Want to know how the end of the season will look? Here’s how you do it

 

 

• The 12 players who should feature in every Arsenal game next season
• Why Arsenal have a problem when trying to buy a centre forward

By Tony Attwood

The job of the pundit is primarily to tell us what will happen in the future.   Many pundits just make things up, although they usually claim that what they write is based on “inside information” (which is journo talk for something that another journalist just made up).

But slowly some journalists have latched onto the fact that the Premier League is getting more and more predictable as years go by.    And as a result it is getting easier and easier to predict the end of a Premier League season from the results of the first seven matches.  So in fact if you spot anyone offering you money for telling them how the season will end, you should probably get in, use the system below, and make the prediction. 

We stumbled on this approach by looking at the top four clubs, last season after seven games, and found that two of the top four clubs were, after seven games, exactly where they finished the season eight months later!

To see how this works we then looked back after the last three seasons.   In these tables we have the usual end-of-season table, followed by the column showing where these clubs were after seven games, and in the final column, the shift in position between seven games and 38 games.

As you can see from the first table there was only a slight movement this past season between the seven-game table and that for the end of the season.

2024/25

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts	After 7	Shift
1	Liverpool	38	25	9	4	86	41	45	84	1	0
2	Arsenal	38	20	14	4	69	34	35	74	3	+1
3	Manc City	38	21	8	9	72	44	28	71	2	-1
4	Chelsea	38	20	9	9	64	43	21	69	4	0

 

In 2023/24 only one of the top four was in the same position at the end of the season as it was after seven games, but three of the top four after seven games were still in the top four at the end of the season, suggesting that the top four remains the top four.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts	After 7	Shift
1	Manc City	38	28	7	3	96	34	62	91	1	0
2	Arsenal	38	28	5	5	91	29	62	89	3	+1
3	Liverpool	38	24	10	4	86	41	45	82	4	+1
4	Aston V	38	20	8	10	76	61	15	68	5	+1

 

2022/23 however showed more change, but not in the top two.   The top team after seven games was still top at the end of the season, but the third team after seven matches ended up second.  It was, of course, Arsenal.   The other two moved up by between four and seven positions.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts	After 7	Shift
1	Man C	38	28	5	5	94	33	61	89	1	0
2	Arsenal	38	26	6	6	88	43	45	84	3	+1
3	Man U	38	23	6	9	58	43	15	75	10	+7
4	Newcastle	38	19	14	5	68	33	35	71	8	+4

 

2021/22

Finally in this little exercise, going back one more season we found three of the final top four were in the top four places after seven games, with only Tottenham moving up from eighth to fourth.  And since Arsenal don’t figure in this chart we’ve added in an extra row to accommodate them.

 

P	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts	After 7	Shift
1	Man City	38	29	6	3	99	26	73	93	3	+2
2	Liverpool	38	28	8	2	94	26	68	92	2	0
3	Chelsea	38	21	11	6	76	33	43	74	1	-2
4	Totte Ho	38	22	5	11	69	40	29	71	8	+4
5	Arsenal	38	22	3	13	61	48	13	69	11	+6

 

So over the last four seasons, 14 out of the 16 clubs in the top four, after seven games, hve been in the top four at the end of the season.   Seven games don’t tell us the exact table for the end of the season, but they give a pretty solid indication of who the top four teams are going to be.  In essence, by and large the best teams make a good start most of the time.

Also we might note that over the last three seasons only Arsenal and Manchester City have been in the top four after seven games for each season.

Goals and cards

Arsenal’s most goals in a 38 match season came in2023/4 with 91 goals.   Below that was 2022/23 with 88 goals.    Below that we had 87 in 2004/5, and 85 in 2002/3

It is obviously very encouraging that our test best 38 match seasons in terms of goal scoring have been in two of the three last years, with the most recent season not reaching those heights because of the disruption of injuries.

The great worry of course is that other clubs in the PL will have seen how successful the tactic of injuring Arsenal forwards was in terms of cutting back their goalscoring, and there is an obvious worry that this tactic of ceaselessly tackling Arsenal forwards even if it means yellow cards, will be copied again next season.  PGMOL might stop it, but putting our faith in PGMOL seems a bit of a long shot.

The number of red cards in a season has decreased from 48 in 2020/1 to just 30 in 2022/3 , a decline of over one third, to a record low for a 38-game campaign.Yet despite this Arsenal’s red cards rising inexorably, Arsenal.

Last season Arsenal got 64 yellow cards and Chelsea 99 (ie 65% more than Arsenal).  Did the journalists who raved about Arsenal’s red cards mention that – or the curious fact that Arsenal could get so many reds but be 18th in the yellow table – even lower than their beloved Liverpool?   If they did, I must have missed it.