Bill ConnellyCloseBill ConnellyESPN Staff WriterBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on XRyan O’HanlonCloseRyan O’HanlonESPN.com writerRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on XOct 17, 2025, 08:57 AM ET
play1:20Can Arsenal cope without Martin Ødegaard?Gab Marcotti and Don Hutchison debate if Arsenal can cope without captain Martin Ødegaard after his recent injury setback.
play1:32Are concerns emerging over Arne Slot?Steve Nicol and Craig Burley discuss Liverpool’s start to the season, as they believe Arne Slot has questions to answer.
play1:34Does Joshua Zirkzee have a future at Man United?Gab Marcotti and Don Hutchison debate if Manchester United forward Joshua Zirkzee has a future at the club after reported loan interest from Roma.
How will Premier League clubs vote on new ‘anchoring’ rule? (2:31)Gab Marcotti and Don Hutchison breakdown the Premier League’s new proposed financial anchoring rule. (2:31)
Can Arsenal cope without Martin Ødegaard?Gab Marcotti and Don Hutchison debate if Arsenal can cope without captain Martin Ødegaard after his recent injury setback.
Gab Marcotti and Don Hutchison debate if Arsenal can cope without captain Martin Ødegaard after his recent injury setback.
Are concerns emerging over Arne Slot?Steve Nicol and Craig Burley discuss Liverpool’s start to the season, as they believe Arne Slot has questions to answer.
Steve Nicol and Craig Burley discuss Liverpool’s start to the season, as they believe Arne Slot has questions to answer.
Does Joshua Zirkzee have a future at Man United?Gab Marcotti and Don Hutchison debate if Manchester United forward Joshua Zirkzee has a future at the club after reported loan interest from Roma.
Gab Marcotti and Don Hutchison debate if Manchester United forward Joshua Zirkzee has a future at the club after reported loan interest from Roma.
Whose rise is more sustainable: Bournemouth or Palace?
Who’s in the most danger: Forest, Wolves or West Ham?
It’s a random, low-scoring sport where conversion rates fluctuate massively from game to game, and the same is true for individual and team-level performances. Throw in unbalanced, lopsided schedules from team to team that don’t even out until we get to the end of the season, and there are so many ways you can get out over your skis by drawing too many conclusions before we get to Halloween.
To try to sift through the noise, Bill Connelly and Ryan O’Hanlon are back with the first edition of their Premier League power rankings since the season began. As always, they’ve each ranked the entire league from 1 to 20, combined their rankings, averaged them together, and come up with the final list.
We last did this in August, right before the season began. Our re-rankings — the combination of the individual rankings from Bill and Ryan — are listed along with the preseason rankings and each team’s present points total and goal differential in the Premier League table.
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Arsenal have easily been the best team through the first seven matches, and unless you think that all of Arsenal’s best players aren’t actually that good, and that Gyökeres is going to start scoring less often than he currently is, then Mikel Arteta’s team should get even better.
They’re not certainties to win the Premier League — there’s a long way to go — but we’re getting close to the point where the Gunners deserve to have greater title odds than the rest of the league put together. — O’Hanlon
What will stability look like for big-spending Liverpool if or when it arrives? Because the first two months of this season have just been a straight adrenaline rush.
The champions lost two leads and lost to Crystal Palace on penalties in the Community Shield. They lost three more leads but still beat Bournemouth and Newcastle. They eked out late wins over Arsenal and Burnley, then lost another two-goal lead in an eventual Champions League win over Atlético Madrid. Then there were two more one-goal wins, followed by late collapses and three straight one-goal losses. Ten of their 11 matches have been decided by one goal, and the other was tied late.
This is just exhausting, and it has relegated the Reds from projected favorites in the Premier League and Champions League to secondary status in both. Ranking them third here almost felt generous.
There are worse places to be, of course. But until they get their transition defense right, it’s hard to see them reaching their goals. So far in Premier League play, they rank 11th in expected goals, or xG, allowed per shot and have gotten two or more defenders between shot and goal only 68.6% of the time (20th).
The top-line stats remain pretty solid: They’re first in possession rate (61.3%), first in combined progressive carries and passes, third in goals, et cetera. But as was expected when they signed a load of new attackers and two attack-friendly fullbacks, the balance is off. And it’s hard to fix that over the first half of the season, with nonstop fixtures and a trio of international breaks.
How long might it take Arne Slot to both get the new attack fully functional — Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak, combined: one goal and one assist in 640 minutes — while heading off the issues at the back? — Connelly
Tottenham are currently on pace to finish the season with 71 goals scored, 27 goals allowed and 76 points. Last season, those marks would’ve ranked third, first, and second. That prorated plus-44 goal differential would be just one behind Liverpool’s league-best and league-winning mark from last season.
And yet: we have Spurs ninth — exactly where we had them before the season started. Given that we both ranked Arsenal No. 1, are our North London allegiances showing? Aren’t they playing at a Champions League level? And after all, didn’t these guys, you know, finish last season in 17th?
Under Ange Postecoglu last season, Spurs created 1.6 expected goals per game and conceded 1.7. This season, the defense has improved significantly (1.3 xG conceded per game), but the attack has cratered to 1.1 xG per game. And so, last season’s per-game xG differential was minus-0.1; this season’s is minus-0.2.
The explanation for Tottenham’s massively improved results, then, is mostly unsustainable finishing — at both ends of the field. They’re outperforming their xG by a greater degree than any other team in the league on the attacking end and on the defensive side.
Unless Thomas Frank has created some new tactic that completely fools the models that drove the decision-making at his previous club, Brentford, then Spurs are going to come crashing back to earth at some point.
Per Opta’s power ratings, they’ve also played the second-easiest set of opponents in the league so far. The next few months could be rough. — O’Hanlon
Bournemouth just keep inching closer and closer to the big time. They enjoyed their second top-10 finish in the first division in 2024-25, and they were close to something greater — they were within shouting distance of a Champions League place before injuries and poor depth caused a late crash.
Neither of these teams are particularly lucky to have landed spots in the top six at the moment — they’re both in the top eight in xG differential, and neither are overachieving dramatically against those xG figures. We ranked Bournemouth slightly ahead in the rankings above, and they did add quite a few new players (while also losing quite a few) in the search for better depth.
But can they last another 31 games at this level with such an exhausting style of play? They’re first in the league in ball recoveries (46.4 per game) and total defensive interventions (117.0 per game), and they play the most possessions per game (88.7) while allowing the fewest passes per defensive action (9.7), or PPDA, a good approximation of defensive intensity.
Palace aren’t nearly as intense, for better or worse. They rank 18th in PPDA (14.6), and they start just 4.5% of possessions in the attacking third (20th). But no one does a better job of creating great opportunities with very little of the ball.
Oliver Glasner’s squad is thriving with an almost old-school defend-and-counter game. It’s less creative and exciting than Bournemouth’s style, but on the 10th anniversary of the ultimate defend-and-counter success story — Leicester City’s stunning title run — and in an age of energy conservation through long, arduous seasons, might this be the winning approach? — Connelly
Never let it be said that United have lost their flair for irony. They caught a lot of skepticism this offseason from the analytics community for signing both Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha after seasons in which their finishing was unsustainably good (and their prices were as high as they would ever be). The duo combined to attempt shots worth 20.9 xG last season — solid production, to be sure — but they scored 36 actual goals, a 72% overachievement that they were never going to sustain.
This season, in 948 league minutes, they’ve attempted shots worth 3.3 xG, a pace reasonably close to last season’s. But they’ve scored only once between them, underachievement of an almost perfectly symmetrical 70%. (Bruno Fernandes has pitched in as well, scoring only twice from shots worth 3.7 xG.)
United aren’t attempting ridiculously high-quality shots — they’re only seventh in xG per shot (and 20th in xG allowed per shot) — but winning the shot-quantity battle by as much as they do tends to pay off over the long haul. — Connelly
Though Brighton have been somewhere around a league-average team overall, Villa have been much worse than that. Through seven matches, only West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Burnley have worse expected-goal differentials.
In particular, the attack has been unwatchable. Despite averaging more possession than Manchester City this season (57.1%), Villa have created 6.03 expected goals — fewer than any team other than Burnley. Ollie Watkins has played every game, he has scored one goal, and he’s attempting fewer than two shots per game.