The battle to qualify for next season’s UEFA Champions League is hotting up, and the chance of an extra spot in the competition will give clubs even more hope. Can Nottingham Forest spring a surprise? We look at the Opta supercomputer projections.
4 April
With the battle at both ends of the table seemingly wrapped up, all eyes now turn to the race for Champions League qualification. As mentioned previously in this blog, given English clubs’ performance in European competitions, it looks extremely likely that a fifth-place finish will be enough to qualify for the Champions League next season.
Aston Villa’s 3-0 win over Brighton was perhaps the most decisive result of Matchday 30. The victory almost doubled Villa’s chances of securing a top-five spot from 7.7% to 14.4%, while Brighton’s hopes collapsed from 20.1% to just 5.2%. As we wrote this week, Villa appear to be hitting form at just the right time.
Meanwhile, Nottingham Forest’s remarkable season continued with a 1-0 victory over Manchester United that extended their winning run to five games across all competitions. It was their 13th league clean sheet of the campaign, which equals their best-ever tally in a Premier League season (matching 1994-95). With a 91.5% probability of finishing in the top five, Champions League football is looking almost certain to return to the City Ground.
Behind Forest, Manchester City (78.1%) remain the favourites to claim a Champions League place, while the battle for the final spot is heating up. Newcastle, who still have a game in hand and the easier remaining fixtures, are narrowly ahead (58.0%) of Chelsea (51.3%), despite the Blues currently sitting in fourth after their crucial win over Tottenham.
Defeats for Fulham (0.8%) and Bournemouth (0.6%) have all but ended their slim hopes of breaking into the top five.
17 March
What a weekend it turned out to be for Nottingham Forest. Nuno Espírito Santo’s side backed up their impressive Matchday 28 victory over Manchester City with another statement performance, beating Ipswich Town 4-2.
Crucially, the result gives Forest valuable breathing room in the race for a top-five finish. They now sit five points clear of Chelsea in fourth place, following the Blues’ defeat to Arsenal.
Elsewhere, Manchester City and Brighton played out a draw, while neither Newcastle United nor Aston Villa were in action. Bournemouth’s poor run continued with a 2-1 home loss to Brentford. In fact, Fulham were the only other top-half side – aside from second-place Arsenal – to win on Matchday 29.
Forest’s win takes their Premier League points tally for the 2024-25 season to 54 from 29 matches. And, given the revelation last week that fifth spot in the Premier League is almost certain to be enough for Champions League qualification, that points haul has major significance.
Only four sides in Premier League history have failed to finish in the top five after amassing 54 or more points from their first 29 games: Newcastle United in 1994-95, Liverpool in 2014-15, and Manchester United in both 2016-17 and 2018-19 – all of whom ended the campaign in sixth.
Given that just one English team needs to win one single match in the remaining European knockout rounds to confirm that fifth place will qualify for the Champions League, we can now start to shift focus purely to the race for the top five.
According to the Opta supercomputer, Forest are now favourites to secure a top-five finish, doing so in 85.6% of simulations – ahead of Manchester City (78.4%) and Newcastle United (52.3%), who still have a game in hand and will be buoyed by their recent League Cup triumph.
Chelsea, who face one of the toughest run-ins, have seen their top-five chances fall to 48.4% following their loss at the Emirates.
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Brighton’s strong recent form sees them break into the top five in 20.1% of Opta simulations, while Aston Villa, Bournemouth and Fulham all retain slim hopes of sneaking in there.
To highlight just how tight the race remains, even teams currently as low as 14th (Manchester United) finished fifth in at least one of the 10,000 Opta supercomputer simulations.
11 March
Since our last update of the battle for Champions League football in the Premier League, the title tussle has turned into a one-horse race and the bottom three have been left six points adrift of safety, so jeopardy and interest isn’t exactly coursing through the table.
Thankfully, the fight for the top four (or five!) is very much alive and giving us something to at least get a little excited about.
Monday’s solitary game between West Ham and Newcastle impacted the scrap as well, with Eddie Howe’s men sneaking a 1-0 win at the London Stadium to go sixth on 47 points, level with Manchester City.
As it stands, just seven points separate ninth-placed Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest in third; with most of those in between having 10 games left (Aston Villa have nine to go), there’s still time for prospects to change as well.
After Newcastle’s win on Monday, their top-four chances stand at 25.5%. In the Opta supercomputer’s latest 10,000 simulations, their most frequent final position was fifth, so they are slight outsiders.
Manchester City lost again on Saturday, going down 1-0 to Nottingham Forest, so that’ll have had an impact on both teams’ chances.
City still finish in the top four in 66.7% of the simulations, though – two-thirds of the time – which is actually the most of all clubs bar the top two. Forest secure a top-four finish in 54.2% of the sims, which is up from 41.7% in our previous update.
Of those currently in the top four, Chelsea are deemed to be the likeliest to drop out, only holding on to an automatic Champions League qualification spot in 36% of the season projections.
No other team is given more than an 8.6% chance of finishing in the top four places, though Brighton, Villa, Bournemouth and Fulham all managed to in at least one of the 10,000 simulations.
Of course, there’s a strong chance fifth is a route into the Champions League as well.
If English clubs do well in Europe, the Premier League will earn a fifth automatic ticket to next season’s league phase. According to the latest projections, there’s more than a 99.9% chance that occurring.
So, while the current top four and City all have at least a 57.6% of finishing fifth or higher, the outlook of those a little further down obviously improves as well.
Brighton finished in the top five in 18.9% of the sims, while Bournemouth did so in 14.7%. Both teams would’ve taken those odds with 10 games left at the start of the season.
There were even single instances in the 10,000 simulations of Tottenham and Manchester United finishing fifth. If anything, though, their numbers just accentuate how little chance those two really have of an extremely unlikely recovery in the final 10 games of the campaign.
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