Premier League Opening Day Trends: Five bets for the first fixtures of the 2025-26 season | OneFootball

English Premier League

The long journey to lifting this trophy starts now

Ste Tudor crunches the numbers from 25 years of opening day fixtures - a total of 248 games - to find the trends from a weekend that is unlike all others.

Opening weekends of a Premier League season are usually a different beast to all that follows. There's rustiness, opening-day jitters, and debutants struggling to link up with new team-mates. That, or they fire a couple of spectacular goals before sinking without trace.

With unlikely results and keepers wearing caps, Matchweek 1 can be far removed from what comes next. Naturally then, it can be hard to make sense of.

Studying a quarter of a century of opening day fixtures helps and oddly, by and large, it takes us to Merseyside.

Trend #1 - Bad news for Leeds, Burnley and Sunderland

Since 2000, 75 teams have achieved promotion, increased their summer transfer budget, and rubbed their hands with glee at the prospect of mixing it with the big boys. Yet for so many, grim reality has bit quick and hard.

The opening day track record of those 75 sides will not fill fans of the latest promoted trio with much confidence, it reading: W11, D16 and L48.

Thirty of those defeats were to nil and 28 were by a 2+ margin. All told, promoted teams have scored one goal per 90 in their inaugural top-flight outing. Their opposition have converted 1.9 per 90.

There has, of course, been the occasional, stand-out anomaly, for instance Bolton thrashing Leicester in 2001 and Blackpool starting out with a 4-0 away win. These memorable triumphs however occurred many moons ago and regrettably the trend for promoted teams to immediately encounter defeat is exacerbating.

Only two newbies in the last seven seasons have begun their adventure with three precious points.

Trend #2 - Feeling champion

Unsurprisingly the title winners of the 21st century have enjoyed much better results, typically starting their new campaigns with a bang after lifting the trophy three months earlier.

Since 2000, only three have experienced an opening day loss, those being Leicester in 2016, Chelsea a year later, and Manchester City coming unstuck at Spurs in 2021.

If this, in itself, is not especially notable, the comprehensive nature of these victories is. Sixteen of the 24 champions began their reign by scoring 2+ goals.

This time out, Bournemouth have the unenviable task of trying to shackle a Liverpool side that averaged 2.2 goals per 90 last term. Having lost 4/5 of their impressive rearguard from 2024/25 the odds are against them.

Trend #3 - Away to nil victories more common

The number of goals scored on opening weekends is perfectly unexceptional, 2.7 a game very much the norm.

Similarly, when we break down the results there is little of note in 58 draws from 248 opening day matches. That amounts to 23.3% which is only slightly above average.

Where we do find a notable glitch in the matrix is in away wins without conceding, accounting for more than a fifth of all the fixtures.There is a logical explanation for this number, one we also tend to see towards the tail-end of campaigns, but for a different reason. Simply put, on the opening weekend some teams are not yet fully operational, and it shows.

Arsenal accrued the second-best away record in the Premier League last season and furthermore kept clean sheets in a third of their commitments beyond the Emirates. On Sunday they come up against a newly constructed Manchester United attack, not yet in synch.

Trend #4 - Spot-kick surge leads us to Anfield again

Before undertaking this deep-dive I wrongly assumed there would be a high card-count across opening weekends. Each and every summer new rule tweaks are introduced and referees tend to enforce them early and stringently.

In fact, 3.2 cautions per game is a touch on the low side.

Similarly, a red card every 5.7 games is nothing to write home about.

Where we do find a spike however is in penalties awarded, one every 3.2 games. The norm is much closer to four games.

Liverpool received the most spot-kicks in 2024/25 while pertinently this Friday's visitors Bournemouth were joint-second in this regard. It's back to Anfield then we go.

Trend #5 - Debutant strikers

Three of last season's top four go into this new campaign showcasing a brand-new centre-forward. Liverpool have purchased Hugo Ekitike for £82.4m, including add-ons. Chelsea have lured Joao Pedro up from Brighton. Arsenal meanwhile have finally secured a proven goal-scorer in Viktor Gyokeres.

Naturally, title-chasing clubs refresh their attacking options from time to time, and there are a great many examples of this since 2000. All we're interested in here though are the centre-forwards who made a full debut on the opening day.

For Arsenal that amounts to five players, all experiencing mixed fortunes. In 2011/12, Gervinho was sent off at Newcastle. Six years later, Alexandre Lacazette needed just two minutes to get off the mark. The other three forwards fired debut blanks.

Chelsea have introduced six new forwards with future greats such as Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Didier Drogba needing 90 minutes under their belt before finding the target on a regular basis. Diego Costa didn't, converting inside 20 minutes at Turf Moor.

It's Liverpool though who have the best ratio of debutant scorers, with three of their eight - Djibril Cisse, Sadio Mane and Mo Salah - wasting no time in showing off their finishing skills.