After the latest round of Premier League matches, we use the Opta supercomputer to assess the likelihood of the teams near the bottom of the table being relegated.
2 December
It wasn’t a great weekend for the Premier League’s struggling teams, with Crystal Palace and Southampton the only sides in the bottom seven who managed to avoid defeat.
Southampton earned just their fifth point of the season, coming from behind to draw 1-1 at Brighton on Friday night. However, Saints are still four points adrift of safety, currently on their lowest-ever points tally (5) after 13 games of a top-flight season.
That record means it’ll probably come as no shock to many that they are relegated from the Premier League in 93.6% of the Opta supercomputer’s latest round of 10,000 season simulations.
History is factored into this projection, with none of the eight sides to have won five points or fewer from their opening 13 games of a Premier League season avoiding relegation. The last top-flight team to avoid the drop after such a start was Sheffield United in 1990-91, who had four points after 13 games but ended the season in 13th place.
Fellow promoted sides Ipswich Town and Leicester City are the next most likely teams to be relegated according to the latest supercomputer projections.
Ipswich sit second from bottom, but are level on nine points with Palace and Wolves. Ipswich’s latest defeat – 1-0 at Nottingham Forest on Saturday – means they are relegated in 70.0% of current simulations, just ahead of Leicester (67.0%).
New Leicester boss Ruud van Nistelrooy watched on from the stands as the Foxes were thrashed 4-1 at Brentford this weekend, but the Dutch coach will take over with Leicester outside of the relegation zone, in 16th on 10 points.
Wolves sit in the final relegation place ahead of the midweek matchday in the Premier League after they suffered a 4-2 home loss to Bournemouth on Saturday.
Gary O’Neil’s men have started as badly before and survived, though. Back in 2010-11 they also had nine points from 13 matches but finished in 17th place and avoided relegation to the second tier. The latest supercomputer projections see them relegated to the Championship 28.0% of the time.
Everton’s winless Premier League run stretched to five games following a 4-0 defeat at Manchester United on Sunday. Just as worrying as the results are their lack of goals, with this weekend’s defeat their fourth successive league game without scoring.
As things stand, Everton are relegated at the end of the season in just over a quarter (26.6%) of the 10,000 supercomputer simulations, making them more than twice as likely to go down as Crystal Palace (12.5%).
Palace drew 1-1 at home to Newcastle on Saturday, despite only allowing their opponents one shot in the whole match. That result means they have lost just one of their last six competitive matches (W2 D3 L1), however, and seem to have turned the corner after an eight-game winless streak in the Premier League to start the season.
18 November
While the middle of the Premier League table is officially as congested as it has ever been, the story at the bottom is a little different. Southampton are already four points from safety, with the gap between them and 17th-placed Ipswich Town the same as the gap between Manchester United in 13th and Chelsea in 3rd.
Saints suffered a particularly damaging defeat to fellow relegation candidates Wolves last time out, and they remain the overwhelming favourites for relegation with the Opta supercomputer. Their chances of going back down to the Championship are now as high as 94.8%.
Russell Martin’s side were the model’s pre-season favourites to go down, but a poor start has added almost 30 percentage points to their relegation possibility (they’d sat at 66.7% before a ball was kicked).
Despite currently sitting just outside the relegation zone, it’s Ipswich who are the model’s next most likely team to go down. Their odds of relegation currently sit at 67.1%. That’s basically flat from where they were at the start of the season (64.7%), and their brilliant 2-1 away win at Spurs – their first of the season – has done a lot to bring that number down recently.
It’s the third of the promoted teams, Leicester, who come next, on 54.6%. After back-to-back victories in October, Steve Cooper’s men are now winless in their last three, and things appear to be about to get harder. A home encounter against Chelsea is the start of a very difficult set of fixtures for the Tigers; only Everton have a more difficult next 10 fixtures according to the Opta Power Rankings.
That’s why Everton (17.6%) have a slightly higher chance of relegation than you might think. Having started the season with four consecutive defeats, Sean Dyche’s men have bounced back well, losing just one of their last seven matches. Their December run is particularly challenging, though, as they face Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City and then Nottingham Forest in a tough five-game stretch.
Southampton’s upcoming fixture list is pretty brutal, too, with their next five fixtures pitching them against Liverpool, Brighton, Chelsea, Aston Villa and Tottenham.
After the hardest start to the season in terms of fixture difficulty, Wolves will be relieved to know that their fixture list opens up somewhat for a while. Only Chelsea and Brighton have an easier next set of fixtures based on the Opta Power Rankings.
They’ll hope to build on their first win of the season when they visit Fulham this weekend, although they haven’t won successive Premier League matches since February last season. On the road they’re winless in their last 11 league matches (D4 L7), conceding 28 goals in that time. At 43.4% they are still under huge threat of relegation.
Crystal Palace (16.9%) are the sixth-most likely team to suffer the drop. Given the impact that Oliver Glasner had when he took over in 2023-24, their poor start to the season has surprised many, not least the supercomputer, who had Palace as a top-half team at the start of the campaign.
In reality, they have registered just seven points from their opening 11 league games this season (W1 D4 L6), only picking up fewer points at this stage of a Premier League campaign in 2013-14 (4) and 2017-18 (4).
Palace are actually 15th in Opta’s expected points table, which takes into account teams’ underlying performance metrics. Glasner’s men have been creating plenty of chances, it’s just finishing woes that have really hurt them. They have the worst differential of any team between their expected goals and actual goals scored in the Premier League this season (-6.0, 14.0 xG, 8 scored), as well as having the worst conversion rate (5.1%).
The Opta supercomputer backs them to turn it around, though, with the Eagles predicted to finish 16th.
West Ham (3.1%) and Brentford (1.2%) are the only other teams in the division given a relegation probability of above 1%. Both sides will be fine, though, honest.
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