Player Fatigue Rankings: Which Premier League Teams Have Managed Their Squad the Best? ...Middle East

We look at running metrics, squad rotation, injuries and more to try to work out how fatigue might affect each Premier League team in the final four months of the season.

And breathe.

After a packed festive schedule that seems to get busier and longer with each passing year, we have now reached the relative serenity of a January midweek in which the only football any of the Premier League’s clubs face is two EFL Cup semi-finals.

So, following a taxing 15-day period in which all 20 top-flight clubs played three league games and an FA Cup tie, all but four of them will be getting a well-earned week off.

Ever since the November international break, the games have come relentlessly. The demand on the players has been extreme. “The schedule’s crazy,” as Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice put it earlier this month.

Almost always able to contend with this kind of fixture pile-up, even Rice was forced to sit out Arsenal’s meeting with Aston Villa at the end of last year due to injury. It was only the fourth Premier League game he had missed since joining the club in 2023.

And after his return, was it any coincidence that his side produced such an uneventful match when they met Liverpool last week? There’s every chance both teams had been content with a draw and took a cautious approach through fear of losing. Perhaps it was nothing to do with having a tired squad, but there’s also the very real possibility that fatigue contributed.

This isn’t limited to these teams, either. That was the fifth Premier League game to end goalless since Christmas Day, meaning five of the last 30 matches have failed to produce a goal, or 16.7%. Before that, there had been 10 goalless draws in the first 180 fixtures of the season, a significantly lower rate of just 5.6%.

Goalless draws don’t necessarily mean teams are playing badly or failing to attack, or that anyone on the pitch is more tired than usual, but it is interesting that so many games ended without a goal during the busy festive period. Arsenal and Liverpool combined for just 0.89 xG in their match, the third-lowest figure of any Premier League game this season.

Again, we can’t say for sure whether fatigue was an issue, but it would be understandable if it was. Premier League players are given a huge workload; Christmas can be knackering for the best of us, so just imagine what it feels like to play four lots of 90 minutes in that time.

So, as we reach the downtime that is the weekend just gone of FA Cup third-round ties, a competition that isn’t the priority for top-level teams that it once was, followed by a midweek of EFL Cup semi-finals, and with it a first seven-day break from Premier League football since November, it’s a good time to try to work out which teams are in the best shape going forward.

With that in mind, we’ve looked at some of the factors that could affect the rest of the campaign. How much has each team rotated in 2025-26? How much effort have they had to put in? How much do they sprint, and how often are they forced to make lung-busting recovery runs?

We’ve used our treasure troves of data to tot up each team’s games played, starting XI changes, number of players who have played almost every game, distance covered, sprints, pressures, off-the-ball runs, recovery runs, and number of injuries to try give us a better idea of which teams could accelerate in the final four months of the campaign, and who might find it hard to keep pace.

First, a disclaimer: this is very much not an exact science. There are a fair few limitations to what we’ve done. For example, it isn’t entirely fair comparing how many sprints teams’ players have made, or the distance they’ve run, and assuming that those who have done more work will be struggling more than the other. The team who have run more might just be fitter.

Meanwhile, an issue with looking at changes to the starting XI is that one team might have made more changes because they were forced to due to injuries, while another might have rotated because the fixture list allowed them to rest players in alternate games. Opta don’t track injuries – we’ve got the numbers used here on current injuries in each squad from the brilliant website premierinjuries.com – and unfortunately, we can’t break starting XI changes down into whether they were enforced or whether they were a result of rotation.

But we have tried to pick a broad range of statistics, which should help mitigate against the limitations of each individual one.

We have ranked each team in each category, with the best team in each scoring 20 points (unless first place is shared) and the worst team scoring one. We’ve then added those up to give a total score, where the highest-scoring team should, in theory, be in the best shape, and the lowest-scoring team would be in the worst position for the rest of the season. Here goes…

Games Played

The first category is a simple one: number of games played. It might seem a little reductive, but the frequency of matches is the main factor in causing fatigue and overload injuries.

The teams in the summer’s Club World Cup – which we’re counting as part of this season as those games will only exacerbate any potential fatigue issues – have played the most games, with Chelsea already having competed in 38 matches this season, and Manchester City in 35.

The teams in Europe, Crystal Palace (34), Arsenal, Tottenham, Newcastle (all 31), Liverpool (30), Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest (29 each) follow next, while at the other end of the scale, five teams have played just 23 matches. Two of those – Manchester United and Bournemouth – have already been eliminated from both domestic cup competitions and will play only 40 games all season.

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Chelsea will play at least another 22 matches this season but, incredibly, they could play another 36 times between now and the end of the campaign. It’s unlikely they will go all the way in every competition, not least because contending with 74 games in one season would be almost impossible, but that remains a possibility while they are in all four competitions. The current record for the most games played in a top-flight season is 70, by Arsenal in 1979-80 and Stoke City in 1971-72.

Chelsea don’t score well in this category as a result, but their fixture list might be the reason they fare better in the next one…

Starting XI Changes

Rotation is crucial these days, with the game speeding up and players asked to run, sprint and press more than ever before. The easiest way to track rotation is through the number of changes made to the starting XI from week to week.

Just looking at Premier League games, Chelsea have managed their squad the best, having made 66 changes to their starting XI between matches, which is at least eight more than any other team, at an average of 3.1 changes per game. Injuries have played their part, but former manager Enzo Maresca chopped and changed his lineup more consistently than anyone else.

Wolves, who may be on course to break records for all the wrong reasons, potentially have hope in how much their team has been rotated. They have made the second-most changes to their starting XI (58).

That could be something to do with the switch in the dugout and current boss Rob Edwards playing a pretty different team to the one that started the season so badly under Vítor Pereira. Whatever the reason, it remains a fact that they should in theory have one of the freshest squads in the league. They have also played just 25 games this season.

Tottenham (55 changes), Newcastle (51), Aston Villa (49) and Bournemouth (48) are the next in this particular list.

At the other end of it, Crystal Palace have relied heavily on a core group of players. Oliver Glasner has made by far the fewest changes to his starting XI this season, at least nine fewer than anyone else (22).

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that their form has dipped; they are without a win in six in the Premier League – nine in all competitions after their historic failure against Macclesfield at the weekend – and have slumped to 13th in the table, having been fourth as recently as 12 December. Some more fresh faces in the January window and the return from AFCON of a key player in Ismaïla Sarr could not be more needed.

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Number of Players to Start 18+ Games

As one former Premier League physiotherapist explained to Opta Analyst, “there’s no single number [of starts] that could be applied to every single player, because every player prepares, recovers and plays differently.” In other words, it’s impossible to pick a number and say that many games is too many games.

Rules are there to be broken, though, and for the purposes of our research, we have fairly arbitrarily chosen 18 matches as the magic number. Starting fewer than 18 out of 21 games would mean a player had been rested, on average, more than every seven games, which feels like a perfectly reasonable amount to expect. Anyone playing 18 or more would have been given very little rest and might well feel the effects of playing so much in the second half of the campaign. (Yes, we’re aware that some players can just stay fit and play every game.)

Despite so many changes to their starting lineup, Chelsea have the joint-most players in their squad who have started at least 18 games (six), suggesting their rotation has tended to come in the other positions. João Pedro, Enzo Fernández, Pedro Neto, Trevoh Chalobah, Marc Cucurella and Robert Sánchez have each started 18+ games, so it would be understandable if any of them needed a rest or suffered a drop-off in form in the second half of the season.

Palace, unsurprisingly, are another of the teams with six players in this category, as are Everton, who ranked second-bottom for starting XI changes (31). David Moyes has put his trust in a key group, and while it worked well earlier in the season, they, like Palace, have seen their form stutter.

Everton have won just one of their last six games; the start of that run was, presumably, not entirely coincidentally, the game in which Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, who had started 15 of their 16 Premier League games up to that point, suffered a hamstring injury – precisely the type of injury most associated with overuse – from which he is yet to recover. Relying too heavily on certain players has led to injuries and below-par results without some of those key men.

However, a reliance on a small group is having less impact on Sunderland. They have made just 32 starting XI changes and have five players who have made 18+ starts, but they appear to have navigated the period when they had to make do without seven players at AFCON very well indeed. After beating Newcastle, they also picked up points against Brighton, Leeds, Manchester City and Tottenham across December and January.

In João Gomes, Wolves have only one player to have started 18+ games, which could serve as another small reason to believe they could improve in the second half of the season. Newcastle (two), West Ham and Manchester United (three) come next in the list, but they all have at least two central midfielders to have started most of their games, and may need to rotate better in those positions to avoid an injury to a key player in the middle.

Distance Run

Two teams might have played the same number of matches, but it’s worth getting into how much work they have to put in. The most basic measure of that is distance run.

Manchester City’s players have covered more ground than any other team in the Premier League this season, collectively running an average of 115.6 km per game, followed by Leeds, Arsenal and Newcastle.

Whether those teams have done so because their manager is more demanding than others or because the players simply work harder isn’t possible to say, but whatever the explanation, City have put in more hard yards than other teams. This, combined with the fact they played in the Club World Cup and are still fighting on four fronts, could lead to fatigue being an issue.

Chelsea have run the least in the Premier League this season, covering more than 10 km per game less than City. Perhaps this is because they have played so many matches this season, or perhaps it is part of a gameplan that could help them contend with such a fixture-heavy campaign that also began in the USA way back in the summer.

Sprints

Arguably a better measure of how much energy and effort players have had to expend is the number of sprints. These are defined as “when a player moves with a speed of 25 km/h or higher for at least one second.” Essentially, high-intensity runs, the type of which it is very possible to do too many.

Mad-house pressers Bournemouth have sprinted more than anyone else this season, followed by Tottenham, Brighton and Newcastle. Meanwhile, Fulham, West Ham and Everton have made the fewest.

From this list, it doesn’t appear as though there is any correlation between sprints and success; none of the teams at either extreme have fared particularly well this season. You could therefore argue that being closest to the league average is best.

However, it is surely better to have sprinted less by this stage of the season, with the rest of the campaign in mind. These numbers are especially interesting in the context of injury numbers in each squad (more on this later). Keen sprinters Bournemouth, Tottenham and Newcastle are all at the wrong end of the table when it comes to the current tally of injuries in their squads.

Pressures and Runs

This category sums up two metrics that clock off-the-ball efforts to get on the ball.

Pressures are “when a player on the defending team approaches the player in possession with the aim of either winning back the ball or limiting their passing options”. Runs – all made off-the-ball for the team in possession – are “high-intensity movements by a player not in possession of the ball, lasting at least two seconds. The player’s maximum speed must be at least 20 km/h” – lower than that of a sprint.

We have paired these together to amalgamate off-the-ball work with intent: out-of-possession attempts to put pressure on the ball, plus in-possession runs to receive the ball or create space for others. Basically, these are runs that put stress on the mind and body.

Lowly Burnley have made the most of these runs, followed by Crystal Palace; two struggling teams who rank bottom and fourth-bottom for average possession, showing that not having much of the ball puts more demand on teams.

The teams having the most success this season are at the opposite end of the list. Aston Villa have made the fewest pressures and runs, followed by Chelsea, Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Man Utd and Newcastle.

That’s seven of the current top eight in the Premier League table, and the entire top seven for possession, each averaging more than 53.0% of the ball. These teams are able to rest by keeping hold of the ball, which could be an important factor in the busy remaining months of the season.

Recovery Runs

A subset of the aforementioned “runs” metric, recovery runs – known in our database as “tracking back to position” – are worthy of their own category because these put so much strain on the player making them. Think of how Ben White pulled his hamstring chasing down Hwang Hee-chan for Arsenal against Wolves on a cold December night last month, or how Micky van de Ven’s hamstrings kept pinging while playing Ange Postecoglou’s high line for Spurs last season.

These runs – defined as “a run back towards their team’s end of the pitch to regain their defensive position, starting in the opposition’s half” – often require players to push themselves too much to try to keep up with an opponent, sometimes to prevent a big chance. These can mean defenders have to run faster than they have in a pressured environment for a long time, without any preparation whatsoever.

And just this weekend in the FA Cup, Tino Livramento tracked back for Newcastle to make a last-ditch tackle as Bournemouth forward Eli Junior Kroupi bore down on goal, and pulled his hamstring in the process. Scans on Tuesday revealed serious damage that means he could be out for eight weeks as a result.

That is particularly noteworthy because it is Newcastle who lead the way in the Premier League this season for recovery runs, with 857, or almost 41 per game. Their total is 368 more than Everton, who earn the most points in this category, having made the fewest recovery runs. The tireless Joelinton has made 83 tracking-back runs alone.

Recovery runs usually suggest a vulnerability to turnovers of possession and quick transitions, which are difficult to defend against in large quantities. Newcastle’s rate might not be sustainable for the rest of the season, particularly considering their injury numbers…

Current Injuries

Obviously, injuries aren’t only the result of being overworked. It’s a little unfair to dock Brighton points for Stefanos Tzimas rupturing his ACL or Tottenham for the fact that Dejan Kulusevski is still out after injuring his knee badly in an innocuous-looking incident last season.

But we can’t go through every single injury, attributing a reason for each one to split them up into those that were avoidable and those that were just down to bad luck. So, a simple list of the number of injuries in each squad will have to suffice.

Crystal Palace have got the most injuries in the Premier League at the time of writing, with nine players out, which might have something to do with the aforementioned fact they have made by far the fewest changes to their starting XI.

Newcastle, who lead the league for recovery runs, are second, with eight. In joint third with seven apiece are Burnley, who have made the most pressures and runs, Bournemouth, who have made the most sprints, Manchester City, who lead the league for distance covered, and Chelsea, who have played the most matches this season.

On this evidence, there may be some link between energy expended and injuries.

And what makes this worse for these teams is that once you’re in an injury crisis, it’s very difficult to get out of it. Absences mean other players are forced to play more (without as many rotation options available), which in turn increases the chance of more injuries. Managers can also be tempted into bringing players back too soon, which can also cause more problems.

Faring much better in this regard are Man Utd, who have just one injury at the time of writing, and West Ham, who have two. And as things happen, they are the two teams who score best overall…

Total Score

We’ve added up each team’s score in each category and can now reveal that by the measure of our not-at-all-scientific process, struggling West Ham are in the best shape. They haven’t played many games, have rotated pretty well, don’t run or sprint a great deal, and that all means they don’t have many injuries.

The only thing with West Ham, currently mired in the relegation zone and looking pretty hopeless in every sense, is that not running doesn’t seem to have got them very far. Their position in this list might give some cause for optimism that they can find reserves of energy to make the second half of the season less miserable, but they need results sooner rather than later.

Manchester United are in second place, not far behind West Ham, so they could be well set for a push for Champions League qualification, currently just three points off the top four. With so few games to play this season, they might be able to play a consistent team in the remainder of the campaign, which could increase their chances of making the reign of Michael Carrick, their new interim head coach, a success.

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Aston Villa’s position in third place is interesting given they are only six points off top spot. Have they set themselves up for a push for the title between now and May? And have Wolves got a chance of a great escape, ranking fourth in our system?

Things look less rosy for Palace, who are well adrift at the bottom of the list and have been in freefall for weeks. They are unlikely to get dragged into a relegation fight, but even though they are only five points off the top five, they are in danger of letting this opportunity to challenge for another season in Europe pass them by with a stretched squad.

Meanwhile, City’s position near the bottom may suggest they will lose ground in the title race to Arsenal, who are in better shape, in the middle of the table.

So, there you have it, all for a bit of fun and without much basis in science, we have our rankings for which teams have set themselves up the best for a positive last four months of 2025-26.

We’ll find out between now and May just how much running, sprinting, playing lots of games, rotation and injuries affect the second half of the season.

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Player Fatigue Rankings: Which Premier League Teams Have Managed Their Squad the Best? Opta Analyst.

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