We’re just five matchdays into the 2026-27 Premier League season, but some interesting patterns are already beginning to emerge. Here are five league-wide trends we’ve spotted.
Is Home Advantage Gone?
OK, ‘gone’ might be an oversimplification. ‘Evaporating’ could be more accurate.
However you put it, the home win percentage in the Premier League is just 36.0% this season, the lowest rate in the competition’s history. It’s even lower than in the COVID-affected 2020-21 campaign, when the majority of matches were played without fans in stadiums.
Ithiel Piñero / Data AnalystThe fading importance of home advantage is part of a wider trend. As you can see above, four of the six lowest home win rates in Premier League history have come this decade. Of course, teams would still much prefer to play at home than away, but the extent to which doing so provides an advantage appears to be falling.
So, where have all those home wins gone?
The answer is that they’re broadly becoming draws rather than away wins. There have been 16 draws in the first 50 matches this season, meaning 32.0% of games have finished level. That’s the highest draw percentage of any Premier League season.
Away wins are also fairly prevalent – 32.0% (16/50) is still the seventh-highest on record – but it’s not as notable as the increase in draws.
Matchday 4 of the Premier League was a good demonstration of this pattern. Across the 10 matches, there was just one home win (Leeds’ 4-1 win against Newcastle), while four of the other nine games finished level.
Had Leeds drawn or lost against Newcastle, MD4 would have become just the fourth matchday in Premier League history not to feature a single home win, and the first since September 2000.
Scoring First No Longer a Guarantee of Success
One reason why draws are at an all-time high could be because sides are struggling to hold onto leads this season.
A team has scored first in 45 of the 50 Premier League games played so far, but only 29 of those sides have gone on to win. That gives teams scoring first a win rate of just 64.4%, the second-lowest percentage across the last 14 years, and the fourth-lowest in the campaign’s history.
Ithiel Piñero / Data AnalystBournemouth have been the biggest culprits. They’ve dropped seven points in games that they’ve scored in first already, with Brentford next on six. Overall, the Cherries have dropped nine points from winning positions having taken the lead in four of their five matches but have failed to win any of them.
Do Teams Want Less Possession?
They say football is cyclical.
When Pep Guardiola joined Manchester City in 2016-17, his arrival led to a revolution in how Premier League sides wanted to play.
Goalkeepers increasingly played shorter, teams became more committed to building from the back, and it felt like monopolising possession became an objective in itself.
Many teams, to varying degrees, tried to replicate Guardiola’s tactics.
But as that style became dominant, opponents increasingly adapted to counter it. Winning the ball back and attacking quickly and vertically in transition has become more popular in recent seasons. And it is becoming increasingly effective, too.
There have been 22 matches this season in which a team has enjoyed at least 60% possession. On only eight occasions has that side gone on to win.
That equates to a win rate of just 36.4%, the third lowest in a Premier League season since we have detailed possession data available (from 2005-06).
It follows last season’s record-low rate of 34.1%. Teams are now set up to be more and more successful without the ball.
Another way to measure that shift is through the rise of counter-attacking football.
Fast breaks – defined as a quick counter-attack beginning in the defensive half against an opposition defence that is at least partially unsorted – are an excellent proxy for measuring counters.
This season, on a per-game basis, total fast breaks (2.4), fast breaks resulting in shots (2.1), and fast breaks resulting in goals (0.3) are all at their highest levels since they started being collected in 2006-07.
Chelsea are a good illustration of this.
Given the talent in their squad and their lofty ambitions, you might expect Xabi Alonso to build a side designed to dominate games through possession. Instead, Chelsea are averaging just 47.1% of the ball this season, their lowest figure on record in a Premier League campaign.
In their 4-3 win against Brighton, Chelsea had just 25.6% possession and completed 155 passes. Both were their lowest recorded figures in a Premier League match since Opta records began in 2005-06. And yet they scored four goals.
No team has recorded more than their totals for fast breaks (14), shots from fast breaks (11) or goals from fast breaks (3).
With a lightning-quick front three who excel when attacking space, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’ve looked more dangerous in games without the ball, than in matches against Hull (2-2 draw) and Brentford (3-0 loss), when they’ve had the majority of the ball (68.3% and 59.8% possession, respectively).
New Refereeing Directives Are Speeding Up Restarts
New refereeing directives have been implemented this season by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in an attempt to curb the amount of time players and teams can waste during matches.
Two of the main changes concern throw-ins and goal-kicks, where a five-second rule has been introduced for both restarts after successful implementation at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Based on the early-season data, the changes look to be having the desired effect.
Opta have ball-in-play data for the Premier League since the start of the 2015-16 season, not only for overall match time, but for specific events as well.
Throw-ins are taking an average of just 15.3 seconds this season, down 2.5 seconds from 17.8 last term.
That’s the lowest average since 2016-17 (15.2 seconds) and, as the graph below shows, a big drop from last season.
Saving 2.5 seconds per throw might not seem like a lot in isolation, but when you factor in how many throw-ins there actually are, the time saving adds up quickly.
If throw-ins continue to be taken at the same rate (15.3 seconds per throw) and the same number of throws are taken as last season (13,615), Premier League fans would collectively spend more than nine and a half hours less waiting for throw-ins to be taken. On a per-game basis, that works out at almost a minute and a half less waiting time (88.5 secs).
Goal-kicks are also being taken noticeably faster. At 27.7 seconds each this season, it is the lowest average on record.
Last season was the first on record in which the average time taken to restart play from a goal-kick crept above 30 seconds, reaching 30.4, but that has fallen by almost three seconds in the opening weeks of this campaign.
There were 5,901 goal-kicks in the Premier League last season. Again, if we saw the same number this term, a saving of 2.7 seconds per goal-kick would amount to more than four hours and 40 minutes across the campaign. Per game, that works out at almost 42 seconds saved.
A Resurgence in Direct Free-Kick Goals
Let’s end with a fun one. What do Nilson Angulo, Anton Stach and Enzo Fernández all have in common?
They’ve each scored a direct free-kick in the Premier League this season.
It’s early days, of course, but three of the 40 direct free-kick attempts this campaign have gone in. That’s a 7.5% conversion rate, the highest figure in a single Premier League campaign since 2013-14 (39 of 486), back when Yaya Touré, Leighton Baines and Robert Snodgrass were banging them in.
In the age of expected goals, players are still very selective about when to shoot from free-kicks; there have been just 0.8 direct free-kick attempts per game this season, the fifth-lowest rate on record.
But that’s having a positive effect in terms of their conversion rate. We’ve seen a direct free-kick goal in one in every 16.6 matches so far, the highest rate since 2019-20 (14.6).
It’s too early to tell whether that conversion rate will hold up, but long may the long-range crackers continue.
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What’s Different About the Premier League This Season? Five Trends We’ve Spotted in 2026-27 Opta Analyst.
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