This was supposed to be the best part of the season. A few months ago, there was congestion up and down the Premier League table, everywhere from the title race down to the relegation fight. The season is almost over, and it feels that way for most of the intraleague competitions, too. City have taken the lead at the top, while Newcastle and Manchester United refuse to drop points in the top-four race. Even a bunch of the relegation battlers have already escaped.
But, well, everyone still has several games to play, which means that everyone can find something to play for. So let's take a look at what's at stake for all 20 Premier League teams over the final month of the season.
Manchester City: Win the treble
Well, that was fast. After hovering around 50-60% probability to win the Premier League despite never surpassing first-place Arsenal, City zoomed past the Gunners over the past 10 days. City now have a one-point lead in the table, with a game in hand and 14-goal advantage in goal differential.
Per FiveThirtyEight, there's a 92% chance they win their fifth title in six seasons and per those same projections, City have around a 35% chance of completing the treble by adding an FA Cup and a Champions League trophy, too. The latter is the one thing the club hasn't won since Pep Guardiola took over -- and it's still the one they're least likely to win this season.
- When can Man City clinch the Premier League title?
In the FiveThirtyEight rating system, City are the best team in the world, by far; Bayern Munich, No. 2, are much closer to fourth than first. Despite that, Guardiola & Co. are still just a coin-flip to win their first European Cup. It feels inevitable at this point, but it's not.
Arsenal: Get back on track
The title isn't officially gone yet. An 8% chance is a small chance, but it's still a chance and if the Gunners win out, they could run it close. It's just that there's not much recent evidence to suggest that Arsenal are capable of winning out.
Since the start of April, here's where they rank across a number of key per-game metrics:
- Points: 1.2 (11th in the Premier League)
- Goal differential: 0 (T-9th)
- Expected-goal differential: plus-0.13 (10th)
- Shots for: 13.2 (11th)
- Shots against: 13.2 (10th)
It's only five games, and two of those five were arguably the two hardest on the schedule: away to City and Liverpool. But there's been a substantial decline in performance since the World Cup, too. After the restart, the Gunners have just the fourth-best xG differential in the league, behind City, Brighton and Newcastle.
Arsenal failed the City test, miserably, but quality performances against the other two, who they face consecutively after hosting Chelsea, would go a long way toward establishing the Gunners as the league's clear No. 2 ahead of next season.
Newcastle: Finish third
Two months ago, it really seemed like they might blow it. They went winless in February and entered the March international break with three consecutive losses to Liverpool, Manchester United and City. Yes, they now have unlimited money, but no one expected this collection of players to add up to a top-three or -four team before the season, and it appeared as if Eddie Howe's team was finally regressing back to its talent level.
So much for that! They've won eight of nine since the international break and just need nine points from their final five matches to clinch Champions League qualification.
Although they're closer to fifth than second in the table, their aggregate performance level has been much closer to Arsenal than to a top-four challenger. In fact, through 33 games, Newcastle and Arsenal have the exact same xG differential: plus-27.4. They'll be favorites when they host the Gunners this weekend.
Manchester United: Focus on fourth
It's easy for me -- an American, not running a club -- to say this, but cups are a nuisance for teams like United and Arsenal. They're both trying to reestablish themselves as consistent top-four finishers and long shot title contenders, and the way you do that is by, you know, consistently finishing top four, increasing your revenue, investing the money in your squad, and creating a virtuous cycle of results-money-better-results.
Instead, both clubs lost key players to injury in Europa League matches. Given the incentive and reward structure of European soccer, risking injury in the Europa League and the FA Cup just really isn't worth it for big clubs who haven't yet built out big squads.
Perhaps luckily, United don't have to worry about the Europa League anymore, while their FA Cup Final match doesn't come until June 3, after the Premier League season ends. United are well below the typical level of a top-four team: sixth-best goal and expected-goal differential. They've only outscored opponents by 10 goals across 32 games, but they've ground out enough one-goal wins to sneak into one of the spots. They need 11 points from their final seven matches -- roughly Aston Villa's full-season pace -- to make sure they stay there.
Liverpool: Win out
It's not likely, but it could happen. With matches against Fulham, Brentford, Leicester, Aston Villa and Southampton remaining, Liverpool will be greater-than-50% favorites in every match from here on out. And if they win them all, they'll end on 71 points. FiveThirtyEight projects Newcastle to finish with 74 points and United with 73, and they give Jurgen Klopp's side a 9% chance of catching one of them.
While it's probably too little, too late, it does seem like Klopp has started to figure out the next evolution of his team. Since shifting Trent Alexander-Arnold into more of a deep-midfield role in possession, the team has improved in just about every way:
#LiverpoolFC defensive numbers and counter-press success rate have improved since Trent switched to the new role
— markstats (@markrstats) April 30, 2023
*Small sample size warning pic.twitter.com/QwejQ9hXxq
As the second half against Tottenham showed, there's still a lot left to figure out in the immediate future and the same goes beyond this season.
What happens if TAA gets injured? Can anyone other than Ibrahima Konate cover all the vacated space on the right side? How does this shift the profile of the midfield player the club targets this summer?
Whatever the answers to those questions, it finally feels like Liverpool are progressing toward something new.
Tottenham: Show up on time
I don't really know what you say to Tottenham at this point. Their top-four hopes are dead. I don't think qualification for the Europa or Conference League gets them anything meaningful. They're one of the oldest teams in the league, and they don't really have that many young players who would immediately benefit from an increase in playing time. The most important inflection points -- what happens to Harry Kane and who becomes the next manager? -- don't really have any connection with whatever might happen over their final four matches, either.
So, how about this? Get through your final four matches without conceding a goal in the first 25 minutes.
Spurs have conceded nine early goals in their past three matches and a whopping 20 in total this season. All goals technically count the same, but early goals are worth the most, as they affect the incentives of both teams for the remainder of the match. Spurs have a long rebuild ahead and it won't go anywhere if they can't get out of the first half-hour without falling into a hole.
Aston Villa: Qualify for Europe
Despite the good vibes and all the points, the underlying performance of Aston Villa under Unai Emery isn't too much better than it was under Steven Gerrard earlier this season:
- Gerrard: minus-0.15 xGD
- Emery: minus-0.11 xGD
Yet with the 11th-best season-long xG differential and just the ninth-best season-long goal differential, Villa are tied with Spurs in sixth. FiveThirtyEight gives them an 18% chance of qualifying for the Europa League and a 30% chance of making it to the Conference League.
If Villa manage to sneak into the Europa League with Emery on the sideline, there's a non-zero chance we'll see them in the Champions League in 2024.
Brighton: Qualify for the Europa League
If Brighton win out, they'll finish ahead of Liverpool and will probably sneak into the top four. That would land them on 73 points, which is almost always enough to qualify for the Champions League. The big difference is that they have seven games left to win, including matches against Manchester United, Arsenal, Newcastle and Manchester City. Run the table from here on out, and they deserve it.
Frankly, they might deserve it anyway. In terms of controlling the things they can control -- create chances, don't concede chances -- Brighton have been one of the four-best teams in the league. Only the current top three in the table have a better xG differential than Brighton's plus-22.8, and Roberto Di Zerbi's side have still played fewer games than anyone else in the league.
It's too much to ask for them to win out with that schedule, so here's a more modest goal: finish in the top six. Brighton are the sharpest club in the league. Given the potential annoyance the competition can represent for some, it would be fascinating to see how they approach the Europa League next year.
Brentford: Prepare for life after Toney
This could mean two things, as it still seems like Ivan Toney is going to be suspended for breaching the Premier League's betting rules.
Brentford don't really have much of a chance at qualifying for Europe, so they could use the remaining games to try to lessen the club's reliance on Toney's goal scoring. Or they could do everything in their power to boost Toney's goal totals -- play him every minute, funnel play in his direction, give him every set piece -- so they can ask for an even bigger transfer fee this summer.
Given that they're owned by a professional sports bettor, you should be able to figure out which of the two is more likely.
Fulham: Finish in the green
There's been some research that suggests teams like Fulham and Brentford -- the ones with nothing left to play for -- are significantly easier to play against at the end of the season. So if Marco Silva wants to prevent his team from coasting across the finish line, perhaps it's worth creating a minigoal for the club to achieve over their final five matches.
Right now, they've scored 45 goals and conceded 45 goals. Can they finish the season with a positive goal differential?
Crystal Palace: Finish ahead of Chelsea
Not only is Roy Hodgson good at managing a soccer team, he's great at managing his career. Here were Palace's three games before he took over: Manchester City, Brighton, Arsenal. And here were Palace's three games after he took over: Leicester, Leeds, Southampton.
Palace lost to three of the best teams in the league, and then fired Patrick Vieira. They hired Hodgson, and then beat three of the worst teams in the league. Beyond those three matches, there wasn't another team higher than sixth in the table on the Palace schedule, and Tottenham were the only team higher than 10th! They were essentially safe from relegation after those first three wins, and then they won a further two.
With four games left on their schedule, they're a point ahead of Chelsea.
Chelsea: Play the kids
Among the various institutional disasters unfolding at Chelsea seemingly every day, the weirdest one might be what's happening under Frank Lampard right now.
It's not that the team is bad under Lampard; that's to be expected. The man has won one of the past 19 games he has coached. Last time he was at Chelsea, the team fired him and then immediately won the Champions League the same season. Most terrible coaches don't keep getting chances to coach top teams, but because he's rich and famous and English, Lampard does, and he's putting together one of the worst Premier League managerial resumes you will ever see.
The surprising part about all of this is that, well, Lampard came in as a caretaker coach with no real expectation that he'd be made full-time manager.
Given that Chelsea have nothing to play for and have signed approximately 300 25-and-under players since last summer, you'd think there would be some kind of agreement between the front office and the coach about which players would get the most playing time over the last two months of the season. But rather than giving minutes to all of Chelsea's new, young signings, Lampard has brought the likes of Cesar Azpilicueta and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang back into the fold. He's mainly just playing Raheem Sterling and all of the players who were with Chelsea back when he was the full-time manager.
Chelsea had a rare opportunity to experiment with a number of different lineup combinations, gather more information about the quality of all their new signings, and give a bunch of young players valuable experience, but instead they're trying to grind out a ninth-place finish -- and even that isn't working.
Bournemouth: Don't get complacent
Bournemouth have the worst xG differential in the league, and yet they already have more points (39) than FiveThirtyEight projects five other teams to finish with. In other words: they can forfeit their remaining games and they'll still likely avoid relegation. But given those underlying numbers, the same exact performance next season probably won't be enough to keep them up again, making this a rare opportunity for one of the worst teams in the league to think beyond the current fixture list and maybe try to experiment with some new tactics, new set pieces and new players.
If none of it works, no harm done. And if any of it does, you've already found a way to improve the team without signing any new players this summer.
Wolves: Find some goals
After looking like a potential Big Six gate-crasher a few seasons ago with a unique tactical approach, this team is just kind of floundering around the bottom-half with no real identity. Well, they do have an identity, and it's that they can't score.
Outside of Daniel Podence, no one on the team has more than three non-penalty goals. And outside of Podence, no one else even has three expected goals. The only worse attacking team in the league is the one at the bottom of the table.
Perhaps a healthy Sasa Kalajdzic, who played only 45 minutes before suffering a season-ending injury after arriving from Stuttgart over the summer, will fix things next season. They're not going to get relegated this year, but they might next year if someone doesn't start scoring sometime soon.
West Ham: Try to stay healthy
Sure, there's still a 1% chance this team gets relegated, per FiveThirtyEight, but I'd be shocked if it happened. If it did happen, West Ham would be one of the best teams to ever get sent down. Through 34 matches, they basically have an even xG differential, meaning they've created and conceded chances of roughly equivalent quality. They're an average team, not one of the worst in the league. Hell, they have a better xG differential than seventh-place Aston Villa. David Moyes just needs to get to the end of the season with everyone healthy, make some tweaks on the edges, and run back a similar approach in 2023-24.
Leicester: Trust Iversen
Under Dean Smith, Leicester have completely eschewed the patient -- frequently too patient -- approach of the Brendan Rodgers era. Case in point: they just conceded 23 shots at home to a team coached by Sean Dyche. It was a 2-2 draw against Everton, but they almost scored three and the bottom never totally fell out because Daniel Iversen looked like Memo Ochoa at a World Cup.
However, Leicester's new keeper made six saves and on the season, he's conceded 1.83 goals fewer than expected, per Stats Perform.
Purple are saves; circles are sized by the probability of a goal being scored:
Leicester got below-average shot-stopping from Danny Ward for much of the season until Rodgers replaced him with Iversen in mid-March. If they had this kind of goalkeeping performance from Day One, they still wouldn't be very good, but they also wouldn't still have a 30% chance of being relegated with four games left.
Leeds United: Hang on for dear life
I don't really know what advice to give here. The club bought into the high-variance approach championed first by Marcelo Bielsa, and then Jesse Marsch. Once the bounces started to go against Marsch, they brought in Javi Gracia to "tighten things up" -- or whatever cliche you prefer -- and it's been an absolute disaster. The players they acquired don't fit whatever it is that Gracia wants them to do, and they've been way worse than they were under Marsch this season:
- Goal differential: minus-1.2 per game under Gracia, minus-0.4 under Marsch
- xG differential: minus-0.92 under Gracia, minus-0.16 under Marsch
The press has disappeared and an already-shaky defense has absolutely collapsed. They're conceding 2.5 goals per game since Gracia took over, and the underlying numbers aren't much worse. Leeds panicked, and it just made all of their problems even worse. Ownership clearly didn't think Gracia could right the ship given the mismatch between approach and personnel, so they've decided to bring in Big Sam Allardyce for a four-game stretch to decide their fate.
All Leeds can really do at this point is cross their fingers and hope for the best.
Nottingham Forest: Hope you find the right combination
Imagine looking at the way Chelsea have done business since the summer and then wondering, "What would that look like if you had less money and signed even more players?" You don't actually have to imagine that; you just have to look at Nottingham Forest and you'll get it.
Thirty freaking players have featured in at least 180 minutes of Premier League game time for this team this season. And that's mostly by choice!
Steve Cooper has been juggling lineups all season long -- Brennan Johnson and Morgan Gibbs-White are the only guys to even start 25 games -- in search of the right combination. It hasn't worked yet; they basically have the same xG differential as Bournemouth, which, again, is the worst in the league. But maybe the pieces finally align and the right combination of players grinds out just enough points to keep them up.
Everton: Focus on the final two
I'm not saying Everton should tank their next two matches, but Brighton on the road and Manchester City at home are not what you'd call "winnable" games. They're barely what you'd even call "drawable" games.
A point from either would be massive, and anything is possible when 22 men have only 90 minutes to put a ball into a goal using their feet. But Everton's most likely route to safety comes from the final two matches: at Wolves and home against Bournemouth -- neither of whom will have anything to play for unless they read this column and institute the suggested goal.
One point from safety, you'll take a point anywhere you can get it, but Sean Dyche might be better off trying to make sure the team is at full-strength over the final two matches instead of pushing too hard for a result in either of the two games before it.
Southampton: Get ready for next season
Barring some kind of incredible, out-of-nowhere turnaround coupled with the absolute collapse of at least two other teams, Southampton are going down.
Want some good news? They've got the youngest team in the league and they really were just one of the worst teams, rather than the worst team. I wouldn't be surprised if they bounced right back up.