Would Arsenal be the worst ever Premier League Champions?
It's a statement that reeks of jealousy but it does give us an excuse to try and rank teams to try and figure out if this holds water.
If Arsenal win the league, this could be the worst team to win the league.
This is a quote from former Manchester United player Paul Scholes on The Good, The Bad & The Football podcast. If you search around or just exist on the internet you will see this sentiment repeated and the same arguments made about this Arsenal team.
It’s often something that is made in bad faith and tinged with tribal jealousy. I am sure that you would have seen similar type of comments from Arsenal fans last season about Liverpool. I have no problem admitting that I haven’t been perfectly above all of that, taking a swipe at that Liverpool title team when this sort of discussion of where teams stack up starts happening.
This time of the year as the title favorite becomes clearer you start getting comments like this and a reflection of trying to figure out where teams rank in the pantheon of former champions.
It’s not done yet for Arsenal (and I really hope I don’t regret this post in a few months) but it was a big weekend for Arsenal’s chances. Arsenal’s late winner combined with a heroic last ditch defensive performance from West Ham gives Arsenal a 9-point (with an extra game played) lead over Manchester City with seven matches to play. Arsenal’s magic number of points won (or City dropped) is down to 16 points and the odds are heavily stacked in their favor now.
This discussion might not be the most good faith and actually trying to come up with the best and worst winners but that doesn’t mean that we can’t go and try and do that. The motto of the moment is you can just do things, so let embrace that and try and make some determinations here.
My methodology here is going to be two pronged and relatively simple. The first measure is going to look at performance relative to their peers for the season that they competed in. The second will be how strong those peers were compared to the rest of European soccer.
I am going to start with the second prong, first because this will feedback into the context of where each team’s performance compares.
How strong is the current Premier League?
If you asked this before the knockouts of the Champions League started you would probably have a slightly different answer but even if many of the teams end up getting knocked out at the round of 16 stage, overall, I think you would still say very strong.
The Premier League has emerged from the post COVID world in an enviable state compared to the other European Leagues financially and that has been leveraged to hoover up talent, not just on the field but also with coaching and technical staff. The Premier League isn’t a socialist utopia with the TV money like American sports leagues sharing money evenly, but they have a much flatter structure than just about any other League and that means that this financial might extends down the League and isn’t just concentrated in a handful of the top teams.
Just for being a member of the Premier League, a team will be among the top 50 in the world for revenue and 15 of the Premier League are in the top 30 of the latest Deloitte Money League rankings, with 9 of the top 20 and 6 of the top 10.
This financial muscle shows up in the different ways that you can rank the Leagues.
There is a fun method that takes betting odds and uses that to infer rankings, and you get a picture that looks like this:
You can take the Opta Power Rankings and you get something that looks like this:
These are great tools but for the historical analysis I am going to use the ClubElo ratings. The main strength here is that there is a long and easy to access historical record and that is exactly what we need here to go back and compare across decades.
Going back to the start of the Premier League era, the League average ratings have seesawed back and forth with different countries having moments where they were dominate. That time is now for the Premier League.
The PL average rating is the highest it has ever been during this stretch and the gap to the rest is only matched by what Serie A had over teams at the beginning of the 1990’s or Spain during the early 2000’s.
By all of the objective measures, the Premier League is at a zenith as the strongest League in the World. What also makes it unique right now is that this is not just a League that is powered by a few strong teams, but rather that basically top to bottom this is a competitive league.
Arsenal are the team with the highest rating in the League and where they are right now isn’t all that special and other teams have been near the same level to where they are rated right now. What is unique this season is that the compression of the ratings and the lack of truly bad teams.
On the graphic above the red lines represent the 25th and 75th percentile team ratings, the current 75th percentile is the highest in the Premier League era but it isn’t too far out of line for where things have been for the last decade. What is worth noting is that the 25 percentile is by far the highest it has ever been and not only that, but it is also higher than the AVERAGE for all Premier League seasons outside of last season. That’s right the 15th/16th best teams right now are rated as higher than every other team that was 10th best in the League.
The median rating in 2025-26 is better than the best teams from several seasons in the 1990’s. It’s not a perfect rating system but that is pretty crazy to think about.
This current level of parity is probably underrated among fans. We have not seen the top teams go out and put up dominate numbers or big blow outs this season and that’s more likely a reflection that there is just not the same gaps between the best teams and the ones in the bottom half compared to seasons past.
