With six games remaining in the 2025-26 Premier League season, we give the four teams still fighting relegation one reason to be optimistic and one reason to be less so.
That was a bad, bad, bad weekend of Premier League football for Tottenham Hotspur.
Roberto De Zerbi oversaw another Spurs defeat in his first game as their manager, while their rivals in the relegation battle all picked up points. West Ham battered Wolves, Nottingham Forest scraped a point against Aston Villa, and Leeds won away to Manchester United for the first time in the league since 1981.
Spurs, meanwhile, are in freefall. They haven’t won a Premier League game since December, and are now in the bottom three, two points adrift of safety and are the favourites for the drop.
A first relegation since 1977 would be a catastrophe for a club who were in the Champions League this season, but it is becoming an increasingly realistic possibility.
The relegation battle isn’t, however, done and dusted. It might feel right now like everything is pointing towards Spurs going down, but there are still six rounds of games to be played and that means 18 points on offer for each team.
A lot can change very quickly in football. Just ask Arsenal, who were on for the quadruple ahead of the EFL Cup final, and now they’re suddenly in danger of throwing the title away, having also been knocked out of two other competitions.
With that in mind, there are reasons for hope and to fear the worst for each of the four teams who could join Burnley and Wolves – who are near certain for relegation – in the Championship next season.
Tottenham
Points: 30Opta Supercomputer Chances of Relegation: 49.5%
Reason to be Cheerful
It might not feel like it, but there are still many eventualities that see Spurs survive. Each of their three relegation rivals have it in them to go on a bad run, which could hand Tottenham the opportunity to claw their way back towards safety.
Forest have won one of their last nine games, while Leeds’ win at Old Trafford on Monday was their first in seven. Both teams also have the distraction of another competition.
West Ham are in the best form of the four teams, but they also have the toughest remaining fixtures of any of them, according to the Opta Power Rankings. Until they face Leeds on the final day of the season, West Ham have five tricky-looking assignments.
Tottenham, meanwhile, have three winnable (yes, really) home fixtures against Brighton, Leeds and Everton, while they also travel to rock-bottom Wolves. Their display in the draw at Liverpool last month could also give them hope for trips to Chelsea and Aston Villa.
The Opta supercomputer has them has favourites to go down, but there are still (just about) more simulations in which Spurs survive (50.5%) than not (49.5%). It’s a slim hope, but Tottenham have to cling to something.
Reason to be Fearful
Put simply, Tottenham’s form is atrocious. They are on their longest run without a league victory since the 1930s. Only Derby in 2008 (18), Sunderland in 2003 (17) and Swindon Town in 1993 (15) have had longer winless runs to start a calendar year in the Premier League than Tottenham in 2026 (14). Ominously, all three of those clubs were relegated after those runs.
Roberto De Zerbi’s first match in charge brought little change in form or fortunes. They lost 1-0 at Sunderland, and they were low on luck, too, as they have been all season, with Nordi Mukiele’s winner taking a huge deflection and captain Cristian Romero sustaining a season-ending knee injury.
The main reason to fear for Spurs is that they have been drifting towards this position for a long, long time. They need something drastic to change, and fast, at at time when they have shown little to no sign of being able to do that in recent months. It doesn’t look good at all.
West Ham
Points: 32Opta Supercomputer Chances of Relegation: 38.8%
Reason to be Cheerful
West Ham are on a genuinely decent run of form, having taken seven points from their last four games. Only Arsenal, Manchester City, Brighton and Sunderland have earned more from their last four matches.
They appear to believe fully in the instructions that Nuno Espírito Santo is giving them, and after a 4-0 win over Wolves last time out, they will be full of confidence heading into the final half-dozen games of the season.
They took a gamble in January on Taty Castellanos and it appears to be paying off handsomely. He scored a brace in the win over Wolves, but more broadly, he has also brought a presence and focus to West Ham’s front line that was lacking before he joined.
Momentum is key at this stage of the season, and West Ham have plenty of it.
Reason to be Fearful
As mentioned above, West Ham have the toughest run-in of the four teams in the relegation battle according to the Opta Power Rankings, facing mid-table teams who are chasing European qualification in Crystal Palace, Everton, Brentford and Newcastle, as well as Arsenal, before hosting Leeds on the final day of the season.
They might have won five of their last 11 Premier League games, but most of those wins came against the current bottom three. The only other teams they have beaten are Fulham and Sunderland. West Ham have a win rate in that time against the current top 14 teams of 25%, compared to 100% against teams in the bottom six.
An unkind fixture list could prove crucial.
Nottingham Forest
Points: 33Opta Supercomputer Chances of Relegation: 10.1%
Reason to be Cheerful
Nottingham Forest might not be winning tonnes of games – they have only recorded one win in their last nine Premier League outings – but they have looked, recently at least, difficult to beat. They have now gone four games without defeat, getting draws against Manchester City (after twice going behind), Fulham, and Aston Villa.
Those results will give Vitor Pereira’s side confidence that they can take points off some of their tougher remaining opponents, who include Chelsea, Newcastle, Manchester United and Bournemouth.
They are a relatively solid side; only seven teams have conceded fewer non-penalty goals in the Premier League this season than them (39), while they rank safely in mid-table (11th) for non-penalty xG against (43.2). Those foundations could provide the base for a successful end to the season.
Own goals have no xG value so are excluded from this graphicReason to be Fearful
Forest’s problem all season has been scoring goals. Yes, they put three past Tottenham before the international break (who hasn’t?), but only Wolves (24) have scored fewer goals than them this season (32). Forest are averaging a goal a game, and if they continue to score at that meagre rate, it may prove difficult to survive.
Morgan Gibbs-White is their top scorer with nine goals, but aside from him, no Forest player has more than three. The only team with as poor a return for their second-highest scorer is Wolves (also three).
Forest have failed to score in 14 games this season, second only, again, to Wolves (16), so it isn’t unimaginable that they struggle for goals for the remainder of the season, too.
Leeds
Points: 36Opta Supercomputer Chances of Relegation: 1.6%
Reason to be Cheerful
When the Opta supercomputer ran 10,000 simulations of the rest of the season, Leeds were relegated only 161 times. In other words, the model says they only have a 1.6% chance of relegation.
That really is a minuscule possibility. It’s about the same chance as 12th-placed Fulham have of making up the eight-point gap to Liverpool and overtaking seven teams to finish in the top five and qualify for the Champions League. It’s almost certainly not going to happen.
That figure is in part so low because Leeds have the easiest run-in of every team in the league, still to face each of the league’s current bottom four clubs.
On top of that, after Monday night’s memorable win at Old Trafford, Leeds have a six-point cushion between themselves and the relegation zone. They are likely to need to win only one of their remaining six games, and given they host Wolves next, they could give their survival hopes a huge boost in just a few days’ time.
Reason to be Fearful
There really isn’t much cause for pessimism at Elland Road, but that won’t stop Leeds fans worrying that their team will go on another of their bad runs.
Through the autumn, for example, Leeds lost six out of seven games, including defeats to Spurs, Burnley and Nottingham Forest. And before the win at United this week, they had gone six games in a row without a win, failing to score in the four most recent of those. The Old Trafford win was very unexpected.
Also, the very fact that they play against Tottenham and West Ham in their remaining fixtures means that if they were to embark on a poor run, they’d be directly helping their relegation rivals.
This Leeds team is more than capable of missing the opportunity to build on that victory, and they could get dragged back into the relegation scrap if they do. It remains an outside possibility, but while it is a possibility, nobody will be making any assumptions about their safety.
*All projection numbers are accurate as of 14 April 2026.
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The Premier League Relegation Battle: One Reason to Be Cheerful and Fearful for Spurs, West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Leeds Opta Analyst.
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