One Stat to Sum Up 2026-27 So Far for Every Premier League Team ...Middle East

Is it possible to summarise the 2026-27 Premier League season so far through just one statistic for each of the 20 teams? We’ve given it a go.

Five matchdays into the 2026-27 season, the Premier League table is looking rather better for some teams (Manchester City, Brighton, Brentford, Hull) than it is for others (Spurs, Fulham, Bournemouth).

But while the actual table is all that really matters, a look into the numbers shows there is more to the Premier League than meets the eye.

With that in mind, we’ve found one statistic that summarises each team’s campaign. From mitigating factors and reasons to be positive to concerning issues and damning truths, in order of current league position, this is the season so far in one stat for each team.

Manchester City

Just five games into the Enzo Maresca era, Manchester City sit top of the pile with the only remaining 100% record in the top four tiers of English football.

They have done it not by leaning on a solid defence but instead through an extremely talented and ruthlessly efficient attack. They are averaging higher-quality chances than any other team in the Premier League this season, with the average expected goals value of their non-penalty shots the best of the lot (0.15). That has helped them maintain the best non-penalty conversion rate, too (19.1%).

This is the 15th instance of a team winning their first five games of a Premier League season but, perhaps surprisingly, only four of the previous 14 have gone on to win the title. City’s lethal attack gives them as good a chance as any of joining the title-winning group.

Arsenal

Arsenal have the talent to beat anyone – yes, the Brighton defeat was an off day – but they also know how important it is to better your opponents when it comes to physical effort.

Across their first five games, Mikel Arteta’s men have run 22.7 kilometres more than their opponents, the biggest positive difference of any team so far.

The fact that they have more of the ball – often significantly so, averaging 59.5% possession – makes this statistic even more stark: Arsenal’s players work incredibly hard both in and out of possession. Sometimes, hard work trumps talent.

Brighton

Speaking of physical effort, no other team has embodied the importance of hard work, specifically when out of possession, more than Brighton, whose high press has functioned brilliantly so far.

Fabian Hürzeler’s impressive side have enforced a suffocating high press to devastating effect, with the lowest PPDA (opposition passes per defensive action) rate (7.4) of every team in the Premier League, which shows how little time they give their opponents without putting pressure on them.

That has resulted in Brighton forcing more high turnovers (56) than any other team in the Premier League this season.

Brentford

It helps when you’re trying not to lose matches if you never go behind, and Brentford have very nearly done just that so far this season.

Over their five Premier League matches, they have been trailing for just three minutes and 10 seconds, all of which came when they briefly went 2-1 down away to Bournemouth before equalising shortly afterwards.

That accounts for just 0.6% of their entire season so far which is, unsurprisingly, the lowest of all top-flight teams. They therefore remain one of just five undefeated sides and, flying high in fourth, will clearly take some beating.

Leeds

Leeds have become a very good multi-faceted team under Daniel Farke, and while they are by no means reliant on set-pieces, they do use them more than most.

They are top of the Premier League this season for the proportion of their shots (46.7%) and xG (41.0%) which have been generated at non-penalty set-pieces. They have scored three of their seven goals from dead-ball situations, too.

Set-pieces aren’t the reason that Leeds are fifth in the table and one of the five remaining unbeaten sides, but they are clearly a significant part of the reason. Leeds are using dead balls better than most, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Liverpool

With draws rescued late on against both Newcastle and Nottingham Forest, more dropped points at home to struggling Fulham, and two wins that weren’t exactly the most convincing against Ipswich and Bournemouth, it hasn’t been the strongest start to life at Anfield for Andoni Iraola.

Fans who want to see physical effort from the players might have mixed feelings about what they’ve watched so far. Liverpool rank bottom of the Premier League for distance covered (110.3 km per game), but are top for sprints (636 in total, or 127.2 per game).

Perhaps that’s an indication of precisely what their new manager wants from them: energy conserved for the moments when they have to go all out.

Results and performances might not have been the best, but the manager appears to be having an impact.

Everton

David Moyes is hardly associated with a high-pressing style of football, but the early evidence of this season is that he is asking his team to play on the front foot more than we are maybe accustomed to seeing from him.

Everton lead the Premier League this season for pressures applied in the opposition half (1,145) and in the final third (682), while no team has forced more high turnovers that have led to a shot on goal than their total of 11.

Time will tell whether this a quirk of the early part of the season or a sign of a reinvented Moyes and a new Everton.

Hull

In an era in which playing through the lines is almost an essential aspect of being a Premier League team, Hull are a bit of a throwback.

Manager Sergej Jakirovic knows his side’s limitations and has set his team up not to muck about with the ball, and to get it forward quickly. And they’ve had great success so far.

They’ve had plenty of chances (61) and have scored a decent number of goals (6), but they have put together just two ‘build-up attacks’, which are defined as open-play sequences of at least 10 passes that end in a touch in the opposition’s box or a shot.

Their rate of 0.4 build-up attacks per game is the lowest by any Premier League team in any season since 2018-19 (Cardiff City’s 0.37 per game), and the second lowest in any season in the last decade. The direct approach didn’t work for Cardiff, but it appears so far as though it might for Hull.

Newcastle

After a summer of losing quite so many key players all in one go as well as a change of manager for a completely unproven 38-year-old, it was easy to fear that Newcastle might struggle.

But they’ve made a decent start to this season, a new era defined by the regeneration of their first team. After having the sixth-oldest starting XI on average last season, Newcastle’s starting lineups have been younger than any other team in the Premier League this season (25 years, 5 days).

With a 38-year-old manager in Matthias Jaissle who also may well have his best years ahead of him, the future looks bright at St James’ Park.

Chelsea

In their first two games of the season, Chelsea gave off the brief impression that they might be very, very good straight away under Xabi Alonso, but three disappointing results in a row since have implied that it may have been a false dawn.

What appears in no doubt, however, is that this team is incredibly entertaining. Their five games have produced a truly incredible 22 goals, which is the most in the Premier League this season.

More striking, though, is the fact that they have become only the 10th team in Premier League history to both score (10) and concede (12) double figures in their first five games of the season.

Promisingly, four of the previous nine, including each of the last three (Chelsea 2019-20, Liverpool 2020-21, Aston Villa 2023-24) have gone on to finish in the top four.

Ipswich

Ipswich have shown on their Premier League return that they are worth watching right until the final whistle. In the space of five games so far, they have made it halfway to the Premier League record for 90th-minute winners in a season.

Only three have been scored by any team in the Premier League this season, but with stoppage-time goals from Jack Clarke against Sunderland and Zian Flemming against Crystal Palace, Ipswich account for two of them (Josko Gvardiol for Man City vs Bournemouth is the other).

The record for 90th-minute winners in a full season is four, meaning Gary O’Neill’s men have 33 games to score another three to set a new all-time high. Given they have also scored three other (non-match-winning) goals after the 90th minute in all competitions games this season, they are clearly a big threat late on.

Manchester United

Manchester United have dominated games far more than their lowly league position suggests. They are down in 12th in the table with just one win from five, but have got closer to goal more often than most while keeping action near their own goal to a minimum.

In fact, they have had more touches in the opposition’s box (182) than any other team in the Premier League this season, while their opponents have had fewer touches in the United box than any other side (92).

Manchester United have had more touches in the opposition box than any other Premier League team so far this season (182).They have also seen their opponents have the fewest inside their own penalty area (92). pic.twitter.com/iUr2gUWuVC

— Opta Analyst (@OptaAnalyst) September 21, 2026

And yet their goal difference is an even 0, with eight goals scored and eight goals conceded. Territory and dominance of the ball hasn’t brought great results for United so far.

Nottingham Forest

Nottingham Forest are the only team to play three home games and remain goalless in all of them.

They have also only conceded two goals at home, making the City Ground the stadium that has seen the fewest goals in the Premier League this season (two). Away from home, meanwhile, their two games have seen seven goals, and they have taken four points.

The thing about this stat is, while it might do a decent job of summing up Forest’s season so far, it is also a pattern that stretches back into the last couple of seasons. Both in 2025-26 and 2024-25, they got more of their points on the road than at home, with far more goals scored in away games. Forest season ticket holders may start reconsidering their renewals if they’re not careful.

Sunderland

Sunderland have very nearly had an exceptional start to the season. They took four points from their first three games before pushing Arsenal and then Man City close in their two games before the international break.

It could have been much better for them, too, but they’ve really been the masters of their own downfall.

Sunderland have already committed three errors leading to an opposition goal, which is more than any other team in the Premier League this season and already as many as two teams (Bournemouth and Leeds) made in the whole of last season.

And to boot, they also account for one of the three missed penalties and one of the six red cards. They need to stop shooting themselves in the foot.

Crystal Palace

Like many other clubs around the middle of the Premier League, Crystal Palace always have to make do with a great deal of player turnover. This summer was no different, while they also saw a change in the dugout.

And while having to deal with things like Jean-Phillippe Mateta reportedly wanting to leave and Daniel Muñoz actually leaving, new boss Pierre Sage has also found it difficult to work out his best team.

He has used an unbelievable 27 different players already this season, which equals the record after five games of any Premier League season (alongside Arsenal in 2011-12).

Last season, Palace used 30 players all season; going on the evidence of the start of 2026-27, they’ll be past that tally by the start of winter.

Aston Villa

Even though they have visited the most welcoming hosts the Premier League has seen in years (Tottenham), Aston Villa still rank bottom of all 20 teams this season for expected goals (4.56), shots attempted (48) and shots on target (12).

They have found chances extremely difficult to create, and even when they scored three at Spurs, they relied on some exceptional finishing from Nicolas Jackson and Emi Buendía to complete the victory.

The volume of player churn at Villa Park is a big mitigating factor, but Unai Emery will know he needs to get his players creating opportunities more reliably if they are to shoot up the table.

Bournemouth

It’s mildly impressive how effectively Bournemouth have thrown away leads this season. Just five games into 2026-27, they have dropped nine points from winning positions; the only game in which they didn’t throw away a lead was the only game in which they didn’t score – the 1-0 home defeat to Liverpool.

Over the course of the Premier League era, there have been 79 instances of teams dropping fewer than nine points from leading positions over an entire season, and Bournemouth are already past all of them.

If they were to carry on at their current rate of an average of 1.8 points dropped from a winning position per game, they would end up throwing away a whopping 68 points this season. To say that would obliterate the current record of 33 would be just a bit of an understatement.

Coventry

Before the 1-0 win at Nottingham Forest just before the international break, the outlook for Coventry was a little bit bleak. Goalless and pointless through four games, talk of an immediate return to the Championship had already begun.

But a goal and a win came on Matchday 5 and, for those who’d been looking at their underlying data, that may not have been too much of a surprise.

Coventry have underperformed compared to their expected goals to a greater degree than any other team in the Premier League this season. With one goal from 4.88 xG, their -3.88 underperformance is larger than any other team.

The hope for Frank Lampard will be that his team start to score more in line with their xG as the weeks go on.

Fulham

Fulham have leaked chances far too readily this season, and big ones, too.

Their opponents have had 20 big chances – defined as a chance you’d reasonably expect to be scored – against them, which is the most of all Premier League teams this season.

Their current rate of 4.0 big chances conceded per game is the second highest by any team in any of the last 10 Premier League seasons, after the miserable Southampton side of 2024-25, who finished the season with 12 points.

Fulham surely won’t carry on at this rate, but they really need to shore things up at the back.

Tottenham

Spurs are bottom of the table after their worst ever start to a Premier League season, but beyond their terrible results, there has been a disjointed nature to much of what they’ve done, and that can be attributed to the number of new players manager Roberto De Zerbi is trying to bed in simultaneously.

Tottenham have handed 26 starts to players who didn’t play a game for them last season, which is by far the most by any team in the Premier League this season, nine ahead of second place (Chelsea – 17). They are only the 12th team in Premier League history to give 26+ starts to new players after five games. Six of the previous 11 have finished 17th or lower.

It is understandable that they’re taking a while to get going, but they need to click soon enough, or they could start sinking without trace.

Enjoy this? Subscribe to our football newsletter to receive exclusive weekly content. You should also follow our social accounts over on X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

One Stat to Sum Up 2026-27 So Far for Every Premier League Team Opta Analyst.

Hence then, the article about one stat to sum up 2026 27 so far for every premier league team was published today ( Monday 05/10/2026 - 11:03 AM ) and is available on The Analyst ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( One Stat to Sum Up 2026-27 So Far for Every Premier League Team )

For more, read the news from the source

Last updated : 05 October 2026 clock 11:03 AM

Also on site :