Why was the Premier League so competitive in 2025-26?
- Published
In the Premier League last season, 13 of the 20 teams finished with between 40 and 60 points - the most in an English top-flight campaign since 2003-04 (also 13).
Was the Premier League so competitive in 2025-26 because the quality of the 'lesser' teams got better or the top teams got worse? It is hard to know for sure.
Given how savvy clubs like Brighton, Brentford and Bournemouth are, the vast amounts of money that enable even bottom-half sides to sign the best talent from abroad and the Premier League's current dominance of the Europa League and Conference League, it would seem to be the former.
However, the fact that promoted play-off winners Sunderland were able to finish above 13 teams in their first season back suggests the league was maybe not as strong as we think.
What we do know is that whether because they got worse or their opponents got better, four of the sides that finished in the top seven in 2024-25 - champions Liverpool, Chelsea, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest - took 79 points fewer between them last season.
While Forest's decline was perhaps expected given their incredible seventh-place finish in 2024-25 and their journey to the Europa League semi-finals last season, the others were far more surprising.
Sunderland and Leeds smashed the recent run of promoted sides struggling to compete by taking 64 more points than the teams they replaced in the top flight.
As a result, this season will be a bit of an upside-down one in that Bournemouth, Brighton and Sunderland have European campaigns to navigate while Chelsea, Tottenham and Newcastle do not.
Will we therefore see a bounce-back to the more 'traditional' order in 2026-27 or are we truly entering a new, fiercely-competitive era of the Premier League?