As the 2025-2026 Premier League season kicks off, it’s the perfect time to look back at the last decade of trends shaping English football’s most exciting league. From dominant teams to surprising promotions, here’s what 10 years of data reveals about the Premier League.
A few notable changes we’ve observed over the years include the addition of VAR, less tolerant referees (time wasting, brash challenges, etc.), and goal keepers choosing more often to play out from the back.
The changes listed are only a few of the many differences the Premier League has seen over the last 10-years. Based on these changes, we were interested to see if impacts were evident in league statistics and if trends were emerging over time.
So with that being said, we’ll dive right into it. In most sections, we rely heavily on graphs to provide a visual representation of data over time. We provide some text to support the graphs but find that often, the graphs tell most of the story themselves.
The 10-seasons covered include 2015-2016 up to 2024-2025. In some sections, there is missing data from the earlier seasons covered. We make note of instances where that is applicable.
Player Age Trends in the Last Decade of the Premier League
First up is the average player’s age for each season. In the data set we used, the average age per team was weighted based on the number of minutes played by each player. To arrive at one number for each season, we just averaged the average age of each team, per season.
The range for average each season-over-season isn’t that large (27.38 to 26.26-years). However, when looking at the graph, there appears to be a clear downward trend. While there are some outliers, the data is telling us that the average squad age of a Premier League team is decreasing.
The youngest average squad age (average based on weighted minutes played) that we observed while looking at the data was Chelsea’s 2024-2025 team, who had an average age of 23.7-years old. The oldest average squad age that we observed was 29.4-years old, this was evident for West Brom in the 2016-2017 season and Crystal Palace in the 2019-2020 season.
From Leicester’s 81 to City’s 100: Title-Winning Points Over the Last Decade
How many points does it take to win the Premier League? Unfortunately, that number changes drastically depending on the year, but that’s what makes the Premier League so interesting. However, over the last 10-seasons it took an average of 91.4 points to be crowned champions of England’s top division.
In 2015-2016, Leicester won the league on 81-points, which is the lowest in the last 10-seasons. In 2017-2018, Manchester City won the league on 100 points, which is the highest in the last 10-seasons.
What is also interesting to look at is the number of points the second placed team had and how close the race was to being crowned as the Premier League Champion.
Margins were large in the 2017-2018 season when Manchester City had a 19-point gap between them and Manchester United. As well as in the 2019-2020 season, when Liverpool had an 18-point gap between them and Manchester City.
However, there are also some close seasons, when the Premier League was won by a one-point difference, with the title coming down to the final day of the season. Those are the seasons that make it more interesting for the average spectator to watch.
Examples include the 2018-2019 season when Manchester City beat Liverpool to the title by 1-point (98 vs. 97-points) and the 2021-2022 season when again, City beat Liverpool to the title by 1-point (93 vs. 92-points).
Over the last 10-seasons, the average points tally for the second-place team is 82.9, meaning there is roughly an 8.5-point gap between first and second place. That is roughly a difference of 3-wins and in most cases, the league winners were well known before the final day of the season.
Survival vs. Relegation: How Close Is the Gap?
Since we’ve just reviewed points tally for teams at the top, next we’ll head to the other end of the table for some data on relegated teams. Over the last 10-seasons, the 20th ranked team (worst in the Premier League) has averaged 20.7 points.
Given that the Premier League winner averaged 91.4 points as outlined above, there is about a 70-point difference. That difference in points is quite considerable, especially when considering that the winning team averages about 4.5 times more points than the losing team.
The worst performance in the last 10-seasons was Southampton last year in the 2024-2025 Premier League season. Southampton only managed a total of 12-points.
Both Huddersfield in 2018-2019 and Sheffield United in 2023-2024 came a close second for the lowest recorded points tally with 16-points in each of their respective seasons.
Also interesting to look at the bottom end of the table is what the points gap was between 17th place and 18th place, with 17th place being the lowest position in the league table which isn’t relegated to the EFL Championship.
It is interesting to look at this metric, as if the gap is small between these two table positions, it really outlines how important every game is when millions of pounds are on the line.
Over the last 10-seasons, 17th place in the Premier League averages 36.9 points, which is only about 5-points off the 18th place average, which is 32-points.
The smallest gap over the last 10-seasons was 1-point in the 2019-2020 season, when Aston Villa stayed up with 35-points, while Bournemouth and Watford were tied on 34-points and both relegated. An extra win for the teams fighting relegation battle during the run-in can make all the difference.
The largest gap was in the 24-25 season that just passed, where the gap between 17th and 18th place was 13-points. Tottenham finished on 38-points and stayed up, while Leicester was relegated after finishing in 18th place with 25-points.
Graphed below is the points tally of the 17th, 18th and 20th place teams over the last 10-seasons of the English Premier League. The visual provides a clear representation of the gap between the bottom teams and in which years there was a tight battle to avoid relegation.
The Decline of Forward-Progressive Passing in the EPL
Progressive passes as defined as completed passes that move the ball towards an opponent’s goal line at least 10-yards from its furthers point within the last 6-passes. In essence, it measures how forward looking a team is.
Is a team more likely to move the ball forward up the pitch and beat the opposition defence? Or are they happy to reach a defender and either make a square pass or turn around and make a pass that moves the ball away from an opponent’s goal?
In the statistic we’ve graphed below, we’re talking about the number of progressive passes, not the number of yards the ball moved progressively. Additionally, this statistic counts any pass in the opponent’s penalty area as progressive. Finally, it excludes passes from the defensive 40% of the pitch.
It should also be noted that the data set we were working with didn’t have this statistic available for the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 Premier League seasons, which is there is not data on the graph.
Now we’re all on the same page, you can see in the graph below that the number of progressive passes is trending down on the whole. There was an increase in the 2023-2024 season, but overall, there is a downwards trend.
In 2017-2018 there was 30,487 progressive passes across all games in the Premier League, with that number decreasing to 28,086 in the 2024-2025 season. On a percentage basis, that is about an 8% drop-off, which might not seem overly significant but there is a definite trend.
With the way the game has been changing in recent years, this statistic appears to be particularly interesting. Shifts in the style of play in recent years has seen an increased emphasis on building the play from the back and maintaining possession at all costs.
It appears that attacks are more calculated in recent years as to not lose possession from taking unnecessary risks when on the offensive foot.
It is often that you will see wingers approach defenders but instead of taking them on, they choose to turn and play the safe ball back to their defenders or inside to a central midfield.
It will be interesting to monitor this statistic in seasons to come to see if the number of progressive passes continues to decrease steadily or if the style of play will revert back to more offensive minded risk taking.
Has VAR Increased Yellow Cards in the EPL?
Another interesting trend is surrounding discipline and the number of yellow cards that are handed out in a given season. While the number of yellow cards issued appeared to be on an overall downward trend from 2015 to about 2021, there has been a steep rise starting with the 2021-2022 season until now.
There appear to be a few reasons for this. Firstly, the introduction of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has without a doubt had an impact. The referee’s ability to have the VAR in his ear at all times means that bookable events that might have previously been missed by the main referee are now strictly enforced.
Secondly, the league has increased their oversight over items such as time wasting, professional fouls, talking back to referees, and tackles with more force. All of these items are bookable offences, not that they weren’t before, but it seems as though references don’t think twice now about issuing a yellow card for these types of actions.
A few other interesting facts about discipline over the last 10-seasons. Chelsea recorded the highest number of yellow cards in the 2023-2024 Premier League season, with a total of 109.
Given the 38 matches they play a season, that is about 2.9 yellow cards per game. Interestingly enough, that is the only season where multiple teams crossed the 100+ threshold for yellow cards received. Sheffield United and Wolves also received over 100 yellow cards for the 23-24 season, with 101 and 102 respectively.
At the other end of spectrum is Liverpool, who received only 38-yellow cards in the 2019-2020 season; only one per match. That is the least number of yellow cards a club has received in a single Premier League season over the last 10-years.
Nationalities in the Premier League (2015–2025)
With it being the English Premier League, as expected, the number of players that are of English nationality is higher than any other nation. Over the last 10-seasons, there have been approximately 237 English players on average that play in the Premier League each season.
As squad sizes have grown in recent years, the percentage of English players in the Premier League has increased from about 34.2% in the 2015-2016 season to 38.6% in the 2024-2025 season that has just passed.
In the graph below, you can see the blue line representing the total number of English players (left axis) and the orange line representing the percent of English players in the Premier League (right axis). Both lines are trending upwards over the last 10 seasons.
Well, if English players only represent about 38% of the Premier League, which other nationalities are represented? In the last 10-seasons, there have been as little as 67 different countries with at least one registered player in the Premier League and as many as 74 different countries with at least one registered player in the Premier League.
As seen in the graph below, the second highest represented nation over the last 10-seasons had a heavy presence of France and Spain from 2015 to 2022, with Brazil claiming the second most represented country after England for the last three consecutive seasons.
To put it in perspective, the Premier League had 35 Brazilians in the 2024-2025 season, which was the second highest of any nation, but that number only represents 5.2% of all players. This outlines that while there are around 70 different countries represented in the Premier League, many of them only have a handful of players representing them.
Final Takeaways from 10 Seasons of EPL Data
Well, that’s it for this article. In this post, we take a look back at the last 10 English Premier League seasons from 2015-2016 through to 2024-2025. We focused on various different data points from over the years and analyzed what, if any, trends we’re noticing.
As outlined above, we see that yellow cards are on the rise, while progressive passing is on a downward trend. The average player age of a Premier League player is also on a downwards trend, while in more recent years, the second highest represented nation after England is no longer a European nation, with Brazil taking the second spot for the last three seasons.
What trends surprised you? When seeing the visual graphs, did the lines move as expected or did any data points stand out? Were there any historic information that we didn’t cover but you think we should have?
Stay tuned for future posts and please send us a message if there is a specific topic you would like to see covered. Similarly, if you have some ideas on how we can improve these articles, please send them our way too.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read these posts!
JC
All data in this article is from fbref.com so, thanks to them!
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