Ahead of the new 2025-26 Premier League season, we ask how strong the English top flight is and outline why it might be one of the most competitive in years.
There was a building narrative last season that the Premier League was as weak as it has been in years.
Liverpool running away with the title and the three promoted clubs disappearing with barely a trace at the other end of the table, while massive clubs like Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur struggling was apparently proof that the Premier League isn’t what it used to be.
That ignored the fact the UEFA Europa League and Conference League were won by English clubs, while three Premier League teams reached the knockout stages of the Champions League and only fell when they came up against eventual winners Paris Saint-Germain.
In fact, in Liverpool (Premier League), Crystal Palace (FA Cup), Newcastle United (League Cup), Spurs (Europa League) and Chelsea (Conference League), 2024-25 was the first season in history to see five different English top-flight clubs win a major trophy.
5 – In Liverpool (Premier League), Crystal Palace (FA Cup), Newcastle United (League Cup), Tottenham Hotspur (UEFA Europa League), and Chelsea (UEFA Conference League), 2024-25 is the first season in history to see five different English clubs win a major trophy. Famous. pic.twitter.com/LEzRFNcUdB
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) May 28, 2025Spurs also beat Man Utd in the Europa League final, while Chelsea went on to add the FIFA Club World Cup to their cabinet, beating UCL winners PSG in the final over the summer.
England will have no fewer than nine teams in Europe this season, with six of those entering the Champions League at the league phase, meaning one in six teams (16.7%) in the competition at that stage will be from the Premier League.
On top of that, Palace, who finished 12th in the Premier League last season, added the Community Shield to their FA Cup by beating Liverpool on penalties on Sunday. Spurs, who finished 17th, were tremendously unlucky to lose out to PSG in the UEFA Super Cup on Wednesday, having been the better side for the majority in Udine.
You could even look at the fact the three promoted teams went back down for a second season in a row as a sign of the league’s strength. Can the Premier League be weak when no new additions are able to compete?
It seemed like those accusations more came from fan frustration at a lack of competitiveness, but that also perhaps isn’t a fair assessment either, outside of the very top and bottom of the table.
At a launch event ahead of the 2025-26 season on Wednesday, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters alluded to the top flight’s exciting competitiveness. It was standard spiel from a representative of the league at such an occasion, but did he have a point?
The title race was over with four games to go last season. Liverpool eased to first place in the end, though the fact they won just two points from their final four games after taking their foot off the pedal perhaps showed how hard it is to win in the Premier League. Anything less than 100% leaves a team vulnerable against almost anyone.
Head coach Arne Slot consistently expressed his opinion that the deep strength through the league meant his team had to work very hard for almost every win.
After their shock 3-2 loss at Fulham in April, Slot said: “We are not number one at the moment because we win every game with a margin of three or four goals. Everyone that has seen our games [knows] it takes us so much effort, so much hard work to win games of football, combined with quality of course.
“It was hard work every time we won a game of football this season, except for two or three games.”
It was the race for the Champions League spots that had many glued to the Premier League in the last few weeks of the season. It went down to the last day and saw Chelsea and Newcastle claim the last two spots, with Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest missing out.
To emphasise what a battle it was, Forest’s 65 points was the most points ever accumulated by a team who finished seventh in a Premier League season, showing how good teams had to be to finish high up the table last season.
In fact, most Premier League teams could boast at least one impressive statistic in 2024-25 that further indicated how strong the division is practically throughout.
Liverpool obviously won the league, only losing two games prior to clinching the title with four games to spare.
Their nearest challengers, Arsenal, had the best defensive record by at least seven goals (34 conceded), while Manchester City won more games (12) than anyone else in the Premier League after the turn of the year.
Chelsea finished fourth but not only became one of two English teams to win European silverware when they lifted the Conference League, but they also claimed the Club World Cup in its new expanded format, beating Champions League holders PSG in the final with relative ease.
Newcastle won 20 league games for the first time since 2002-03, while Aston Villa didn’t lose any of their last 21 home games in all competitions (W15 D6), their longest run without defeat at Villa Park since a run of 24 between September 1976 and May 1977.
Only Liverpool (49), Arsenal (47) and Man City (46) won more points against bottom-half teams than Nottingham Forest (45), who also had the third-best away record (33 points) behind only Liverpool (38) and Arsenal (35). Forest won 29 more points than the previous season, with no other team improving by more than 17 points.
Brighton & Hove Albion won 23 points from losing positions, the most of any Premier League team, while the Seagulls also won six consecutive matches in all competitions for the first time ever as a top-flight club, having never previously won more than four in a row.
Bournemouth set a new club record for points in a Premier League season with 56 – eight more than their previous best of 48 from the season before. The Cherries also ended the campaign with a positive goal difference (+12) for the first time in their Premier League history.
Brentford became the first team in Premier League history to score in the opening minute in three consecutive games, while Fulham won the second-most points in the Premier League against top-half teams (30 points) only behind Liverpool (35). Marco Silva’s men also set a new club record for Premier League points (54) and scored more goals via substitutes than any other team ever in a single Premier League campaign (17).
Crystal Palace finished in the bottom half of the Premier League but also won the FA Cup and have just added the Community Shield. The Eagles won six successive away games in all competitions for the first time ever in 2024-25, and their haul of 53 points was four more than their previous Premier League best of 49.
Everton didn’t start the season well, but from David Moyes’ first victory after returning to the club in January, only three teams won more points than the Toffees (31). There was a similarly strong finish by Wolves; only nine teams won more points than their 33 from the point Vítor Pereira was hired in December.
There were admittedly few positives for Manchester United and Tottenham, except for reaching the Europa League final, with Spurs securing their first major trophy since 2008. People took their respective struggles as proof that the league was weak, but you could equally make the argument that such massive clubs with expensively assembled squads who still proved their quality in Europe doing so badly domestically pointed to the strength of the league.
There were even fewer positives for the relegated trio of Southampton, Leicester City and Ipswich Town, but they have been replaced by Leeds United, Burnley and Sunderland. The first two both reached 100 points in the Championship last season, with Burnley becoming the first team to reach the landmark in England’s second tier and not be crowned champions.
Sunderland didn’t impress to the same extent but have made some eye-catching signings over the summer, including Granit Xhaka, Chemsdine Talbi and Simon Adingra, so will be backed to put up a bigger fight than 12-point Southampton did last season.
Another sign of the league’s competitiveness, the gap between Liverpool in first and Tottenham in 17th was just 46 points, the smallest it has been between those two positions since 2015-16 (42 points). The gap between Arsenal and Spurs was 36 points, the smallest it’s been between second and 17th since 2020-21 (35 points) and has only been smaller three times in the last 22 Premier League seasons.
There were also 93 draws in the Premier League last season, the most since 2017-18 (99). That might not seem amazing, but it came after a noticeable drop in the number of stalemates in the few prior campaigns.
In the first 25 seasons following the Premier League reducing to 20 teams, there were only three campaigns that saw fewer than 90 draws occur. The next four from 2020-21 onwards all saw fewer than 90 draws, before last season’s 93. That could perhaps be partly explained by five substitutes being allowed per team in recent years, while stoppage time has generally increased as well, which makes last season’s jump in draws to above 90 more intriguing.
On top of that, there were 137 single-goal victories in 2024-25. When looking at 20-team Premier League seasons, the first 16 up to and including 2010-11 all featured more than 230 combined draws/one-goal wins. It has only happened three times in the last nine seasons, though, with last season (230) the first time it totalled that many since 2020-21 (232).
It must be said that a lot of these numbers were consistently higher in the past. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, there were generally more draws and one-goal wins in the Premier League. In recent years, more games have been won by two or more goals, suggesting they are less competitive on average.
So, it isn’t really that last season’s Premier League was more competitive than it ever has been; it certainly wasn’t, but it was more competitive than recent seasons, especially the 2023-24 campaign, when there were only 208 combined draws/one-goal wins, the second fewest in the 20-team PL era behind only 2018-19 (206).
In fact, the 2023-24 season saw the lowest percentage of overall wins be by just one goal in a Premier League campaign (42.3%, 126 of 298).
Does it point to strength, though? Points distribution is relative – an equally weak league could see similar points gaps to an equally strong one – but there are other things that do point to stronger teams populating the Premier League, such as success in Europe as previously mentioned.
To judge the strength of teams across the Premier League, we can also look at the Opta Power Rankings, a global team ranking system that assigns an ability score to over 10,000 domestic men’s football teams on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world. The Opta Power Rankings are updated daily and currently rank teams from 183 different countries and 413 unique domestic leagues, providing a truly global rating system in men’s football.
As of 14 August 2025, six of the top nine teams in the world according to the Power Rankings are from the Premier League: Liverpool (1st), Arsenal (2nd), Man City (3rd), Chelsea (6th), Aston Villa (8th) and Newcastle (9th). For added context, Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich are 10th, last season’s Champions League finalists Inter are 11th, while Serie A champions Napoli are 17th.
All 17 Premier League teams who avoided relegation last season are in the top 40 in the world, while promoted duo Burnley (55th) and Leeds (56th) aren’t far behind. Sunderland are the lowest ranked at 82nd, one place above Rayo Vallecano, who finished eighth in La Liga last term.
Compare that to the other top five leagues in Europe, where there are only 13 teams from La Liga in the top 100 in the world, along with 12 from Serie A, 11 from Ligue 1 and 10 from the Bundesliga.
Ultimately, this is a subjective topic. Is a league strong just because it’s competitive? No, but it’s also not necessarily weak if the so-called bigger teams struggle and one runs away with the title.
We all hope for a more interesting title race and relegation battle in the 2025-26 Premier League, and don’t be surprised to see significant disparity when it comes to various season predictions ahead of the campaign’s big kick-off on Friday.
That unpredictability is really what neutral football fans want, hence why the Championship is so popular despite clearly not having the quality of the Premier League.
So, let’s just sit back and enjoy the ride. Strength is relative, but entertainment is really all we’re after.
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Could 2025-26 Be the Strongest the Premier League Has Ever Been? Opta Analyst.
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