The halfway mark of the 2024-25 Premier League season is an ideal time to check in on the Opta supercomputer predictions.
We’ve now reached the halfway point of the Premier League season – except for Liverpool and Everton, who still have to play their Merseyside derby after it was postponed in early December.
That makes it a great time to not only assess the current projections for the Premier League title, Champions League qualification spots and relegation to the Championship, but also to look back at how it compares to the Opta supercomputer’s pre-season predictions.
Who Will Win the Premier League Title?
Back in August, the supercomputer made Manchester City the favourites for the 2024-25 Premier League title. Pep Guardiola’s side won the title for a fifth season in a row in 82.2% of simulations, which came as no surprise considering they were the first men’s team in history to win the English top-flight title in four successive campaigns.
That projection was lower than at the start of 2023-24 (90.2%), mainly because of the challenge that Arsenal had put up over the previous two seasons, when they finished five and two points behind Man City respectively. The Gunners won the league in 12.2% of pre-season simulations by the Opta supercomputer ahead of this season, up from 4.1% at the start of 2023-24.
Liverpool were the only other side with more than a 1% chance of title success back in August, but they were slightly more of an unknown quantity following the departure of Jürgen Klopp and arrival of Arne Slot. Now, halfway through 2024-25, it’s clear that the supercomputer underestimated them.
Slot’s men are six points clear of their nearest challengers Arsenal, and have a game in hand. As it stands, the Reds win the 2024-25 Premier League title in 89.89% of simulations. To put it simply, if you played the remainder of the season 10,000 times, Liverpool would go on to win the title in 8,989 of those.
Of course, this latest projection is not only down to Liverpool’s excellent season so far, but also due to Man City’s sensational collapse since the start of November.
On 1 November, Man City sat top of the Premier League table with 23 points from nine matchdays – one ahead of Liverpool (22) and five ahead of both Arsenal and Aston Villa. Since then, Guardiola’s side have won just eight points in 10 games, with only Leicester and Southampton (5) winning fewer. In that same period, Liverpool have won 23 points (from one game fewer) and Arsenal have collected 21.
This sees Man City now sit 14 points behind Liverpool in the Premier League table, having played a game more than their rivals. No team in Premier League history have overturned a points deficit of more than 13 points to win the title (Arsenal did so in 1997-98).
So that’s Man City ruled out (well, near enough – the supercomputer still gives them a 0.24% chance), but what about Arsenal?
The Gunners have begun to pick up form again in recent weeks, winning their last three games after disappointing draws against Fulham and Everton, but with Liverpool also winning their three games across these matchdays, they haven’t been able to gain any ground on their rivals.
As it stands, Arsenal win the Premier League title in 9.54% of simulations – just shy of a 1-in-10 chance, which is below their pre-season chances (12.2%) despite Man City’s dreadful form.
The other team that looked to be genuinely in a title race until recently were Chelsea. After their 2-1 win over Brentford on 15 December, the Blues’ title chances rose as high as 5.5%.
However, a terrible festive period that saw them win just one point in matches against Everton, Fulham and Ipswich (while Arsenal and Liverpool won nine), has put them 10 points behind Liverpool having played a game more. That has effectively ended their title challenge (not that Enzo Maresca ever thought they were in one), with Chelsea winning the Premier League in just 0.32% of current simulations.
Who Will Qualify for the Champions League?
Liverpool don’t fall outside the top four in any of the current supercomputer simulations, so it’s safe to say that they’ll play UEFA Champions League football again next season. Arsenal are near enough guaranteed a top-four finish, too (99.14%), while Chelsea finish inside the top four in 80.29% of sims.
So, the real battle looks to be for the fourth and final spot. The supercomputer still thinks Man City will make it (74.96%), but with every defeat that projection is reducing.
Could this open the door for Nottingham Forest? We deliberately missed them out of the title conversation, as a) they are still eight points behind Liverpool having played a game more, and b) we’ve seen teams surprise halfway through a season before and fall away in the second half.
But Forest deserve respect and admiration for their excellent season to this point. As it stands, they finish inside the top four places in 14.14% of simulations, just below Newcastle (19.21%) but well above more fancied clubs in pre-season such as Aston Villa (4.67%), Tottenham (1.47%) and Manchester United (0.38% – more on them later).
But this is where English clubs’ performances in Europe this season make this much more interesting.
The top two nations in the seasonal UEFA coefficient ranking will receive an additional place in the 2025-26 Champions League. Last season, England missed out on one of these, but their projected chance of getting one in 2024-25 currently stands at 97.8% by the Opta supercomputer.
This means that, based on the supercomputer’s calculations, fifth place in the Premier League table this season should be enough to qualify for the UCL next season.
Now, this is massive for clubs like Newcastle and Nottingham Forest. Eddie Howe’s side have a 44.6% chance of finishing in the top five this season – 25.4 percentage points higher than a top-four finish. That difference is also big for Nottingham Forest – 19.5 percentage points to be exact – as they finish inside the top five in 33.6% of current sims compared to a top-four finish in 14.1%.
Forest are the biggest success story of 2024-25 so far. Before a ball was kicked, the Opta supercomputer saw them average 39.3 points overall across the 10,000 pre-season simulations. That projected points average is now 60.8 – a rise of 21.5 points and the biggest difference of any side in the Premier League between 1 August and now.
This is just above Liverpool (+14.6) and Bournemouth (+10.6), while Manchester City have had the biggest negative change (-19.9).
Who Will Be Relegated from the Premier League?
However bad Man City’s form has been, at least they aren’t being discussed in the battle for relegation like rivals Man Utd.
Most of those discussions are said with tongue firmly in cheek, but with an average of just 0.88 points per game won under Ruben Amorim so far, it’s not looking great. In fact, if they were to continue picking up points at that measly rate for the rest of the season, they’d only amass a total of 39.
Since the Premier League was reduced to 20 teams for the 1995-96 season, there have been six teams suffer relegation having accumulated 39 or more points.
As of today, there’s little chance of relegation being a genuine possibility, at least with the Opta supercomputer. They were relegated in just 0.11% of current simulations, with eight other clubs deemed more likely for the drop to the Championship, but there’s no precedent for the supercomputer to latch on to with respect to Man Utd being in a relegation battle, so this does make the situation a little trickier to read.
Back in August, only three sides were given more than a 40% chance of being relegated from the Premier League, and those were the promoted trio of Southampton, Leicester City and Ipswich Town. Now, five months later, nothing has changed other than that the chances of those three teams being sent straight back to the Championship have increased.
Southampton were favourites for the drop in August at 66.7%, but that’s now a massive 99.5% – across the 10,000 current simulations, there were only 53 instances where they finished 17th or higher.
Ipswich Town have gone from 64.7% pre-season to 70.8% now, while Leicester’s chance of relegation has risen more than 14 percentage points from 60.3% to 74.6%.
Outside of those teams, Wolves are the next highest in the relegation projections at 39.2%, but that’s gone down a lot since the arrival of new manager Vítor Pereira. Seven points from three games under the Portuguese coach have seen their chances fall by nearly 30 percentage points from 68.2%.
Everton’s chances of relegation are slightly higher now (12.5%) than they were in August (9.1%), but it’ll only take a few defeats – together with positive results for the three sides in the relegation zone – for that projection to creep up.
Overall, the current Premier League simulations by the Opta supercomputer saw 11 different teams relegated at least once. Tottenham fans, you aren’t safe yet. Spurs were relegated in one of the 10,000 simulations.
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