Feigning ignorance or disinterest in the league table is a staple of the post-match press conference.
“Our job is not to watch the table,” said Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola after his team’s 1-0 defeat away at Aston Villa last month. Instead, Guardiola, his counterparts and their players insist they are focused solely on the team’s next game.
This is, of course, a lie, but there is a case for paying less attention to the Premier League’s standings this season.
With each team having played 11 of their 38 games, there is some daylight at both ends: Arsenal hold a four-point advantage at the top, while Wolverhampton Wanderers are seven adrift at the bottom, the biggest gap at this stage of a Premier League season. But cut away the head and the tail, and you’re left with a bloated middle, a table packed tightly together, especially in its top half. One win separates 10th-placed Crystal Palace from Chelsea in third.
Since the Premier League was reduced to 20 teams for the 1995-96 season, that gap has been this small on only three other occasions: 2002-03, 2005-06 and last season. Normally, it averages around seven points, peaking at 12 in 2011-12.
A fair chunk of this congestion stems from the small sample of fixtures.
After Tottenham Hotspur’s solid start last season, their head coach at the time, Ange Postecoglou, said: “There’s no point looking at the table now because ultimately it’s where you are at the end of the season that’s going to count.” Those words proved grimly prophetic as Spurs unravelled to finish 17th, with Postecoglou dismissed despite winning the Europa League.
For the Premier League’s top half, the European-chasing wheat tends to pull away from the mid-table chaff around Gameweek 16, where the average points difference between third and 10th starts to hit double digits.
But that expected break did not materialise in 2024-25, and with 11 games to go, only six points divided Nottingham Forest in third from Aston Villa in 10th, setting up a fiercely contested race for European qualification.
That lack of separation was attributed to a stronger Premier League “middle class”, with upwardly mobile clubs such as Forest, Bournemouth and Brighton & Hove Albion disrupting the established order. With this season beginning in a similarly condensed fashion, it is little surprise to see the same theme resurface. Thomas Frank has already called it the “most competitive season” of his five in the top flight, with his fifth-placed Tottenham side ahead of Bournemouth, who are ninth, only on goal difference.
Tottenham head coach Thomas Frank has highlighted the division’s competitiveness this season (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
The table below shows each club’s points total compared with the historical average for that position in the table at this stage of a Premier League season, and once again, the squeeze is coming from below. All of the top six have fewer points than is typical after 11 games each, while 12 of the other 14 have more.
Eleven games can be a volatile period to analyse. If you take any 11-match slice of Premier League fixtures, there is even one — from October 24 to December 28 in 2009, when they won seven games and drew four — that would have Birmingham City top of the league (they finished that season in ninth, to be fair).
On the whole, though, league position around this stage is highly predictive, as The Athletic’s Mark Carey has shown — the table after 11 games correlates with the final standings at around 90 per cent.
But if this league-wide increased competitiveness continues in the same way, that correlation will start to dwindle.
League position shapes the narrative, but for clubs stuck in this mid-table traffic jam, the line between Champions League contention and mid-table irrelevance is blurring. The difference at this point in the 38-match proceedings is a single result — futures can hinge on nothing more than a wicked deflection, a once-in-a-season screamer or a poor refereeing call.
Cameron Jerome’s Birmingham City in late 2009: the Premier League’s most-overlooked form side? (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
This misleading picture painted by league standings has coincided with a shift in how managers and head coaches talk, which is increasingly focused on underlying processes rather than results. Manchester United’s Ruben Amorim touched on this in his post-match interview after his side’s 2-2 away draw with Tottenham in both sides’ final fixture before this international window, which extended their unbeaten league run to five games.
“We have a lot of problems, we are just in the beginning,” Amorim said. “Sometimes the results show people that we are improving, but we have a lot to do.”
Last season, he was even blunter: “I don’t look at the table. I look at what the team is doing, the things we have to improve.”
It’s the same logic behind the rise of expected goals (xG) and modern football analytics: separating outcome from process. Though xG is volatile this early in a campaign as well, it gives a clearer signal of a team’s capacity to create and prevent chances. This season’s numbers suggest Spurs may be in for another descent down the table: they have posted the league’s third-worst xG difference, with their attack looking particularly listless, especially at home.
Even when blending the observed league table with the underlying data, our Premier League view is still a foggy silhouette.
It’s probably best to let the high drama and unexpected twists of the coming weeks and months bring it into sharper focus.