Premier League Rankings

Hi Everyone,

A while ago, I had an idea about taking the 20 Premier League Teams, and ranking them much like is done with the World Rugby Rankings. I took inspiration as well from the Football and Hurling Ranking Tables (Credit to laoisman11 and Hanalei for those great threads), and thought that maybe the Premier League would be an interesting one to do.

The reality is, there is no definitive answer to who is the better team because it changes season after season, potentially even game after game, and that gives us fans possibly the best discussion points for the sport for decades to come.

This ranking is not the end of that discussion, as no ranking system is absolutely perfect. No ranking system can prepare you for Leicester City to win the Premier League, nor that Crystal Palace would fight back to draw with Liverpool, going from three goals down to level in the space of nine minutes to derail their title ambitions. What this ranking system is designed to do, however, is reflect the strength of every team after such results and aid that discussion by taking a team’s performance and adding a rating to it. It is fluid, and past successes won’t mean that you have protection from a low rating in the future, nor will a good season for a normally lower table team still leave it languishing in the bottom of the rankings.

The main problem associated with just looking at a league table is that it does not tell you about how a team earned the points it has at the end of a season. As it stands, a team winning one game and losing another is better than drawing two games, with each worth 3 and 2 points respectively. The points a team earned in the opening weekend of the season are worth just as much as the points they earn in the last game of the season, even though the latter is a far better indicator of a team’s strength at this point in time.

Finally, the league table ignores the quality of the opposition. Currently, the team that sits bottom of the table defeating the league leaders is worth precisely the same as the league leaders defeating a team that sits bottom of the table even though the quality of the opposition they overcame to win is vastly different. It also fails to take into account the margin of victory, with a top team scraping a 1 goal victory being worth the same as a team pulling off a 3-0 win against the odds.

This ranking system aims to give a better idea of how strong each team is at any point in time, and give answers to each of the problems mentioned above. It started from Arsenal v Norwich on the 15th of August 1992, or the start of the Premier League, and runs right up to today.

So, for the first table:



Liverpool have a clear lead on Manchester City, and Leicester have been the biggest improvers of the season which is no surprise given their form.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.