How winning and losing Premier League runs affect title and relegation outcomes

Longest winning and losing Premier League runs

Arsenal have enjoyed one of their best starts to a Premier League season, having won nine of their first 10 matches, but will it ultimately matter?

Specifically, how well does an impressive run of results during a season correlate with success? We’ve looked at the most notable sequences in a Premier League season to see how often they proved decisive.

Winning runs

The Gunners weren’t able to sustain a 100% record during their opening fixtures but there have been 10 clubs in Premier League history who have managed at least 10 victories in a row. Manchester City set a new record of 18 consecutive wins en route to the 2017-18 title and this was equalled by Liverpool as they ended their drought in 2019-20.

The Reds are also the only member of the ’10 wins in a row’ club not to have seen one of these sequences deliver a title. The famous Steven Gerrard slip against Chelsea in the 2013-14 run-in meant they finished second to Manchester City, with both clubs scoring over 100 goals.

Unbeaten runs

While winning games is always the target for a title contender, we can also look at whether avoiding defeat is enough to deliver success. There have been 11 teams in Premier League history who have gone more than 20 games without defeat: most famously Arsenal’s title-winning Invincibles in the 2003-04 season.

However, four of these clubs did not see their unbeaten runs seal the league championship, most notably José Mourinho’s 2016-17 Manchester United side. Despite avoiding defeat for an impressive 25 successive league matches, 12 of these were draws and the Red Devils ultimately had to settle for sixth place.

Goalscoring runs

Avoiding defeat may not be a guarantee of silverware, but what about boasting an array of reliable goalscorers? In the history of the Premier League there have been 11 teams who have scored in more than 20 consecutive matches during a season, but six of them did not end it in first place.

While 2001-02 champions Arsenal – to date the only team to have scored in every game of a league season – prevailed, others such as the aforementioned 2013-14 Liverpool team did not. Aston Villa, who registered a notable 24-match sequence without blanking in 2007-08, finished sixth, while a 21-game scoring run from Norwich back in 1993-94 only got them as high as 12th.

Runs of clean sheets

Teams who can prevent their opponents from scoring have fared slightly better. There have been five Premier League clubs who have gone at least eight consecutive matches without conceding a goal, and three of them ended that season as champions.

Manchester United’s record of 14 consecutive shut-outs was enough to deliver the 2009-10 title, as was the 10 accumulated by previous record-holders Chelsea during Mourinho’s first spell at the club in 2004-05.

Losing runs

We can also flip this analysis around and look at how poor runs influence the relegation battle, beginning with consecutive defeats. All five of the Premier League clubs who have lost at least nine games in a row during a season were relegated, and apart from Fulham in 2018-19 they finished at the bottom of the table.

Leicester’s six-match losing run earlier this season – which left them marooned at the bottom of the table – was cause for concern but fortunately fell some way short of the record.

Winless runs

A failure to win matches has been just as lethal as losing them. Of the 10 clubs in Premier League history who went more than 15 matches without a win, all went on to be relegated. Furthermore, all but one of them finished bottom of the table, which was when Middlesbrough finished above another historically bad team in 2016-17.

Derby’s 32-match winless run – punctuated by their only victory of the campaign – saw them finish with a record low tally of just 11 points.

Runs without a goal

Failing to find the net is also unsurprisingly a big problem in a game built around that concept. There have been five Premier League teams to date who went at least seven games without scoring a goal and only one of them survived. Crystal Palace’s disastrous start under Frank de Boer in 2017-18 saw them lose all of their first seven games without scoring, but he was quickly replaced by Roy Hodgson who would guide the Eagles to a safe mid-table finish.

It is also Palace who hold the unwanted record here, having failed to find the net in nine successive games during the 1994-95 season, although they were only relegated due to four clubs going down that year as the league moved from 22 to 20 teams.

Runs without a clean sheet

Surprisingly the history of the Premier League suggests that keeping clean sheets is overrated. Five of the 10 clubs who have gone more than 20 games without one managed to avoid relegation, including the longest run of all. West Brom conceded in 34 consecutive matches in the 2010-11 season but nonetheless finished in 11th.

However, the other three teams who endured a run of more than 25 games without a single shut-out all went down, including both Blackburn and Wolves in 2011-12 – clearly not a season that will be remembered for defensive discipline.

Overall this is good news for Southampton, who have conceded in all of their first 10 matches this season. Even if the Saints defence reverts back to its porous ways in the months ahead, a leaky defence doesn’t necessarily spell doom.