Can the end of one season or the start of the next predict the final table?

By Tony Attwood

With it being summer, and me apparently being the only person in the kingdom who has no interest whatsoever in the Olympics (hence no capital O), I started to reflect on what our regular use of the last six Premier League games actually tells us, beyond the obvious (i.e. how the clubs have performed in the last six games).

So I took the last six games of the 2023/24 season and looked at the league table based on just those six games and compared it to where each club is.

As you can see below, the top two in the last six games have been the same as the top two all season, mainly because both clubs have won all six games.

But then there was a surprise – the third-best team in the last six games was none other than Crystal Palace, who actually finished the league in 10trh. And that wasn’t the biggest change, as Everton were fifth in the last six games but finished 15th – a late-season performance that was far above their performance over the season as a whole.

Tottenham Hotspur were, as ever, bucking the general trend. In their last six games, they lost four, which left them 16th in the table based on those final outings. But they finished the league in 5th

Here’s the table for the final six games of last season, with (in the final column) the actual position each team finished in. I’ve included the promoted clubs, obviously using their Championship records.

Seeing a fair amount of variation, I wondered whether the first six games of a season tell us much about what will happen later in the season. Certainly, many correspondents tend to think that is the case.

So below we have the league table as of 25 September 2023, when all Premier League clubs have played their first six games. The biggest changes we see in position after six games and the end of the season are eight places for Brighton and Hove (down from third to 11th) and Chelsea (up from 14th to sixth).

The three relegated clubs were in the bottom three after just six games, and five of the top six clubs at the end of the season were in the top six after six games. But only two of the top four clubs that went into the Champions League were in the top four. So not everything is known after six games, but a lot can be predicted after just six matches.

In fact, the notion that “it’s all up for grabs” may not be entirely true after six games. The average team moves up 2.7 places between where they are after six games and where they finish the season. And here’s the surprising thing, only four clubs were more than three places different (up or down) at the end of the season compared to where they were after six games.

Those outliers were Brighton (down eight places), Nottingham Forest (up five places), Chelsea (up eight places) and Bournemouth (up five places).

Now, after the first six league games last season, the top of the league said

So while this clearly didn’t tell us exactly what the top six would look like, it did predict five of them at the end of the season, with only Brighton losing out to Chelsea in the final table.

What this table didn’t predict, however, was goals scored or goal difference. As you’ll know, Arsenal were the second highest scoring team. After six games, they were only fifth in the league, only the sixth highest scoring team, with only the third best defence and only the sixth best goal difference.

If Arsenal are not top of the league after six games this season, there will be cries for new players and a new manager to be hired. For your own sake, you can ignore these cries – they may just be gibberish from people who want to create a story in 30 seconds so they can move on to the next beer, and who have failed to understand the similarity that exists in football between the start and end of each season.