Every good analyst knows this: Wait 10 games until you start making any declarations about anything that happens in the Premier League.
Many different analyses have found that past performance starts to meaningfully predict future performance only once we get right around the 10-game mark. You don't even need fancy underlying numbers. A 2019 paper published in the journal PLOS One found that 77% of the variance in the final league table is explained by where each team was just 10 games into the season. Put another way, the league table shifts by only about 23% over the final 28 matches.
That's great news for Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City. And it's a big "Yikes!" for Manchester United, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Southampton and Ipswich.
But we can, of course, go deeper than just points. Plus, much of the reason for what these researchers found is that, well, 10 games accounts for more than a quarter of your full-season point total. Unsurprisingly, you're likely to finish higher or lower in the table when you win or don't win a lot of points in your first 10 matches.
So, with the Premier League hitting the 10-game mark last weekend, what have we learned, and what might that tell us about how the rest of the season might turn out? Here are some predictions, accompanied by how confident I am in each one on a scale of low, medium or high.
