Premier League table after 10 matches – What does it tell us about the final standings? | OneFootball

The last international break of 2024 is finally in the rearview and it was one where Newcastle United international stars showcased importance to their respective national teams.

The next round of international fixtures doesn’t come around again until mid-March 2025, by which time Newcastle United are scheduled to have played 18 more Premier League fixtures and faced up to three additional games in each of the cup competitions, if they are able to progress through the rounds.

It’s safe to say that the next few months are going to be crucially important in shaping how our season turns out. However, a recent article in The Athletic suggested that Newcastle’s season may already be written after just the opening 10 games.

For those without a subscription to The Athletic, or for those who missed the story and several videos that spun off the back of it, it drew on findings from a recent academic study which looked at the predictive power of the Premier League table as the season progresses.

Based on the findings from the study, The Athletic concluded that it’s unlikely that a team’s league position will change much from where it was at the 10-game mark, with the chances of a team altering its position decreasing after each game week. The table below shows how things stood going into match week 11 this season, Newcastle United sat in 11th place.

If we take these interpretations of the study at face value, it looks like we are set for a frustrating season in the Premier League this time out, but how accurate is the interpretation of the results?

The original study was led by an academic, Clive Beggs, from Leeds Beckett University (you can give it a read here) and contains some interesting reading.

When it comes to the accuracy of the claims made in the article in The Athletic, while they have reported the headline finding accurately, they overlooked one quirk regarding this season’s Premier League standings.

Beggs’ study itself sets out that the Premier League table after 10 games can be used to predict the final standings with “reasonable” accuracy. The predictive power of the table improves with every passing game-week, which you would expect given that there are less points to be won as the season progresses.

However, if you read over the conclusions more carefully, the authors make one key concession with regards to the impact of points gaps and how these affect teams “crossing-over” with others in the league standings.

Typically, you start to see points gaps greater than three points start to open up between groups of teams in the league from around the 10-game point. These gaps and the difficulty in crossing them are one of the key factors in the stability of league standings as the season progresses.

After 10 games in the league this season, there were only three points separating 4th place Chelsea from 11th place Newcastle.

This puts eight teams within one win of the Champions League places. This number of teams being so closely grouped together after 10 games is completely unheard of in recent years.

I looked back over the past 10 years and the number of teams in the hunt for top four after 10 games has only been this tight once before, in the COVID season of 2020/21. That year, which saw some odd statistical trends, partly because of the absence of fans, saw 10th place still in the mix for top four. Typically, the gap between 4th and 10th is six points or more come gameweek 10 but with teams taking points off each other with more regularity this season, that isn’t the case.

I’ll let you make your own minds up as to why the table is so tight from 3rd to 11th. One thing I will say is that I think you can throw the ability to rely on maths alone to predict the outcome of this season, completely out of the window.

Having won Premier League match 11 at Forest, Newcastle United still very much have everything to play for this season, starting with their 12th Premier League game of the season at home to West Ham on Monday!