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Ryan O’Hanlon
Multiple Authors
You want my predictions for the upcoming Premier League season? The things that I’d choose if I happened to encounter that bizarro situation where my life was on the line if I didn’t correctly choose what might happen during a specific sporting event?
Here you go:
• Win the Premier League: Arsenal
• Finish top five: Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea
• Get relegated: Hull City, Ipswich Town and Coventry City
• Golden Boot: Erling Haaland
• Most assists: Bruno Fernandes
Why am I predicting these things in this hypothetical life-or-death situation? Because those are the most likely outcomes. How do I know they’re the most likely outcomes? Because the betting odds are telling me as much.
Per DraftKings, Arsenal are significant favorites to win the league, the five biggest clubs in the league all have better-than-50% shots at finishing top five, and the same goes for the chances that the three promoted teams are sent right back down. Haaland wins the Golden Boot almost by default every season. Given the random nature of assists, Fernandes leading the league again is the only outcome that isn’t significantly more likely than the second-most likely one.
Yes, betting markets are wrong all the time, but they’d need to be so wrong about most of these outcomes for me to be able to confidently disagree with any of them. Given the amount of money on the line, I’m not going to do that.
So, that’s it. There’s my preview. Enjoy the season!
I’m kidding — sort of. Instead of telling you what’s most likely to happen across all of the major races in the Premier League, I’ll tell you what I think is more likely to happen than conventional wisdom suggests. So, which teams and players in the Premier League are most likely to defy the betting odds?
But first: This is not betting advice!
To define conventional wisdom, I’m using the betting odds from DraftKings. But I am not telling you to use any of these predictions to try to make money.
Why? That’s not what I do, and also because the odds are so heavily stacked against you. Sportsbooks make money by letting you bet on coin flips but only giving you 60% combined odds for both heads and tails. If you have to bet $150 to win $100, and you bet on tails, you’re making a terrible bet. And if you keep making that bet, you’re definitely going to lose money.
Just take the market for most assists in the Premier League this season. Were you getting fair odds, the combined probabilities of the players would add up to 100%. Instead, it currently adds up to … 220%.
While it’s impossible to do it exactly with these markets because some odds might be more inflated than others, I wanted to estimate the implied probabilities behind the betting odds. In other words, if we removed the fee that you’re essentially being charged to place your bet, what would the market be telling us about the various probabilities for the upcoming Premier League season?
For example, if four teams were being given a 35% chance of winning the Premier League by the odds offered on the betting markets, we’d know that’s impossible — the combined likelihood can add up to only 100%, not 140% — but we could roughly imply that each team has an equal likelihood of winning the league: 25% apiece.
So, once we do all of that using betting lines from DraftKings, we can start to predict where the conventional wisdom might be wrong.
Premier League title winner
Arsenal are sizable favorites to defend their title. The gap between them and second-favorites Manchester City is bigger than the gap between Man City and third-favorites Liverpool.
But the most likely outcome for this season, as ever, is that someone other than the favorite actually wins the league. After all, Arsenal’s 35% odds of winning are lower than the 65% of every other team’s odds combined.
That said, I’m inclined to believe that Arsenal might be the most undervalued team in the top five.
Manchester City and Liverpool have managerial and personnel uncertainty. We’ve seen Manchester United have one promising season so many times over the past 10-plus years, only for it to all fall apart the next campaign. Plus, United’s best player is pretty much the same age that Mohamed Salah was last season, when he looked like the best player in the world and then suddenly fell off a cliff. Chelsea finished in 10th last season and are currently being given about a 1-in-10 chance of winning the league — a big bounce-back is already expected.
Over the past four years, Arsenal have finished the Premier League season with 84, 89, 74 and 85 points. The 74 points were mainly the result of an injury crisis, and they still reached the Champions League semifinals that year. They’ve added a ton of valuable players since then and might be adding even more after you finish reading this piece.
But with arguably their three most important players, William Saliba, Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka, struggling with their own degrees of injuries, the Gunners have their own downsides, too.
So, instead, we’re going with Brighton as the team whose likelihood of winning the league is higher than suggested by the conventional wisdom of these betting lines.
I say this pretty much every season, and I’ll say it again: Brighton still have so many talented young players who could make a leap at the same time. And they also have the youngest manager in the league in Fabian Hurzeler, so he could improve, too. On top of all that, they were quite good last season — sixth-best adjusted goal differential (70% goals, 30% expected goals) after the five teams we’ve already mentioned.
Given Brighton’s clear upside and the clear downsides across the five favorites, I’d give them something better than a 1-in-200 shot at winning the league.
Qualification for Champions League
We’re looking at a predicted top five instead of a top four. The Premier League has only four guaranteed Champions League places, but given the continued spending gap in the transfer market between England and everywhere else, and that we saw six Premier League teams make the round of 16 in last year’s Champions League, it seems likely that the league will secure one of the two bonus Champions League spots again next season.
Unsurprisingly, I like Brighton here again more than the betting lines do. There’s a good chance they’re a straight-up better team than Aston Villa and Tottenham, and yet their top-five probabilities are way lower than either of them.
But in the spirit of keeping things interesting, let’s go with the other data darlings of the Premier League, Brentford, as our pick for the team that should do better than conventional wisdom suggests.
The Bees lost their two starting strikers and their manager before last season and were still in the top-five race up until the final month of the season. They were the third-youngest team in the league in average age weighted by minutes played, per the site FBref, and not only have they kept all of their key contributors — sorry, Jordan Henderson — but they’ve also made a couple of high-upside transfers: 20-year-old center back Jannik Schuster from Red Bull’s Salzburg club and 24-year-old midfielder Mamadou Sangare from Lens.
We’ve seen plenty of young center midfielders leave Ligue 1 and become stars. Sangare, who did pretty much everything at an above-average level in France, certainly fits that profile. His aggressive passing profile feels like it fits perfectly with his new team, too.
Relegation from the Premier League
Hull City finished last season with the 20th-best adjusted goal differential in the championship — and they got promoted to the Premier League.
They’re the first team, in the expected goals era, to be promoted with a negative xG differential in the championship. If you’ve ever wondered what it might look like if the 40th-best team in England got a chance to play in the Premier League, Hull might give you that chance this season.
Still, soccer can still be so random over a 38-game sample, especially with the smaller point totals toward the bottom of the table. So, I wouldn’t make Hull or either of the other promoted sides my choice here.
Oh, and if you’re confused by Manchester City’s odds –13th-most-likely team to be relegated — that’s essentially how the market is pricing in the chance that those 115 charges turn into a meaningful punishment.
I’m going to select two picks to defy the odds for this category: Aston Villa and Tottenham.
With Villa, they have to deal with extra Champions League matches, they’ve lost arguably their three best players (Morgan Rogers and Youri Tielemans to transfers, Amadou Onana to injury), they were the second-oldest team in the league last season and their underlying performance makes them a classic regression candidate.
In other words, Villa had the 12th-best xG differential in the league last season, and there are a number of reasons why that number could get worse this season. Throw in some worse finishing luck and you can picture more than 1.3% of future worlds where they fall into the bottom three. The Premier League is so competitive now, top to bottom, that I think we’re going to see more big clubs get sucked into unlikely relegation battles.
We saw it happen last season with Tottenham. And yes, I know they have a new manager and they spent tons of money this summer and they also struggled with injuries last season. But they also were genuinely horrible last season. This wasn’t a team getting burned by great goalkeeping and constantly connecting with the opposition crossbar — no, Spurs had the fifth-worst adjusted GD in the league last season.
I don’t think they’re going to get relegated this season, but they’ve finished in 17th place in consecutive seasons. There’s no way they should be considered more likely to win the title than to get sent down.
Premier League Golden Boot
I’m including only the top 20 players in the odds list here and with the assists race. Conveniently, the odds do start to dip once you get beyond the top 20, in both categories.
Over the past four seasons, there are three players currently in the Premier League who have scored more than 20 goals in a single Premier League campaign. Haaland has done it four times — his lowest total was 22 during the injury-affected 2024-25 season. Alexander Isak has done it twice: in 2023-24 and 2024-25 for Newcastle. And Cole Palmer (2023-24) and Igor Thiago (last season) have each done it once.
Isak is an appealing choice, given his track record, a new attacking manager at Liverpool, an injury to Hugo Ekitike that’s probably going to force him to play more minutes, and a full, healthy preseason under his belt after last summer’s transfer saga. But he has still played only 2,500 minutes in a domestic season once in his career, and it’s unclear if he’ll take penalties for Liverpool this year.
While someone such as Manchester United’s Benjamin Sesko could explode into superstardom, these numbers seem like they’re aware of that possibility. Instead, I’m going with Cole Palmer as my choice to defy the odds.
Palmer is going to take penalties at Chelsea, and he’s entering his prime this season. We saw him score 22 goals as a 21-year-old. Given how he was frequently hurt last season and how he was left off the World Cup roster by coach Thomas Tuchel, it feels like we’ve collectively forgotten just how good Palmer was in the two prior seasons.
I don’t know how conducive the system of new Chelsea manager Xabi Alonso will be to a goal-scoring attacking midfielder, but João Pedro, Chelsea’s starting striker, is much more of a facilitator of chance creation than a finisher of moves. Combine all of that with the likelihood he takes Chelsea’s penalties, and it makes me think there’s better than a 1.7% chance Palmer leads the league in goals.
Most Premier League assists
There, rightfully, is a clear top two. Fernandes just broke the assist record in the Premier League, and he wasn’t even the most creative player in England — at least, on a per-90-minute basis. No, Rayan Cherki created 0.44 expected assists per 90 minutes last season, the most by a player not named Kevin De Bruyne in any of the previous four seasons.
Among the top teams, these two are the closest to classic No. 10s, players whose main role is to get on the ball near the penalty area and create chances, over and over again.
After Fernandes, Saka and Martin Ødegaard are ranked second and third for total expected assists in the Premier League over the past four seasons. But Saka’s injuries remain a concern, while Ødegaard might lose some playing time to new signing Bruno Guimarães.
Liverpool’s Florian Wirtz fits the mold of a breakout player. It seems like he’s going to play as more of a true 10 this year under new manager Andoni Iraola. He still has another season before his prime years begin, he’s going to be more important to the attack now that Salah is gone, and he has had a year to adjust to the Premier League.
But rather than Wirtz, my pick is Crystal Palace‘s Adam Wharton, who is a year younger, was way more productive last season and won’t be worn out from the World Cup. Despite playing a deeper midfield role, Wharton generated 7.4 expected assists in 2025-26, fewer than only Fernandes and Cherki.
There’s uncertainty with Crystal Palace’s new manager and the possibility that Wharton still moves to a different team over the last few weeks of the window, but he’s already one of the best creative passers in the world. And at just 22 years old, he’s likely to only get better.
