Analytics & Stats
Premier League 2025/26: Ranking the fastest initial accelerations
A data-led list of the Premier League’s fastest accelerations in 2025/26, measured over three metres
“Speed is always important,” Thierry Henry once said. The question for 2025/26 is which players turn raw pace into meaningful moments. Using data from Gradient Sports, via The Athletic, this list ranks those with the highest maximum acceleration over the first three metres of a sprint.
Max acceleration: 5.5 m/s² — Ola Aina. In his first season for Nottingham Forest Aina recalled a moment when he outran Kyle Walker. His friends’ phones were “frantic” with messages after the run. “Afterwards,” Aina recalled to The Guardian, “he said something like: ‘You’re pretty quick’ and ‘You caught me flat-footed.’ But he was very chilled about it. He’s done the same thing to other players so many times.”
Max acceleration: 5.6 m/s² — Alex Scott. The bandy-legged central midfielder from Guernsey is not an obvious blur, but his burst has helped the best season of his career. As a fixture in Andoni Iraola’s full-throttle pressing unit, he must be light on his feet to apply pressure and escape opponents.
Max acceleration: 5.6 m/s² — Noah Okafor. “He’s a player of high potential,” Daniel Farke said of Noah Okafor upon his summer arrival at Leeds United, “he more or less has all the skills.” Speed stands out among them.
Max acceleration: 5.6 m/s² — Jérémy Doku. “Jérémy is the best player in the world in the first five meters,” Pep Guardiola said. Doku has deliberately slowed parts of his game. “When I arrived I was younger and had a lot of energy and always wanted to go forward,” Doku maturely reflected earlier this season, “but what I’ve learned is that sometimes you need to know the moments in the game to be more mature and calm down.” Before the end of January he had a career-best nine assists across all competitions.
Max acceleration: 5.6 m/s² — Pedro Neto. A sporting family background underpins his athletic profile: a father who played roller hockey, a mother who played volleyball, twin sisters who won national trampolining titles and an uncle who was a professional soccer player.
Max acceleration: 5.7 m/s² — Diego Gómez. In his first full Premier League season he has lined up in seven different positions for Fabian Hürzeler, with swiftness key to that adaptability.
Max acceleration: 5.8 m/s² — Benjamin Šeško. At 6’5″ and 22 years old, the forward combines a thunderous shot off both feet with blistering pace; he scored against Everton in February during a productive run under Michael Carrick.
Max acceleration: 5.8 m/s² — Aaron Wan-Bissaka. His reputation preceded him after moving to Manchester United. Wilfried Zaha recalled: “I had a little look back and I thought, ‘Oh my God … it’s Aaron.’” Wan-Bissaka dispossessed him and Zaha added, “Any other player…”.
Max acceleration: 5.9 m/s² — Kaoru Mitoma. He turned down a professional contract at 19 to study physical education and produced a thesis in dribbling. He strapped GoPros to players, investigated diet and consulted Satoru Tanigawa to refine his running and dribbling. Mitoma’s takeaway was that the best players don’t look at the ball and the ultimate task is to shift the opponent’s center of gravity. His speed complements that approach.
Analytics & Stats
Opta Supercomputer: Tight Premier League Relegation Picture After Tottenham Defeat
Opta’s model predicts a close relegation battle: Leeds, Tottenham, Forest and West Ham all involved
The relegation battle in the 2025/26 Premier League tightened significantly after Tottenham Hotspur’s 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace. Positive results for West Ham United (a 1-0 win over Fulham) and Nottingham Forest (a 2-2 draw at Manchester City) left both clubs level on 28 points and intensified the fight at the bottom.
Leeds United remain precarious. Daniel Farke’s side sit 15th, just three points clear of the current relegation group, making this a contest that could shift quickly.
Opta’s supercomputer produces the following projection for the bottom six:
– Leeds: current 31 points, expected 42.09, relegation chance 8.09%
– Tottenham: current 29 points, expected 40.04, relegation chance 16.10%
– Nottingham Forest: current 28 points, expected 39.08, relegation chance 26.88%
– West Ham: current 28 points, expected 37.49, relegation chance 49.53%
– Burnley: current 19 points, expected 27.07, relegation chance 99.36%
– Wolves: current 16 points, expected 24.62, relegation chance 99.92%
Wolverhampton Wanderers have improved form after a draw with Arsenal and successive wins over Aston Villa and Liverpool, but the supercomputer underlines that their season was effectively over months ago, with the club not recording a victory until the 20th game. Burnley sit 10 points adrift; Opta’s model projects only eight more points for the Clarets and expects their return to the Championship to be confirmed well before the final day.
The model largely maintains the current ordering and gives West Ham the highest chance of relegation among the quartet fighting to avoid the drop into the second tier. Forest are forecast to finish two points clear of the relegation places, with Tottenham projected to reach 40.04 points and stand as the final side to reach the 40-point threshold. Opta assigns a 16.10% chance of relegation to Igor Tudor’s side, a near doubling of their previous prediction before Thursday’s defeat. The fixture between Tottenham and Forest on March 22 now carries clear significance for both clubs.
Analytics & Stats
Opta Rankings: Which Premier League Sides Have the Hardest Remaining Fixtures
Opta rankings expose which Premier League sides face the toughest remaining fixtures this season…
We are deep into the final quarter of the Premier League season and Opta’s Power Rankings make clear which clubs face the steepest tests. The dataset lists mean difficulty scores for each side’s remaining fixtures, with Wolves (88.83) and Leeds (89.38) among the friendlier schedules and Everton (92.57) and Crystal Palace (92.30) toward the more difficult end.
The full set of mean difficulty figures runs from Wolves at 88.83 up to Everton at 92.57, with notable entries including Brighton (90.13), Aston Villa (90.28), Arsenal (90.30), Tottenham (90.49), Brentford (90.64), Nottingham Forest (90.72), Sunderland (91.06), Newcastle (91.21), Manchester United (91.33), Bournemouth (91.40), Fulham (91.40), Manchester City (91.44), Liverpool (91.52), Burnley (91.66), Chelsea (91.70), West Ham (92.01), Crystal Palace (92.30) and Everton (92.57).
Chelsea supporters will be concerned: Opta shows the Blues have the highest mean difficulty among the top-seven sides. The report notes Chelsea have taken points from Liverpool, Manchester City and Aston Villa, and still have to face Liverpool and Manchester City again.
In the title race, the rankings suggest Arsenal hold a scheduling edge over Manchester City. Arsenal’s only remaining match against a current top-seven side is the trip to City in April. City, by contrast, still face Chelsea, Aston Villa and Arsenal, plus potentially testing away fixtures at Everton and Bournemouth.
Aston Villa, meanwhile, register one of the clearest runs among the teams competing for Champions League qualification, with a relatively straightforward closing schedule according to the numbers.
Manchester United and Liverpool both confront tricky finishes as they chase a top-five place; United’s path includes games against Villa, Chelsea and Liverpool, while Liverpool must play Chelsea, Villa and travel to Old Trafford in the closing weeks.
At the other end, Tottenham, Leeds, Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth occupy varied positions on the difficulty scale, with Leeds and Wolves among the clubs with the kinder runs remaining.
Analytics & Stats
What Manchester United Must Learn After Carrick’s First Loss
Carrick’s first defeat shows missed big chances, midfield imbalance and the thin margins in results.
Michael Carrick’s first defeat since becoming interim manager in January exposed several clear lessons for Manchester United. The run that followed his appointment — six wins from his first seven games, a draw with West Ham United and an unbeaten stretch that, when combined with his 2021 caretaker spell, extended to nine league matches — had masked deeper issues. Only Herbert Bamlett (1927) and Ole Gunnar Solskjær (2018–19) had matched similar starts in the club’s history.
Senne Lammens called the performance at St James’s Park a “a collective off-day” that the players now “have to learn from.” Since beating Arsenal on Jan. 25, Manchester United haven’t been brilliant. Results continued largely because of resilience rather than dominance: the Fulham victory required a 94th-minute winner from Benjamin Šeško; Spurs spent more than half the game with 10 men after Cristian Romero’s red card; Everton was another narrow win courtesy of Šeško; and United were trailing against Crystal Palace until the Eagles were reduced to 10 early in the second half.
Newcastle followed a similar pattern. Even after the Magpies had a player sent off in the first half, a Newcastle penalty and an individual strike from William Osula turned a potential narrow victory into a narrow defeat. FotMob’s numbers underline the difference: United led overall attempts (14–12), shots on target excluding penalties (5–4) and ‘big chances’ (4–3), but missed three ‘big chances’ to Newcastle’s two. That matched the total of big chances missed across the three previous matches combined.
Casemiro scored United’s equaliser deep into first-half stoppage time, his 36th goal involvement since joining the club, but he is a traditional No. 6 and is leaving in a matter of months. Kobbie Mainoo offers quality as a deep-lying playmaker, yet United lack an all-round box-to-box engine on the scale of Sandro Tonali, Declan Rice, Moisés Caicedo or Tijjani Reijnders. Under Sir Alex Ferguson, United often recruited opponents’ best performers — Wayne Rooney, Roy Keane, Andy Cole, Dwight Yorke, Teddy Sheringham, Robin van Persie and even Carrick himself — which makes Tonali a summer target to consider.
Time in-season is precious; fixture congestion after Christmas leaves little room to regroup. That scarcity of recovery and reflection only increases the cost of missed chances and midfield imbalance.
