Resetting our Premier League predictions for the end of the 2025-26 season

We had perennial bridesmaid Arsenal winning the league this season heading into the campaign, and we are sticking with that. The Gunners have had some injuries, but they are probably the best defensive team in the world. Also, crucially, Arsenal sits atop the table and what once seemed like a three-or-four-club race is down to two.

Manchester City clearly did not like giving up the throne last season. Pep Guardiola’s squad is giving Arsenal everything it can handle, and with more than half the season left we wonder if Arsenal will fold under the pressure. Betting against Manchester City under Pep has often been a fool’s errand, but for now we will stick with a second-place finish.

It’s not so much that Chelsea has played so well that we have it finishing one spot higher than in our initial predictions. No, it’s about the team we had in third more than it is about Chelsea, who has not played like a top-three squad. However, the Blues can point to Cole Palmer missing two months of the season. With their best player back, Chelsea should be able to mount the oh-so-slight rally required to finish third.

In the 2023-24 season, Villa took advantage of Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur slipping a bit (and Chelsea not improving enough) to finish fourth. The club made the Champions League and it was a grand old time. Well, Spurs and Man U have tumbled since then, so all it took was one club slipping for Villa to dream of a top-four spot. That’s not to say Aston Villa is backing into a top-four spot in our minds. The club has done well enough early on it now has a margin of error to stay in the top four.

The defending champs are out of the running. In fact, at present they stand decidedly mid-table. However, Liverpool is loaded with talent, and should benefit from accepting that Mohamed Salah is the club’s past, not present nor future. Plus, they can always sack Arne Slot for a bit of a boost. Also, for those who would argue that blue-blood clubs can and sometimes do end up mid-table or lower, that is true. We’d counter that falling from a comfortable first to an out-of-contention fifth is as precipitous a decline as falling from, say, third to 10th.

Oliver Glasner is good at securing points for Palace, even if it isn’t always fun for the neutral observer. The club has really solidified itself in recent years, but even though it won the FA Cup last season, don’t forget it finished 12th in the table. Finishing sixth would be big for the club, and we’ve already increased our positivity on it compared to preseason.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but Spurs’ record is less impressive than their goal differential would indicate. Turns out it wasn’t just an Ange Postecoglou problem perhaps. That being said, the wildness of 2024-25 when Tottenham Hotspur both finished 17th in the table and won Europa League should cede to something more normal this season. Like, say, finishing a perfectly respectable seventh.

Okay, maybe in hindsight we shouldn’t have expected Brighton to fall after it surprisingly finished eighth last season. To be fair, finishing eight last season in what felt like a reset campaign was a surprise. The Seagulls, in truth, have been as good as we expected. Turns out Fabian Hurzeler is another find at manager. It’s more that a couple of the teams we had ahead of Brighton before the season have slipped.

Sure, fine, whatever. Congratulations to Manchester United. We think you’ll be a top-half of the table team. That’s better than 15th last season but a far cry from the days of being not just a perennial contender, but a perennial league winner. Even finishing ninth is betting on United’s talent, and largesse, winning out. Ruben Amorim’s club hasn’t always looked mid-table this season.

In a way, there is a relief in knowing that a club can have more money than they know what to do with and still not build anything sustainable. Newcastle hasn’t won anything of note since being bought by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, and it’s looking like an outside top-four threat this season. Liverpool and Chelsea have both shown you can splash money on splashy names and not necessarily get results, but Newcastle’s roster simply doesn’t wow right now.

This is David Boyes’ Everton to the core. The Toffees are perfectly fine, they struggle to score, but Jordan Pickford is there to clean up the mess. It feels like it is Everton’s destiny to finish one side of the midpoint in the table or the other. Hey, beats the days of worrying about relegation.

Whoops. We were off on Sunderland. The club finally returned to the Premier League this year after winning the Championship playoff last season. Teams that do that, though, tend to go right back down. Sunderland made several roster changes, but we were skeptical. Not anymore. Sunderland soared up the table, but the drop back down to reality has already begun, and there is a lot of midtable congestion. When all is said and done, we don’t see a top-10 team here, but on the plus side the relegation fears have completely subsided.

Bournemouth is the first club on this list that, to date, has a negative goal differential. That’s not surprising given the big-name clubs that gutted the Cherries’ defense in the summer transfer window. If anything, it’s a testament to Bournemouth that we have seen enough to predict a 13th-place finish instead of 15th. Well, it’s largely a testament to Antoine Semenyo, who has been excellent.

Brentford is no longer charming or interesting. It’s just a mid-table Premier League club that probably doesn’t have to worry about relegation. Of course, it’s worth remembering how it got here. The Bees were playing League Two football in 2008-09, League One football in 2013-14, and Championship football in 2020-21. Brentford hadn’t played top-flight football in 75 years when it got promoted to the Premier League. To be, in our minds, comfortably out of the relegation race is a reminder that some clubs strive to be unremarkable.

We were as off on Forest as we were on Sunderland, but we won’t offer up any “whoops” here. Forest is mired in the relegation battle of its own volition. Namely, you can blame the tempestuous club owner Evangelos Marinakis. He couldn’t get along with Nuno Espirito Santo, the manager heavily responsible for the club finishing seven last season, leading to his exit. Marinakis then signed Ange Postecoglou, who famously needs time to get his system in place. Ange got a month before being sacked to be replaced by Sean Dyche. Even having Forest finishing 15th is to the credit of the players on the squad who have had to deal with this nonsense.

Prior to last season, we had Fulham pegged as the established Premier League club that would get relegated. That didn’t happen, and it turns out the trio that had gotten promoted last season was as terrible a collection of promoted clubs as we have seen. We came around on Fulham staying up in our first prediction reset last season, but this year we still thought it was going to be a subpar club. Nothing has changed on that front. To be fair, Fulham at least looks to be one of the clubs that is run-of-the-mill bad, not remarkably bad.

Prior to the season, we had two newly-promoted clubs going down and one staying up. The one staying up was Leeds, if only just. Well, turns out Sunderland is looking safe, so will Leeds be relegated, or will two established clubs go down? With these predictions, we have Leeds staying in place. It’s gone as we expected, and Leeds is in the relegation battle. Two of the clubs we expected to go down are definitely going down, though, which means there is really only one spot “up for grabs,” such as it is.

Clearly, we didn’t think the Hammers would be good. What has surprised us is just how bad West Ham has been. Were the season to end today, the Hammers would be relegated. West Ham is the only club in line for relegation with any chance of fighting out of it, but even though it sacked Graham Potter early to replace him with Nuno Espirito Santo, the best Santo can do at this point is finagle holding onto a spot in the Premier League.

Maybe Burnley will figure it out someday, or maybe it has figured out that its destiny is to be the ultimate yo-yo club. This will be the fifth season in a row wherein it will be relegated from, or promoted to, the Premier League. Different players, different managers, but the same result. Burnley is too good for the Championship, but not good enough for the Premier League.

Hey, we were right in pegging Wolves as an established Premier League club in line to get relegated. We will admit, though, we didn’t expect Wolves to be horrendous. This club is a mess. This team is so bad. Wolverhampton is so clearly the worst team in the Premier League this season. Dare we say, it might threaten to be as bad as Southampton was last season.