Annual table
The old expression “the league table never lies” is often best ignored at the start of the season, when most clubs are trying to come to terms with a high turnover of players from the summer transfer window or adapt to a new manager and his changing tactics. In truth, it isn’t until the end of the calendar year that we really see which clubs are on the rise and which ones are in desperate trouble of sliding down the league table.
However, while there may have been a sizable off-season and turbulent transfer period in the summer, we can draw better conclusions from how each club in the Premier League is doing when we consider an entire calendar year’s worth of form. More often than not, teams tend to start one league campaign the way they finished the last one. And in the case of the English top-flight, there are certainly plenty of examples of that.
The best performing Premier League teams of 2023
Indeed, as we can see from the table above, Manchester City continued their dominance of English football across 2023, with a remarkable 16-point lead over the second-placed team. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Arsenal sit level on points with Liverpool and Aston Villa. Which goes some way to illustrating the manner in which Mikel Arteta’s side dropped a lot of points in the second half of the season, as well as pointing to the resurgence in form from the two other clubs under Jürgen Klopp and Unai Emery respectively. This table also does a good job of showing the struggles of some of England’s biggest clubs over the course of the year. Manchester United fans will unhappily note that they sit sixth in the table, behind Brighton. While both Newcastle and Tottenham are outside the top four. Which goes some way to showing the work that both clubs have had to do over the summer to improve their fortunes.
Similarly, the table also shows us which clubs have continued to struggle from one season to the next. The most obvious example of this are Chelsea, who have picked up just 25 points from 29 games in 2023. Which puts them below the likes of Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest. In fact, the only Premier League club to pick up fewer points than the Stamford Bridge side over the course of both seasons are Everton. Which perhaps shows the degree to which new manager Mauricio Pochettino really has to turn things around sooner rather than later.
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