Four Points Separate Chelsea in Third and Man Utd in 13th – It’s the Tightest the Premier League Has Ever Been

The middle of the Premier League table is more bunched than ever before at this stage of a season. Things could change very, very quickly for any of the teams in that group.

Manchester United, fresh off sacking their manager for making the worst start to a Premier League season in the club’s history, are just five places off the relegation zone.

But look at things another way, and the season doesn’t look quite so lost. United are only four points off Chelsea in third, while they are eight points clear of the bottom three.

Aston Villa, who qualified for the Champions League last season, have won one in six but are still only a single point off third. Chelsea, in third, have one win in five, and fourth-placed Arsenal have none in their last four.

While some Tottenham fans are losing patience with Ange Postecoglou over their now mid-table team’s inconsistency, they remain just one win off the top three.

The middle of the Premier League is more bunched than it has ever been after 11 games of a season. Just four points separate third and 13th, which is a smaller gap than at this stage of any other campaign in Premier League history.

Furthermore, the gap between second and third (four points) is the same as the gap between third and 13th for the first time. The gap between third and ninth, meanwhile, is just a single point. Nine Premier League teams have won exactly five of their first 11 games.

And yet, even with the margins as tight as they are, sweeping conclusions are being made about the teams involved. (Excuse us while we put our fingers in our ears as you try and point out that we run a weekly column on this website titled ‘Premier League Knee-Jerk Reactions’ because, while that column might enable and encourage exactly the kind of sweeping conclusions we’ve just mentioned, we also clearly don’t take the judgements we make anything like entirely seriously.)

When it comes to this season’s Premier League, Chelsea (one win in five, remember) are being spoken about as top-four contenders and the conversation around Enzo Maresca is largely about how bright the future looks at the club.

Nottingham Forest are level on points in fifth, behind Chelsea and Arsenal on goal difference, and they are quite rightly being praised for mixing it at the top of the table, but they are still only three points above Brentford, who are in the bottom half of the table. They dropped from third over the weekend – despite the fact that the two teams who overtook them drew with each other – and are no more than one point above four other teams, meaning their current position in the top five remains precarious.

Newcastle are just one point back having strung together back-to-back wins over Arsenal and Nottingham Forest, yet their manager Eddie Howe is under pressure and few would argue they’ve had a particularly good start to the season. Two games ago they were 12th, and now they could go level on points with third place with a draw in their next match.

Tottenham have only won successive games once all season and missed an opportunity to go third in the league by losing to Ipswich Town on Sunday. Instead, they sit 10th despite being the league’s top scorers and having both the second-best goal difference and the sixth-best defensive record.

Brentford (16 points), Bournemouth (15) and Man Utd (15) are all close behind having had decidedly mixed campaigns so far. None of those three sides have won consecutive Premier League games all season, and yet they all remain within four points of the top three.

Things can change incredibly quickly in football, and never more so has that been the case than with this unbelievably bunched group in the middle of the top flight. Four games ago, Bournemouth and United were nine points off the top three, and despite each having failed to win two games since then, they are all of a sudden within touching distance of the Champions League spots.

It is also worth considering the opponents each side has faced. According to our pre-season analysis of the difficulty of each team’s first 10 fixtures of the 2024-25 season, for example, Forest had the third-easiest schedule, and Newcastle had the fourth-easiest. Given Forest are now only one point ahead of Newcastle in the table, which team’s position would you rather be in?

Jonathan Manuel / Data Analyst

Arsenal might be as close in points terms to 13th as they are Manchester City in second, but having played tougher games than either the champions or league leaders Liverpool, clawing back the points they’ve dropped maybe shouldn’t feel as daunting as their deficit to the top of the table might make it appear.

With all this in mind, it is pertinent to ask whether there is any explanation for why the Premier League’s mid-table is more congested than it has ever been?

Many of the teams who were expected to challenge for the top four have been unable to build up any kind of momentum, with Tottenham, Arsenal, Aston Villa, Newcastle and Man Utd all on fewer points after 11 games this season than they were a year ago.

Meanwhile, Forest, Brighton and Fulham are overachieving, and Brentford and Bournemouth are arguably winning games at about the rate we would have expected of them at the start of the season.

Going deeper, we can use our expected points model to try to get a better understanding of whether the table paints an accurate picture of performances this season.

Our expected points model simulates the number of goals scored by each side in each match based on the expected goals (xG) value of every shot taken. It then uses the simulated number of goals to determine the match outcome (win/draw/loss). Each match is then simulated 10,000 times. The expected points for each team in each match can then be calculated based on the proportion of simulations they win/draw/lose.

In other words, by looking at how many chances each team has created and conceded, and the quality of those chances, we can ascertain which sides have been performing better or worse than the actual league table and the teams’ points totals suggest.

It has its limitations, not least in that dangerous periods of possession that don’t lead to any shots make no difference to the model, and factors like game state or red cards which naturally affect how much a team attacks (and creates chances) aren’t taken into account. But it can help us understand whether the actual league table tells the full story.

There are some major differences, particularly in that Tottenham, Fulham, Bournemouth and Aston Villa ‘should’ be third, fourth, fifth and sixth in the table, when they are actually 10th, seventh, 12th and ninth, respectively. Chelsea deserve to be seventh based on their expected goals data this season, and Arsenal should be ninth.

Jonathan Manuel / Data Analyst

However, all of the 11 teams in the bunched group between third and 13th in the actual table remain in that part of the table in the expected points table.

Using the average number of points that all teams took from the 10,000 simulations of each game based on their expected goals data, we can see exactly how many points every team ‘should’ have based on their underlying numbers. While the 11 teams are separated by just four points in the actual Premier League table, there are 5.7 points between Tottenham in third and Brentford in 13th in the expected points table. In other words, they should be less bunched than they actually are – but not by very much.

Jonathan Manuel / Data Analyst

And what’s more, just three points separate Spurs in third and Newcastle in 11th, suggesting those nine teams are precisely as close in reality as they should be based on their performances.

So, the underlying data proves that the middle of the real Premier League table is very nearly an accurate reflection of how the teams involved have played this season. Eleven of the top flight’s 20 teams deserve to be within a couple of results of one another.

But once the international break is over, things could change very quickly indeed. In two games’ time, Chelsea and Arsenal could be three points off top, or they could be 13th. Tottenham and Brentford could be third, but they could also be 16th. Manchester United could be in the top four, or they could be two points off the relegation zone.

There’s no point worrying about your team just yet. Right now, a place in the bottom half also means you’re in the hunt for a Champions League spot. This is the tightest mid-table battle the Premier League has ever seen.

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