What Happens When You Win Your First Five Premier League Games

With the first international break of the season now upon us, it gives observers of the Premier League an ideal opportunity to take stock of the opening five weeks, and although there may only be a small sample of games contested, there are still plenty of emerging stories being crafted.

One of those is the title race, and although you cannot win any silverware so early in the campaign, you certainly do not want to cede ground to your nearest rivals and with Arsenal being pecked by the Seagulls last weekend, Brighton’s 3-0 win has already given Manchester City daylight at the top.

Daylight that comes courtesy of a fifth successive league win for Enzo Maresca’s men, and even though they were given a rather rough afternoon by Sunderland, the five City goals on the scoresheet were enough to cancel out Brian Brobbey’s impressive hat-trick at the Etihad.

City’s win puts them three points clear of defending champions Arsenal, and it is the five-game marker that has drawn attention in terms of how often teams have set the early pace and then gone on to win silverware the following May.

When it comes to the topic of setting the pace, there can be no better early speed than a perfect record after the first five games of the season and with City’s current crop achieving this record just a few days ago, they become the 15^th team in Premier League history to do so.

Adding City to the previous group of 14 presents the data sample below:

With the current season a long way from being concluded, we can instead look at the 14 previous instances where a team has earned maximum points from their first five league outings, and of those 14, only four have gone on to win the Premier League title.

Of those four instances, only three clubs have achieved the feat in question. Chelsea have managed this twice, in both the 2005/06 and 2009/10 seasons; Liverpool did so during the 2019/20 campaign and Manchester City added their name to the honours board four years later.

Four instances from 14 where early perfection has also led to silverware. A hit rate of 28.57% and one that suggests that it is not necessarily how you start the campaign but, perhaps more importantly, it is how you finish.

An example of this would be the previous two instances where a team has gone on to collect 15 points and also finish the season 33 games later. When we compare the 2023/24 and 2025/26 seasons, we can see a stark difference.

Pep Guardiola’s men were perfect in the early weeks of the 2023/24 season and would eventually earn Premier League glory the following spring. Arne Slot’s side may have sprung out of the blocks two seasons later but could only muster a fifth-place finish.

This means if the hit rate of 28.57% for teams displaying early perfection is far from a guarantee of collecting a Premier League medal, perhaps a different question needs to be asked instead, and here we can ask how many points the champions collected after their first five matches?

This question opens up the data to every season in Premier League history instead of those where perfect starts were recorded, and due to this, we can get a better idea of what it took to find success.

Note: 14 points have been removed from the table due to the impossibility of this after five matches.

We already know that four of our perfect starters in the data sample went on to win the title and therefore, that same data point carries over to this table. However, the percentage of champions that picked up 15 points equates to 11.76% by comparison.

Just over 1 in 10 Premier League champions have been faultless after their first five league matches of the season. The same ratio as those teams that collected either 11 or 12 points across the same number of fixtures.

Before the end of last season, four winners also collected 10 points from their first 15 and with Mikel Arteta finally leading Arsenal to Premier League glory four months ago, the Gunners have now increased this particular group to five.

14.7% of all Premier League champions have picked up 10 points from their first 15; the same can be said of those that picked up eight. 50% of all title winners have earned 11 points or fewer during this period - highlighting that dropped points are not the end of the world in the opening weeks.

The outlier in all of this is a Manchester United side that picked up just seven points from their first five matches of the very first Premier League season. Then they purchased Eric Cantona from Leeds,; and the rest was history.

One team has won the title after dropping eight points early on, two have found glory after dropping six from their first five matches. If you are a team that has won the title after collecting nine points from 15, you have just a 5.88% success rate by this measure.

Which brings us to the most common number of points before going on to win the Premier League crown. That number is 13, and at the start of this campaign, there have been nine previous instances where four wins and a draw in the first five have been converted into the title down the line.

That means 13 points accounts for 26.5% of all 34 Premier League champions in our sample, more than twice the proportion who had a perfect 15-point start. Two points dropped, but why does that seem to work so well?

Perhaps it is simply the combination of winning regularly while avoiding defeat. Four victories from the opening five games provide the momentum of a perfect start without requiring perfection, while the solitary draw means that the team has already demonstrated an ability to pick up points.

It is, of course, impossible to say from this data alone that four wins and a draw is some sort of formula for success. Nine champions from 34 is a historical pattern rather than a guarantee of what comes next.

But for Manchester City, there is an interesting twist. They have already gone one better than the most common starting point for an eventual champion. They have 15 points from 15 and are currently the Premier League’s latest trailblazer.

The question now is whether that perfect start becomes the foundation for another title-winning campaign, or whether they follow the path of the other perfect starters who eventually discovered that the Premier League season is a marathon rather than a sprint.