9.3 expected goals based on where they’ve ended up on the goal frame.
This could be due to something systemic with the way West Ham defend that makes it easier for opponents to square up shots, but more likely is that it’s just random variance that cools down quite soon.
They have zero points. They have the worst adjusted goal differential in the league. They have the second worst expected-goal differential in the league.
And there’s not much reason to expect improvement. They lost their best player, Matheus Cunha, over the summer, and by xG differential, they were the worst of the nonrelegated teams last season.
ESPN BET now has them as second favorites for relegation after Burnley, and the oddsmakers give it a greater-than-50% chance of happening. They’ve hit the double-whammy of doom: genuine performance decline and a complete inability to put any points on the board.
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