How Premier League top four and relegation places are decided: goal difference is the first tiebreaker

Manchester City and Arsenal are both on 12 points. City are first, Arsenal second, and the only thing between them is goal difference: plus 6 against plus 4. First place in the Premier League is being settled right now by a number that the clinch and tragic figures on this site do not contain. Those figures are computed on points, and only points. Reading this table properly starts with that difference.

Every number here comes from the September 20 update. Forty-six of the season’s 380 matches have been played, twelve clubs have played five and eight have played four. Three further matches carry the same Sunday date and are still listed as upcoming, with one more on Monday the 21st. This is a cutoff, not a completed round.

The shape of the competition is simple. Twenty clubs play 38 matches each, 380 in all. A win is three points and a draw is one, which the table confirms on its own: City have four wins and 12 points, Brentford have two wins and three draws and 9. The top four places go to the Champions League. The bottom three go down. A club that has played four still has 34 matches and 102 points in front of it. A club that has played five has 33 matches and 99 points. That single match of difference is why City’s ceiling is 114 points and Arsenal’s is 111.

When clubs are level on points, goal difference decides the order, and the table is currently full of worked examples. Brentford and Everton are both on 9 points, Brentford fourth on plus 6 and Everton fifth on plus 3. Leeds, Hull City and Newcastle are all on 8 points and sit sixth, seventh and eighth on plus 4, plus 2 and 0. Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Coventry City are all on 3 points and sit sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth on minus 1, minus 5 and minus 9. Liverpool and Ipswich are level on 6, and Manchester United, Sunderland and Aston Villa are level on 4, ordered the same way. No two clubs in this table are level on both points and goal difference, so every tie in today’s order is settled by goal difference alone. The full set of qualifying and relegation rules is at.

A clinch number is the minimum further points that guarantee a place even if every rival wins every match it has left. For the four Champions League places, only four clubs have one at all. City and Arsenal need 96 more points. Brighton, third on 10, need 98. Leeds, sixth on 8 with a match in hand, need 100. Add each figure to the points the club already has and the same total comes out every time: 108. Four clubs starting in four different places are all being asked for one total. It also asks for something close to a perfect season from a competition four or five matches old, so it is a boundary rather than a target anybody is chasing.

Brentford are fourth in the table and have no clinch number. Neither do fifth-placed Everton nor Liverpool. A blank is not a verdict on a club. It means the remaining schedule does not yet give that club a reachable points total that would put the place beyond a sweep by its rivals. The 108 figure is a total shared by the four clubs that do have a number, not a bar every club is measured against, and the table shows why treating it as a bar would mislead: Leeds, sixth and a match behind, tops out at 110, higher than either of the two clubs directly above it. Below Liverpool, no club tops out above 106. The tragic number runs the other way: the further defeats after which the place becomes impossible even if the club wins all of its other remaining matches. Nobody is close to one. The smallest figure anywhere on the board is 30, and it belongs to Tottenham, nineteenth on 2 points, for the title. Tottenham’s top-four tragic number is 31 from 33 matches left. Leeds and Liverpool would have to lose all 34 of theirs. City, Arsenal, Brighton, Brentford and Everton have no top-four tragic number at all.

The relegation end is tidier than the table looks, because safety also resolves to a single total: 103 points. City’s 12 plus 91, Chelsea’s 7 plus 96, Bournemouth’s 3 plus 100 and Fulham’s 1 plus 102 all land there. Fulham are bottom on a single point and can still reach it exactly, because they have 34 matches left rather than 33. Aston Villa, fifteenth on 4 with 33 left, also tops out at exactly 103 and carries a safety number of 99. Coventry City, eighteenth on 3 points, top out at 102. Tottenham, nineteenth on 2, top out at 101. Those two are the only clubs in the division that cannot certify their own safety with the points still on their schedule, and neither of them is bottom. Only Tottenham and Fulham carry a relegation tragic number at this stage, 33 and 34, which in each case is every match they have left.

Three matches dated September 20 were still to be played when these figures were produced. Manchester City host Sunderland, and that is the match in hand. A win or a draw puts City clear of Arsenal on points and takes goal difference out of first place entirely. A defeat leaves the two level on 12 and leaves goal difference deciding it. Leeds host Crystal Palace, the lowest-placed club holding a top-four clinch number against one of the three clubs on 3 points. Bournemouth host Liverpool. On Monday the 21st, bottom club Fulham host Manchester United. After that the fixture list in our data jumps to October 10, when Arsenal host Leeds, Aston Villa host Brentford, Chelsea host Bournemouth and Ipswich host Fulham.

How to read these numbers. Zero means it is already done, and a blank means the remaining schedule does not let that club settle it alone. Both the clinch and the tragic figures are computed on points, against a sweep by every rival, and ties are counted against the club in question, so a clinch here can trail an official announcement by a day. Goal difference, the thing currently deciding first place, is deliberately not in that arithmetic. What that leaves untouched, the first-to-twentieth range every club in the division still shows, is covered separately. The table updates as results land, the remaining fixtures are at, the qualifying and relegation rules at, and scenario by scenario results at. Each club’s own figures sit on its page, /epl/team/11 for Manchester City and for Fulham.