One stat that sums up each club's 2026/27 season so far

From the top of the Premier League table to the bottom, Opta Analyst's Ali Tweedale picks out one key statistic for each club to highlight the story of their season so far.

Just five matches into the Enzo Maresca era, Manchester City sit top of the pile with the only remaining 100 per cent record in the top four tiers of English football.

They have done it not by leaning on a solid defence but instead through an extremely talented and ruthlessly efficient attack. They are averaging higher-quality chances than any other team in the Premier League this season, with their average Expected Goals (xG) value of their non-penalty shots (0.15) being the best of the lot. That has helped them maintain the best non-penalty conversion rate too (19.1 per cent).

This is the 15th instance of a team winning their first five games of a Premier League season but, perhaps surprisingly, only four of the previous 14 sides to achieve this feat have gone on to win the title.

Arsenal have the talent to beat anyone – yes, the defeat at Brighton & Hove Albion was an off day – but they also know how important it is to better your opponents when it comes to physical effort.

Across their first five matches, Mikel Arteta's men have run a total of 22.7 kilometres more than their opponents, the biggest positive difference of any team so far.

The fact that they have more of the ball – often significantly so, averaging 59.5 per cent possession – makes this statistic even more stark: Arsenal’s players work incredibly hard both in and out of possession. Sometimes, hard work trumps talent.

No team has embodied the importance of hard work, specifically when out of possession, more than Brighton. The high press deployed by Fabian Hurzeler's impressive side has functioned brilliantly so far, suffocating their opponents to devastating effect.

Brighton have the lowest PPDA (opposition passes per defensive action) rate (7.4) of every team in the Premier League, which shows how little time they give their opponents without putting pressure on them.

That has resulted in Brighton forcing more high turnovers (56) than any other team in the Premier League this season. Eight have ended in a shot, with one resulting in a goal.

When you’re trying not to lose matches, it helps if you never go behind. Brentford have very nearly done just that, across their five Premier League matches so far this season.

Keith Andrews' team have been trailing for a total of just three minutes and 10 seconds, all of which came when they briefly went 2-1 down away to Bournemouth before equalising shortly afterwards.

That accounts for just 0.6 per cent of their entire season so far which is, unsurprisingly, the lowest of all top-flight teams. They are one of just five undefeated sides and, flying high in fourth place, the Bees will clearly take some beating.

Leeds have become a very good multi-faceted team under Daniel Farke, and while they are by no means reliant on set-pieces, they do use them more than most.

They top the Premier League charts this season for the proportion of their shots (46.7 per cent) and Expected Goals (xG) at 41.0 per cent which have been generated at non-penalty set-pieces. They have scored three of their seven goals from dead-ball situations, too.

Set-pieces aren’t the only reason that Leeds are fifth in the table and one of the five remaining unbeaten sides, but they have clearly played a significant part.

With draws rescued late on against both Newcastle United and Nottingham Forest, more dropped points at home to Fulham, and two wins against Ipswich Town and Bournemouth, it hasn’t been the strongest start to life at Anfield for Andoni Iraola.

Fans who want to see physical effort from the players might have mixed feelings about what they’ve watched so far. Liverpool rank bottom of the Premier League for distance covered (110.3 km per game), but are top for sprints (636 in total, or 127.2 per game).

Perhaps that's an indication of precisely what their new manager wants from them: energy conserved for the moments when they have to go all out.

Results and performances might not have been the best, but the new manager appears to be having an impact.

David Moyes is hardly associated with a high-pressing style of football, but the early evidence of this season is that he is asking his team to play on the front foot more than we are maybe accustomed to seeing.

Everton lead the Premier League this season for pressures applied in the opposition half (1,145) and in the final third (682), while no team has forced more high turnovers leading to a shot on goal than their total of 11.

Time will tell whether this is a sign of a reinvented Moyes and a new Everton.

In an era in which playing through the lines is almost an essential aspect of being a Premier League team, Hull are a bit of a throwback.

Sergej Jakirovic knows his side’s limitations and has set them up to not muck about with the ball, and to get it forward quickly. And they’ve had great success so far.

They’ve had plenty of chances (61) and have scored a decent number of goals (six), but they have put together just two "build-up attacks", which are defined as open-play sequences of at least 10 passes that end in either a touch in the opposition’s box or a shot.

Their rate of 0.4 build-up attacks per game is the lowest by any Premier League team in any season since 2018/19 (Cardiff City’s 0.37 per game), and the second lowest in any season in the last decade.

The direct approach didn’t work for Cardiff, but it appears so far as though it might for Hull.

After a summer of losing so many key players all in one go and a change of manager, it was easy to fear that Newcastle might struggle this season.

But they’ve made a decent start, in a new era defined by the regeneration of their first team. After having the sixth-oldest starting XI on average last season, Newcastle’s starting line-ups have been younger than any other team in the Premier League this season (25 years, five days).

With a manager who may also have his best years ahead of him, 38-year-old Matthias Jaissle, the future looks bright at St James' Park.

In their first two matches of the season, Chelsea created the impression that they might immediately be a very good side under Xabi Alonso, but three disappointing results in a row since then have implied that it may have been a false dawn.

What appears in no doubt, however, is that this team is incredibly entertaining. Their five matches have produced a truly incredible 22 goals, which is the most in the Premier League this season.

More striking, though, is the fact that they have become only the 10th team in Premier League history to both score (10) and concede (12) double figures in their first five matches of the season.

Promisingly, the last three teams to do this — Chelsea 2019/20, Liverpool 2020/21, Aston Villa 2023/24 — have gone on to finish in the top four.

Team Final position

Oldham (92/93) 19th

Charlton (00/01) 9th

Derby (00/01) 17th

Man Utd (01/02) 3rd

Blackburn (03/04) 15th

Everton (14/15) 11th

Chelsea (19/20) 4th

Liverpool (20/21) 3rd

Aston Villa (23/24) 4th

Chelsea (26/27) TBD

Ipswich have shown on their Premier League return that they are worth watching right until the final whistle.

In the space of five matches so far, they have already made it halfway to the Premier League record for the most 90th-minute (or later) winners in a season.

They have secured three points with two stoppage-time goals, from Jack Clarke against Sunderland and Zian Flemming against Crystal Palace; the only other team to score such a late winner this season are Man City, with Josko Gvardiol's strike giving them victory over Bournemouth.

The record for 90th-minute winners in a full season is four, meaning Gary O’Neil’s men have 33 matches to score another three to set a new all-time high. Given they have also scored three other goals (not match winners) after the 90th minute in all competitions this season, they are clearly a big threat late on.

Man Utd have dominated matches far more than their lowly league position suggests. They are down in 12th place in the table with just one win from five, but have got closer to the opposition goal more often than most teams while keeping action near their own goal to a minimum.

In fact, they have had more touches in the opposition’s box (182) than any other team in the Premier League this season, while their opponents have had fewer touches in the Man Utd box than any other side (92).

And yet their goal difference is zero, with eight goals scored and eight goals conceded. Territory and dominance of the ball hasn’t brought great results for Michael Carrick's team so far.

Nottingham Forest are the only team to play three home matches and not score in any of them.

Oliver Glasner's side have also only conceded two goals at home, making the City Ground the stadium seeing the fewest goals in the Premier League this season (two). Away from home, meanwhile, their two matches have featured a total of seven goals, and they have picked up four points.

The thing about this stat is, while it might do a decent job of summing up Forest’s 2026/27 so far, it is also a pattern that stretches back into the last couple of seasons.

Both in 2025/26 and 2024/25, they got more of their points on the road than at home, with far more goals scored in away matches.

Sunderland have very nearly had an exceptional start to the season. Regis Le Bris' men gained four points from their first three matches while pushing Arsenal and then Man City close before the international break.

It could have been much better for them, too, but they’ve really been the masters of their own downfall.

The Black Cats have already committed three errors leading to an opposition goal, which is more than any other team in the Premier League this season and already as many as two teams (Bournemouth and Leeds) made in the whole of last season.

And to boot, they also account for one of the three missed penalties and one of the six red cards.

Like many other clubs around the middle of the Premier League, Crystal Palace always have to make do with a great deal of player turnover. This summer was no different, while they also saw a change in the dugout.

And while having to deal with issues like Jean-Philippe Mateta reportedly wanting to leave and Daniel Munoz actually leaving, new boss Pierre Sage has also found it difficult to work out his best team.

He has used an unbelievable 27 different players already this season, which equals the record after five matches of any Premier League season (alongside Arsenal in 2011/12).

In all of last season, Palace used 30 players; going on the evidence of the start of 2026/27, they’ll be past that tally by the start of winter.

Even though they have visited the most welcoming hosts the Premier League has had in years (Spurs), Aston Villa still rank bottom of all 20 teams this season for xG (4.56), shots attempted (48) and shots on target (12).

They have found chances extremely difficult to create, and even when they scored three goals at Spurs, they relied on some exceptional finishing from Nicolas Jackson and Emiliano Buendia to complete the victory.

The volume of player churn at Villa Park is a big mitigating factor, but Villa head coach Unai Emery will know he needs to get his team creating opportunities more reliably if they are to shoot up the table.

It’s mildly impressive how effectively Bournemouth have thrown away leads this season. Just five matches into 2026/27, Marco Rose's team have dropped nine points from winning positions; the only match in which they didn’t throw away a lead was the only match in which they didn’t score – the 1-0 home defeat to Liverpool.

Over the course of the Premier League era, there have been 79 instances of teams dropping fewer than nine points from leading positions over an entire season, and Bournemouth are already past all of them.

If they were to carry on at their current rate of an average of 1.8 points dropped from a winning position per game, they would end up throwing away a whopping 68 points this season.

Before the 1-0 win at Nottingham Forest just before the international break, the outlook for Coventry was a little bit bleak.

Goalless and pointless through four games, talk of an immediate return to the EFL Championship had already begun.

But a goal and a win came in Matchweek 5 and, for those who’d been looking at their underlying data, that may not have been too much of a surprise.

Coventry have underperformed compared to their expected goals to a greater degree than any other team in the Premier League this season. With one goal from 4.88 xG, their -3.88 underperformance is larger than any other team.

The hope for Frank Lampard will be that his team start to score more in line with their xG as the weeks go on.

Fulham have leaked chances far too readily this season, and big ones, too.

Alvaro Arbeloa's team have had more big chances created against them (20) than any other other team in the Premier League this season — a big chance being defined as one you'd reasonably expect to be scored.

Their current rate of 4.0 big chances conceded per game is the second highest by any team in any of the last 10 Premier League seasons, after the struggling Southampton side of 2024/25, who finished the season with 12 points.

Fulham surely won’t carry on giving away chances at this rate, but they really need to shore things up at the back.

Spurs are bottom of the table after their worst ever start to a Premier League season, but beyond their three defeats and two goalless draws, there has been a disjointed nature to much of what they’ve done. That can be attributed to the number of new players their manager is trying to bed in simultaneously.

Roberto De Zerbi has handed a total of 26 starts to players who didn’t play a game for Spurs last season, which is by far the most by any team in the Premier League this season, nine ahead of the next team in that chart (Chelsea, 17). Spurs are only the 12th team in Premier League history to give 26+ starts to new players after five matches. Six of the previous 11 sides have finished the season in 17th place or lower.

It is understandable that Spurs are taking a while to get going, but they need to click soon enough, or they could start sinking without trace.