The 2024/25 Premier League isn't Weak, it's Very, Very Strong
Liverpool are going to win the Premier League without having to contest too much of a title race. Is this the sign of a weak league? Absolutely not.
Data correct on April 17, 2025. This article was first published for subscribers the following day but is now available to all as Liverpool have sealed the Premier League title.
To the surprise of nobody, bad actors in football media are rushing to paint Liverpool as stumbling towards the title. As they are ‘only’ going to win the Premier League, their campaign must be considered something of a flop.
Yet if this season has not been miraculous, Arne Slot has performed remarkably. He had to replace a legend, doing so with little in the way of transfer activity. At least Jürgen Klopp had the good grace to bequeath a strong squad to his successor, unlike Alex Ferguson.
Perhaps the pundits are embarrassed at their pre-season failure to predict that the Reds would even compete for the title, much less win the damn thing. It can’t be the media who are wrong, obviously. They were off the mark because the league is so weak. It’s the only explanation. Liverpool have had it too easy, they wouldn’t have stood a chance of the gold medal otherwise.
It’s been the same all season. Firstly they hadn’t played anyone of note. Then once they had (mostly at Anfield), the chasing pack were going to have a chance because the Reds hadn’t contested many away games against top half sides.
While they haven’t won many such matches since, nobody does; unsurprisingly it’s hard to beat the best teams on their own patch. Only Fulham have won more away games against current top half sides than Liverpool this term, even then by only three to two:
Paul Tomkins wrote an article last month which showed that Slot’s men have a ridiculously good record against the strongest teams they have faced, powerful evidence of their excellence. Cup defeats to Paris Saint-Germain and Newcastle since the piece was published don’t lessen the general theme as it stood in early March:
“Excluding the reserves and kids who played at PSV in a dead rubber, Liverpool, currently ranked #1 in the Club Elo Index of European football (by some margin), have played 22 games against teams ranked in the 29 places directly below.
They have won 16, drawn four, lost two – a staggering return… That’s an insane 72.7% win percentage.
If you’re unfamiliar with Club Elo, it’s a system for rating teams based on their results against the standard of opponents they face (full explanation here). For instance, Liverpool earned 0.8 points for beating Southampton at Anfield but 10.5 from their victory at the Etihad. By compiling these statistics for all clubs, it’s possible to compare teams across leagues throughout their history.
Using the ratings for teams in the Premier League, we can establish the relative strength of the class of 2024/25 compared to their predecessors. Is it a weak league as has been widely suggested?
I wrote about this five years ago, compiling the average Elo score for the teams in each Premier League season as presented below. The peak was 2007/08, which is reasonable considering the Champions League final was an all-English affair with Liverpool one of the beaten semi-finalists.
With Manchester City banking 100 points as Liverpool became kings of Europe, the Elo average in the league was again lifted towards those levels in 2019. The data is worth updating to see how things stand now.
Here’s why. By this measure, the Premier League is the strongest it has even been.
Wow. This season clocks in at 1788, 20 points above the previous high when I last looked at this data, though only one point above 2022/23. However, the bottom three teams today are rated worse than any club from two years ago.
Otherwise, the floor is higher. If we plot the median (mid point of the sample) figures, then the current campaign is the leader by a wider margin.
Let’s set an arbitrary Elo bar of 1700. The relegation zone dwellers are the only clubs below that line this season. As recently as 2017/18, there were 14 teams adrift of this benchmark.
The 2024/25 Premier League isn’t weak at all. It is historically strong. The cliché has long stood that English football’s major selling point is that any team can beat another. It is closer to being true than it has been for quite some time thanks to the tremendous strength in depth.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. A look at European football’s net spend rankings for this season shows Brighton at the top. Southampton are directly behind Juventus, Bournemouth one place below Bayern Munich. The Premier League’s capacity for hoovering up top talent (and whomever Southampton signed) is off the scale.
With competitiveness high in a division, Elo rates tend to rise (or at least not sink) for most teams as good sides beat each other. The system is not perfect, not that any model is. Consider how many clubs are at-or-around their peak this season though.
Crystal Palace logged their highest ever Elo (1812) earlier this month, as did Fulham (1796). Bournemouth hit their pinnacle in January (1817). Then there are Newcastle, Aston Villa, Brighton and Brentford, all of whom reached their all-time peaks last season, at 1898, 1877, 1855 and 1836 respectively.
With two European Cups to their name, even an absurdly impressive campaign from Nottingham Forest can’t match their best days. They’ll have to settle for having had their strongest Elo (1812) since 1989 for the purposes of our study.
As much as they fluctuate, especially Manchester United and Tottenham this term, the established big six clubs rarely drop too far below an Elo score of 1800 either. Liverpool were still around league average at the points they dispensed with Roy Hodgson and Brendan Rodgers. You can expect a baseline level from these teams as they win a decent number of games even when at their worst.
Rampant success naturally can’t occur for every club. The bottom three teams are not as strong as they were in their previous Premier League stints. They look set to be historically weak in terms of points for relegated sides too.
Everton are at least rated higher than they were under either of their previous two managers, while Wolves have been on the up since appointing Vitor Pereira. The Blues are sixth bottom of the Premier League Elo rankings yet their score of 1768 matches the average from 2007/08, a previous high watermark for the division-wide metric.
It’s only really West Ham of the established top flight clubs who have sunk this season without any flickers of improvement.
Even then, their squad contains many of their side which won a European trophy two seasons ago. A team with their talent should not be 17th in the table, but it shows how tough it is to win games in the Premier League these days.
And why is that? Because it’s a very, very strong division. Any side sat comfortably atop this standard of competition must be a formidable outfit indeed.
Winning the league is everything to me. Even getting knocked out of the cups isn't as important. Those are playoffs in the most random of the major sports. Establishing a dominant position over an entire 38-game season is what determines the quality of a team, despite the fact that those playoffs (as with all American sports) are often more exciting than the regular season. Is it just my Reds bias talking here or is it a Liverpool-centric trend that every time we either win or come close to winning the league, it's always derided as "weak" whereas other recent winners like City and Chelsea never seemed to encounter that or at least not at the level we do?
Very important article!
I wonder if this season is going to push Newcastle into Big 6 position. Chelsea seem to be at a point were player transfers do not impact results anymore. United are hopeless because of their players, Tottenham because of their manager.