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ESPN.com writer
- Ryan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”
We’re 11 games into the Premier League season, and congrats if you predicted any of this!
Arne Slot’s Liverpool can’t stop winning; Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City can’t stop losing; Arsenal are tied on points with Nottingham Forest and Brighton; Fulham got better by letting their presumptive best player leave for Bayern Munich. And Manchester United are currently in a tie for 12th place, thanks to a goal differential of exactly zero.
OK, fine. You probably got that last one. After all, scoring as many goals as they’ve conceded is actually a slight improvement on last season for United.
But beyond that, it has been a season of consolidation in the Premier League thus far. While Liverpool have built up a five-point lead atop the table — with Manchester City in second — only seven points separate Chelsea in third and West Ham in 14th. Heck, the gap between Liverpool and Arsenal is the same as the gap between Arsenal and Leicester City.
With everything all muddled up below the surprise leader, we are back to cut through the noise and try to provide a true assessment of the current levels of team strength all across the Premier League. As always, we have each ranked all 20 teams, 1 through 20, and then combined the rankings to produce the master rankings. The criteria: who we think would win a match if any of these teams played each other on a neutral field in the near future.
The updated rankings are below, followed by some analysis of the most notable changes (or non-changes) from the previous edition of our rankings.