Pedro Neto to Chelsea, Europe’s Top-Five League Competitiveness, and Premier League Preview Questions

Stat, Viz, Quiz is the Opta Analyst football newsletter. This week’s edition includes numbers on Chelsea, Europe’s top five leagues, and Premier League predictions.

Just three more sleeps before the new Premier League season begins. We’re like a kid in the build up to Christmas, only with suntan lotion and ice cream instead of winter coats and mince pies.

We’re here to bestow presents upon our wonderful subscribers in the form of another edition of SVQ, including a bonus viz section this week just because we wanted to show our gratitude to you all.

We’ll be discussing Chelsea’s latest addition (as of writing, but you can never be entirely up to date when it comes to the Blues’ transfer dealings), comparing the strength of Europe’s big five leagues, and firing up the oh-so wise Opta supercomputer.

All that and a Premier League quiz as well; tis the season!

Correction; tis almost the new season.

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STAT – Pedro’s Precision

Put down your mug of coffee or tea lest you drop it in surprise when we tell you that Chelsea signed a player over the weekend.

Yes, Sunday saw Pedro Neto unveiled to the crowd at Stamford Bridge following his £54 million transfer from Wolves, making it nine signings for Chelsea in this summer transfer window.

Where Enzo Maresca is going to play all these new arrivals is one thing, but Neto is surely someone who has come in to be a key component of a Chelsea team looking to get back to where they feel they belong.

Neto can be an absolute menace to opposition defences and seemed set to be one of the Premier League’s brightest stars last season, until injury halted his momentum.

The 2023-24 season began brilliantly for Neto as he racked up seven assists in 10 games before a hamstring injury sidelined him until Christmas.

A stop-start rest of the campaign saw Neto end with 10 Premier League assists in 20 appearances, with only Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins (13) and his new Chelsea teammate Cole Palmer (11) registering more, though they did so from 37 and 34 games respectively. Of players who played at least 1,000 minutes in the Premier League, only Kevin De Bruyne (0.73) averaged more assists per 90 than Neto’s 0.53.

Questions have been raised about the Portugal winger’s fitness. He made 20 Premier League appearances last season, with 18 starts after missing some time with two separate hamstring injuries.

It was still the second-most league starts he has managed since arriving at Wolves in 2019. In fact, Neto only recorded 18 Premier League starts in total across both the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons. He has not been able to stay consistently fit since 2020-21 when he had 30 starts and 31 overall appearances in the Premier League.

If he can avoid further injury agony, Neto could be a tremendous acquisition for Chelsea, and imagining him linking up with Palmer and Christopher Nkunku in attack is quite the enticing prospect.

VIZ – Top Five Leagues Competitiveness

Viz by Danny Dinsdale

It’s one of the great football debates. Which is the most competitive top league?

Last season saw Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain’s recent dominance of the Premier League and Ligue 1 respectively continue, Bayern Munich finally had their hogging of the Bundesliga title ended by Bayer Leverkusen, and Inter and Real Madrid ran away with the Serie A and La Liga titles respectively. It can be a tricky question to answer.

Well, using the Opta Power Rankings, we’ve had a go at trying to make things clearer.

Teams are measured out of 100, with the top team in Europe attributed 100 points. As you can see, that’s currently Manchester City, with Real Madrid second and Inter third.

Our viz above shows the gap between the reigning champions and the rest is quite big in four of Europe’s top five leagues, with the Bundesliga the most tightly-bunched at the top. That suggests there could be quite an interesting title race again in Germany this season, with the top five a fair way ahead of the rest, but all relatively close to each other in the Power Rankings.

In the Premier League, the big gap is between the top three of City, Arsenal and Liverpool against the rest, while in Italy it seems the fights for European spots and relegation could be very close indeed.

In La Liga you can see that everyone apart from Real Madrid are fairly evenly spread out, so perhaps we can surmise that to be the answer to the question, though as with everything else in football, it’s up for debate.

You could argue similar in Ligue 1, especially with the teams fighting for Champions League places so closely bunched together.

According to the leagues’ average team rating, we can also see a suggested order of strength of each league, with the Premier League highest with an average of 87.6 points.

Then it’s Serie A (87.1) followed by La Liga (86.8), the Bundesliga (86.3) and Ligue 1 (85.2).

We hope that’s answered some questions for you, though more than likely it’s just raised significantly more.

BONUS VIZ – The Opta Supercomputer Has Spoken

As it’s the week before the Premier League season starts, we thought we’d treat you with an extra viz.

Well, we say an extra one, you may have already seen it.

After a summer of sunning itself, going to festivals and getting some much-needed R&R, the Opta supercomputer is back from its holidays and ready for a new season.

We gave it a nudge and asked it to spit out some predictor numbers ahead of the 2024-25 Premier League campaign, and it didn’t disappoint… unless you support Southampton.

Unsurprisingly, Man City are the heavy favourites again, but their 82.2% likelihood of making it five Premier League titles in a row is a fair bit down on the more than 90% Pep Guardiola’s men were given this time last year.

Arsenal (12.2%) and Liverpool (5.1%) will be hoping to stop them from continuing their stranglehold on the league. The Gunners might not think that percentage is high enough, but it’s still a big increase on the 4.1% they were given ahead of last season.

Chelsea (0.2%) and Newcastle United (0.1%) can’t be entirely discounted either, though those percentages tell you that, actually, anyone but one of last season’s top three winning is incredibly unlikely.

At the other end, the excitement of the trio promoted from the Championship might be tempered by the supercomputer expecting them all to go straight back down, as happened last season in England’s top flight.

If you want to read more detail on the supercomputer’s projections for the 2024-25 Premier League season, head to the Opta Analyst website now, where we’ll also be providing numbers for other top leagues later this week.

QUIZ – Premier League Posers

How else could we celebrate the impending start of the 2024-25 Premier League season than by getting our big quiz hats on? Here’s five questions about England’s top flight. Answers at the bottom of the page.

1. How many Premier League titles have Manchester City won? (not including their two First Division titles because, as we all know, football started in 1992)

2. Which team has come second in the Premier League era more often than any other?

3. Which team has been relegated from the Premier League the most often? Clue: They aren’t currently in the Premier League.

4. Which team has scored the most goals in Premier League history?

5. Which team has scored the most penalties in Premier League history?

Ask Opta

Do you have a stats-based football question you want to Ask Opta? If so, send it to editors@theanalyst.com and we’ll do our best to provide you with the answer in a future edition of SVQ.