Here's How Arsenal Are Premier League Favourites | Opta Supercomputer Predictions | w/ Matt Furniss
With the 2026-27 Premier League season a week away, the Opta supercomputer predictions numbers are finally here! Who will win the Premier League? Who will qualify for the Champions League? And which clubs are likeliest to be relegated to the Championship? We answer all the key questions with our Premier League 2026-27 season predictions via the Opta supercomputer. Check out the Opta Analyst website: https://theanalyst.com/ 📬 Sign up for the Opta Analyst Newsletter here for free: https://theanalyst.com/sign-up Follow Opta Analyst: Twitter: https://x.com/OptaAnalyst Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theoptaanalyst Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/optaanalyst/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@optaanalyst QUESTION - Have a question about a player or data? Drop it in the comments!
Transcript
With the Premier League season just a week away, the Opta supercomputer predictions are finally here. Who's favorites for the title? Who's going to qualify for Europe? And who's going to get relegated? We're joined by Opta analyst Matt Furniss to talk through the numbers more. Matt, thank you for joining us. The Premier League's just around the corner. How you doing? >> No worries. I'm very good. How are you? >> I can't lie. I'm excited. But for the people who may not have heard of the supercomputer before, can you just explain what it is and how it works? >> Yes, the Opta supercomputer is a prediction model that we created years and years ago that we've been kind of updating and improving over time. It's based on various factors, really. It's based on the data that we have all the teams in any given competition that we run the projections on. It's also based on latest betting markets. It's a smaller proportion of the model is based on latest betting markets. But it essentially estimates the probability of each match outcome, win, lose, or draw over 38 match days. And then by using the Opta power rankings, which looks at team strength overall across the last two, three seasons, it formulates a projection for the season. It estimates the likelihood of teams finishing in certain positions and how likely a team is to be successful or unsuccessful that season. >> The latest pre-season predictions have Arsenal as current favorites at 38%. Is that based on their performances last season? >> Yeah, I mean, their performances last season are strong part in that projection. Defensively, they were the best team. They were incredibly hard to beat. And yeah, the other teams just weren't as good as them. But Arsenal, this is a longer-term thing. Arsenal have been the best team in the Premier League over the last three seasons as well. So over those that three-season period, Arsenal won eight more points than any other team in the Premier League. So this is nothing new. And also, they reached the Champions League final last season and only lost on a penalty shootout to PSG. So, they were penalty kicks away from being the best team in Europe as well. Our power rankings has them as the best team in the world at the moment. And based on everything we know today, Arsenal are the strongest team in the Premier League. So, we expect them to be challenging for the title. And in across the 10,000 simulations that we played out today, Arsenal won the league more often than the other team. >> Qualification for Europe is where it changes so quickly. Who are the current favorites for the Champions League spots? And how do the UEFA coefficients impact those numbers? >> Arsenal and City are heavily backed to finish in the top four this season. In fact, they are the only teams who finish in the top four more often than not across our simulations. But, the big question mark again is can English clubs perform in Europe and win that extra spot in the Champions League like they have done the last two seasons? So, if if we get enough coefficient points to to do that again, that really does increase the chances for a lot of teams. So, if the top five is enough to secure a Champions League spot this season, that increases Man United's chance by almost eight percentage points. Then you're looking at Aston Villa, that's around seven percentage points. Chelsea's about the same. Liverpool's is a nine percentage point jump. That goes from just under 40% chance of finishing the top four to a 49% chance of finishing top five. So, you're looking at a 50/50 kind of chance there for for Liverpool finishing in the top five this season. So, yeah, that there's there's also options of like teams like Brighton, Bournemouth, Palace, Forest. You never really know. Those teams could sneak in and off see an extra spot in the Champions League. Really does increase their chances of doing that. But, also there's that knock-on effect of sixth place will then be Europa League, seventh place Conference League. And then you've got to factor in cup wins, etc. as well. So, it's quite complicated. And we're not saying like definitely a top four place is only good enough for the Champions League. So, that will change over the season and hopefully yeah, another English club will be winning a place in the Champions League. >> The three promoted teams are currently the favorites to get relegated, but as we've seen last season with Sunderland and Leeds, that's not always the case. Are those numbers based off their Championship performances? >> Yeah, so it will be based on the fact that they are coming into a stronger league and I mean seven of the last newly promoted teams have been relegated back to Championship at the first time of asking. As you said, Sunderland and Leeds survived last season. Sunderland are a strange one because actually they are the fourth most likely team to be relegated in the current simulations. Now, some people might be surprised by that cuz they finished seventh last season, but our underlying data suggests that actually that was a massive over-performance. As it stands, we are saying that three newly promoted clubs, Ipswich, Coventry, and Hull are the most likely to be relegated, but also all three of those clubs have a higher chance of staying up than they do of being relegated. So, yet again, we're not saying yet that those three they're the givens of being relegated. It's not It's not that at all. So, you're going to I think personally you will see at least one of those stay up this season. You're looking at some other clubs who might be a bit nervous. Sunderland, Fulham, Forest, maybe even Palace. Um we don't know how Brentford are doing that second season under Keith Andrews. Um Sunderland going back to to them, they have European football to contend with this season as well. How will they cope with that? Um so, we aren't saying those three newly promoted clubs are going to get relegated again. We are saying they are most likely to be relegated, but as I said, they are also more likely to stay up than they are to be relegated.