It’s long been said that, over the course of a 38-game Premier League season, a team’s luck will even out. As the old adage goes, “you play every team twice,” and that’s true, but refereeing decisions, injuries and managerial changes can each have a huge impact on a club’s season — either positively or negatively.

So, with that in mind, we thought we’d take a nonscientific look at which Premier League teams have been favored by fortune or fallen foul of it. There’s no magic formula for something as ethereal and fleeting as luck, but here’s how some have fared in each of these three key areas:

• 1) Injury issues: This is not about a couple of injuries. We’re looking at situations where multiple star players were missing or entire position groups were out. After all, if you’re lucky enough to play Chelsea without star player Cole Palmer, or catch Arsenal without Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard, then your experience of playing them will be very different to that of another team.

• 2) Managerial changes: The “new manager bounce” theory suggests that it’s unlucky to be the first team up against a refreshed side that have just sacked a struggling boss — although in one case, sacking the manager made a team demonstrably worse.

• 3) Confirmed refereeing / VAR errors: This is more tangible as there have been six confirmed errors this season so far, so we’ve looked at who came out on the right and wrong side of each one.

After looking at these areas, the results may go some way to explaining why some clubs have performed above or below expectations, adding context to the 11 Premier League gameweeks we’ve seen so far.

Injury issues

LUCKY: They’ve faced teams with a lot of injuries

LIVERPOOL

Liverpool won their first five Premier League games on the spin, but the prevailing narrative around that run was that they were lucky to do so as their performances weren’t really matching up and they relied on a lot of late goals. Perhaps one factor in that fortuitous run was opponents’ injury issues, as they faced some severely undercooked teams.

Indeed, they kicked off the campaign with a 4-2 win over AFC Bournemouth, who were missing so many midfielders they could barely put a functioning unit together. (They’d also built a brand-new backline in the transfer window after several players, including Dean Huijsen, Milos Kerkez and Ilya Zabarnyi left in the summer.) Two weeks later, Liverpool won 1-0 at Anfield against an Arsenal side not only missing Saka and Ødegaard, but that then saw key center back William Saliba limp off after only five minutes.

The Reds are also one of a number of clubs who have had the benefit of playing against a Chelsea side without Palmer, although they lost the game 2-1 in the last minute anyway.

NOTTINGHAM FOREST

Forest have also benefitted from some injury luck too, although you might struggle to believe it given their league position of 19th. They opened up the season with a 3-1 win over a Brentford side who were missing talismanic midfielder Mikkel Damsgaard, then a month later lost 3-0 to an Arsenal side missing Saka and Ødegaard.

They were given a golden chance to beat Chelsea after the October international break, as the Blues were missing Palmer and Enzo Fernández and had to limit Moisés Caicedo to 45 minutes, but still lost 3-0.

If only they’d managed to convert more of their lucky situations into actual points.

UNLUCKY: They’ve had a lot of injuries

ARSENAL

Arsenal’s position at the top of the Premier League table is made all the more impressive by the fact that manager Mikel Arteta has been without several key players for portions of the opening stretch. The Gunners lost their first big game of the season 1-0 away to Liverpool, but that was hardly surprising given they had to do without Saka, Ødegaard and Saliba.

They also faced Manchester City without Ødegaard and got just 45 minutes out of Saka, who was recovering from the problem that kept him out of the Liverpool clash. They faced a similar situation away to Crystal Palace, only it was Saliba who could only manage 45 minutes. Then, just before the November international break, they faced Sunderland at the Stadium of Light without a recognized striker, as Viktor Gyökeres joined Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus in the treatment room and left Mikel Merino up front as a makeshift center forward.

FULHAM

Five losses in their past six league games have left Fulham hovering precariously above the relegation zone. Questions are starting to be raised about how, and why, this has happened — and the truth is that it’s down to a decent portion of it is bad luck when it comes to injuries.

Marco Silva has had to battle through several games this season with no recognized striker at all, as both Raúl Jiménez and Rodrigo Muniz have been injured. They’ve also had major defensive issues to contend with: left back Antonee Robinson has been mostly absent, while center back Joachim Andersen limped off in the 42nd minute of the 1-0 home loss to Arsenal, meaning the club’s entire first-choice backline and midfield general Saša Lukić were not on the pitch to finish the game.

The Cottagers have been one of the worst injury-affected sides in the league this season — and to rub salt in the wound, we’ll be revisiting them in the VAR section later on, too.

CHELSEA

Finally, Chelsea have battled serious injury problems already this season and have done remarkably well to grind out results anyway. While it’s true they have a massive squad — and therefore should be better equipped to absorb absentees — they were dealt an impossible hand by the scheduling of the summer’s Club World Cup, with only a few weeks of preseason training.

The Blues been hit particularly hard in two areas: central defense and central midfield. Palmer has missed eight league games so far this season, Romeo Lavia has missed seven, while Dário Essugo has undergone surgery on his thigh and been largely absent as a result. This has stretched the club to the limit in the center, and it’s impressive that they managed to beat Nottingham Forest 3-0 without all of the above and Fernández.

Meanwhile, by the end of their gritty 2-1 win over Liverpool, all but one of their center backs were injured: That’s Levi Colwill, Wesley Fofana, Tosin Adarabioyo, Trevoh Chalobah, Josh Acheampong and Benoît Badiashile.

Managerial changes

Through 11 games so far, there have been four managerial changes: Two have been made by Nottingham Forest, one by West Ham, and one by Wolves, who are yet to play a game with new man Rob Edwards at the helm.

Logic would suggest that means three teams have had the misfortune of colliding with the fabled “new manager bounce” — but that’s not actually true, as one of these changes only served to make matters worse.

LUCKY: They’ve faced a team in a managerial crisis

ARSENAL

Forest replaced Nuno Espirito Santo, who was beloved by the fans and players, with former Tottenham boss Ange Postecoglou after three games. It created an immediate downturn in atmosphere and a playing-style crisis, meaning Arsenal were actually fortunate to be next up. The Gunners hammered Forest 3-0.

BOURNEMOUTH

Because they are such a mess, just 39 days and five Premier League games later, Forest sacked Postecoglou and brought in Sean Dyche. The former Everton and Burnley manager began his Forest career with a visit to Bournemouth and lost 2-0, so we’re considering them lucky to have faced a team in such a state.

UNLUCKY: They fell foul of the ‘new manager bounce’

EVERTON

However, one club did struggle from an opponent’s switch of manager. West Ham moved quickly to appoint Nuno after Forest dispensed with him, and he immediately delivered a draw away to Everton. While that doesn’t seem too impressive on paper, it was their first point for a month, so the Toffees can feel aggrieved that they didn’t have Forest next on the fixture list.

Confirmed VAR errors

LUCKY: They’ve got away with some decisions
UNLUCKY: They’ve been punished by VAR unfairly

VAR was brought in to remove officiating mistakes from the game, but sadly some still creep through. In fact, it’s only made it more infuriating when one does, as referees are now given multiple chances to get the call right.

Six VAR errors have been confirmed by the KMI (key match incident) review panel this season. They are as follows:

LUCKY: AFC Bournemouth
UNLUCKY: Liverpool

– AFC Bournemouth should have opened up the campaign with an early red card, as Marcos Senesi’s hand denied Liverpool’s Hugo Ekitike a clear goal-scoring chance in the 13th minute. That said, Liverpool went on to win 4-2.

LUCKY: Chelsea
UNLUCKY: Fulham

– Fulham took the lead against local rivals Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in August thanks to a wonderful goal from Josh King, only for it to be incorrectly ruled out on a VAR review for a foul in the buildup. The Cottagers lost 2-0.

LUCKY: Everton
UNLUCKY: Wolves

– Wolves’ Hugo Bueno was tripped inside the box in the 71st minute against Everton and it should have been ruled a penalty. They were 3-1 down at the time and went on to lose 3-2.

LUCKY: Brentford
UNLUCKY: Manchester United

– Manchester United were rightly stunned when Brentford’s Nathan Collins was only shown a yellow card for pulling Bryan Mbeumo back inside the box, not a red. It was the 72nd minute and United were 2-1 down; they went on to lose 3-1.

LUCKY: Chelsea
UNLUCKY: Brighton

– Brighton & Hove Albion should have been awarded a penalty at Stamford Bridge when Chelsea defender Malo Gusto produced a high boot challenge on Yankuba Minteh in the box. It mattered little in the end, though, as the Seagulls went on to win.

LUCKY: Bournemouth
UNLUCKY: Crystal Palace

– AFC Bournemouth’s Marcos Senesi got away with another one in October, when his last man challenge on Crystal Palace’s Ismaïla Sarr was ruled a yellow on the field, but should have been a red. The Eagles were 2-0 down at the time, but roared back to 3-3 regardless.

CONCLUSION

So, is there any conclusion we can draw over which teams have been luckiest or unluckiest across the board? It’s not an exact science, but Arsenal and Bournemouth have certainly ridden their luck in various aspects so far this season, and that has helped their rise up the Premier League table.

Chelsea have had it both ways, while 15th-place Fulham can point to both injuries and VAR as reasons their season hasn’t gone exactly to plan.

Let’s see where we’re at once another third of the campaign has passed, and what has changed.

Over the summer, clubs across the world spent $9.76 billion on acquiring about 12,000 new players.

Both numbers were record highs, according to FIFA. Around 1,000 more players changed teams in 2025 than did in 2024, and the near-$10 billion outlay was a more-than-50% increase over the summer spending in the previous year.

Most of the money was spent by UEFA clubs: $8.5 billion, which was a $3 billion increase from just the year before. About 7,350 players joined new teams in UEFA, around 20% of those players required transfer fees to acquire, and the average price of those transfer fees was $4.27 million — a $1.2 million per-deal average increase from 2024.

Unsurprisingly, most of that money was spent by members of the Big Five top leagues in Europe and their associated lower-down-the-ladder clubs. England led the way with $3.19 billion spent on transfers, while Spain, Germany, France, and Italy all spent over $650 million, too. All in all, clubs across these five countries spent $6.5 billion — two-thirds of the entire global transfer spend.

And what did they get? Per Transfermarkt data, there were 203 transfers for at least €10 million across the Big Five leagues over the summer. And through mid-November, those players have combined to play … only 45% of their team’s minutes. It gets a little better when you look at the more expensive deals, but not by much: the players with fees of at least €35 million have played 49% of the minutes.

When you’re investing this much money into simply acquiring a player — and we’re not even accounting for the contracts — two things are true: (1) you expect that player to play more than 45% of the minutes, and (2) you’re thinking much longer term than the first 10 or 12 games of the year.

It’s still too early to write off any move as a failure or start celebrating anything as a massive success — but you also don’t get to extend a player’s contract just because he started slow, and you can’t reclaim lost points just because your new midfield took a couple months to gel. These games have already happened — you’re never getting them back.

So, with nearly a third of the season completed, let’s take a look at the 10 worst-performing transfers — and five of the best — from the first three months.

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What makes a bad transfer?

Almost by definition, the worst deals among these 203 moves for €10 million or more are going to be some of the most expensive ones. And if we look at “value left on the bench” — a player’s transfer fee, multiplied by the percentage of minutes he hasn’t played this far — then it’s going to skew heavily toward the biggest deals.

If a team paid €10 million to sign a player, then €10 million is the max that can be left on the bench. If a team paid €100 million, then, well, yeah, you see where I’m going. By this crude metric, here are the 10 worst deals among the Big Five leagues so far:

1) Alexander Isak, Liverpool: €107.88 million left on the bench
2) Yoane Wissa, Newcastle: €57.7 million
3) Nick Woltemade, Newcastle: €46.95 million
4) Xavi Simons, Tottenham: €43.2 million
5) Jamie Gittens, Chelsea: €41.83 million
6) Noni Madueke, Arsenal: €38.7 million
7) Tyler Dibling, Everton: €37.95 million
8) Omari Hutchinson, Nottingham Forest: €37.8 million
9) Florian Wirtz, Liverpool: €37.5 million
10) Jorrel Hato, Chelsea: €36.71 million

Liverpool broke the Premier League transfer record for a frequently injured player, and they’re already experiencing pretty much all of the downside from that bet: Isak has only played about one-fourth of the Premier League minutes so far.

But even when you play a significant number of minutes, it’s hard not to rate poorly when a team pays nine figures to acquire you. Before Isak, Liverpool broke the Premier League transfer record for Wirtz earlier in the summer, and he has played 70% of the minutes so far, but he still ranks in the bottom 10.

The same applies at a leaguewide level. Premier League teams spent way more than everyone else, so transfers made by Premier League clubs make up the majority of the bottom of the list. In fact, there’s only one non-Premier-League transfer in the bottom 20 by this method: AC Milan acquired midfielder Ardon Jashari from Club Brugge for €36 million, and he’s only played 1.6% of the Serie A minutes because he broke his leg in late August.

However, we’re only grading these moves based on the downsides. Let’s say you sign someone for $80 million and he only plays 50% of the minutes every year … but he also gets you 12 goals and 5 assists every year. Is that a failure? A success? A combination of the two?

Transfermarkt also estimates the market value for every player in the world using crowd-sourcing. If we take that and multiply it by the percentage of minutes each player has played, we can come up with another crude number: a version of the value he’s provided to his team thus far. (It’s not perfect — estimated transfer values aren’t 1-to-1 with player performance — but it at least lets us apply the methodology to each player equally.)

Then, we can rank each deal by both of these numbers — value provided, value left on the bench — and then we can combine the two numbers to get a general sense of the performance of each transfer so far.

The 10 worst transfer deals so far

10. Ben Doak, €23.1 million, Liverpool to Bournemouth

Herein lies the upside and downside of spending significant money on signing a 19-year-old. Doak has only played 5% of the minutes for Bournemouth so far this season, but there’s still so much more time left for him to come good. He won’t hit his prime years for another five seasons.

And yet: he won’t be in his prime for another five seasons. That’s a lot of potential time where a player you invested €23.1 million into still might not be good enough to contribute for your first team.

9. Arnaud Kalimuendo, €30 million, Stade Rennais to Nottingham Forest

With all of Forest’s struggles, I pin pretty much all of it on the ridiculous ownership of Evangelos Marinakis and almost none of it on the players or the three coaches they’ve employed this season. Kalimuendo has started zero matches, and he’s a center forward who has so far attempted three total shots. That’s a rate of €10 million per shot.

8. Fábio Silva, €22.5 million, Wolverhampton to Borussia Dortmund

The year is 2035. Fabio Silva has transferred from Atletico Madrid to Marseille. It’s his 10th team in 10 years. He’s never garnered a fee more than the initial €40 million that Wolves paid to acquire him from Porto as a teenager, and yet the cumulative transfer fees over his career make him the most expensive player in the history of the sport. He is a 32-year-old center forward who has never scored more than eight non-penalty goals in a single season.

7. Omari Hutchinson, €40 million, Ipswich Town to Nottingham Forest

Forest paid a combined €152 million to acquire Kalimuendo, Hutchinson, Dilane Bakwa, James McAtee, Jair Cunha, Igor Jesus, and Dan Ndoye this past summer. On average, they’ve played 26% of the available Premier League minutes.

6. Tyler Dibling, €40.5 million, Southampton to Everton

This is the “Doak Problem,” times two. Everton paid a lot of money to sign a teenager with only one discernible skill: his ability to dribble past defenders. As we’re seeing with Jérémy Doku‘s explosion at Manchester City this season, that can be the right long-term bet. But it took Doku until his age-23 season to really become a winning player. Dibling won’t get there for another four years.

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Will Chelsea’s youth transfer policy finally work?

Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens react to Chelsea signing Geovany Quenda and Dario Essugo from Sporting in deals worth up to $81 million.

5. Dário Essugo, €22.7 million, Sporting Lisbon to Chelsea

I don’t know what kind of Faustian deal Chelsea’s ownership made with a corporate-connected practitioner of the dark arts, but the record-breaking amounts of money they spent to sign midfielders Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández has mostly worked out. These deals had to hit their 95th-percentile outcomes to be worth it, and Caicedo is a legit superstar, while Fernandez is one of the better passing midfielders in the world. But any time Chelsea have tried to acquire a third midfielder, it has almost immediately fallen apart.

Romeo Lavia — remember him? — has made 12 starts across three seasons, thanks to a succession of injuries. And now Essugo’s Chelsea career has started off similarly: He’s played zero minutes and is out until at least the start of 2026 after undergoing thigh surgery in September.

4. Ardon Jashari, €36 million, Club Brugge to AC Milan

The loss of Jashari hasn’t hurt Milan much because 40-year-old Luka Modric is the latest midfielder to drink from the fountain of youth that is the Serie A tactical environment. He’s completed 99 progressive passes, while no one else in the league has more than 79, but he’s also made 36 tackles and interceptions, which is 12th-most in Italy.

3. Charalampos Kostoulas, €30 million, Olympiacos to Brighton

The 19-year-old Kostoulas has only played 32 Premier League minutes, and he’s attempted two shots. That puts him ahead of Kalimuendo on the millions-per-shot leaderboard. But he’s still way behind Isak’s six shots, at a rate of €24 million per attempt.

2. Giovanni Leoni, €31 million, Parma to Liverpool

This probably isn’t the name you expected to see from Liverpool, but Leoni provided zero Premier League value to Liverpool before tearing his ACL against Southampton in the Carabao Cup in late September. Among the players in our dataset who have played zero minutes this season, Leoni’s move required the second-highest transfer fee.

This methodology that I landed on also assumes that both Wirtz and Isak have performed to their requisite standard whenever they’ve played this season, so they avoided the top 10. But Wirtz is averaging 0.32 non-penalty expected goals and assists per 90 minutes, and while Isak’s rate is better (0.54), that’s without any of the build-up play responsibilities or pressing output that Wirtz has. More simply, they’ve combined for zero goals and one assist in the Premier League so far.

I’ve suffered my own whiplash in how to accurately assess Liverpool’s disappointing season, but the simplest explanation is also probably the best: They broke the British transfer record to sign two different attackers this past summer (when you include add-ons), and their combined goal+assist output is less than that of James Milner, who turns 40 in two months.

1. Yoane Wissa, €57.7 million, Brentford to Newcastle

While there are all kinds of caveats with these rankings, no such conditionals apply here. Purely based on the first three months of the season, this is easily the worst transfer of the summer. Wissa hasn’t played a single minute for Newcastle yet, but it’s worse than that. Everyone else in this top 10 is 23 or younger. In fact, everyone else in the top 25 is 24 or younger. These are all players with plenty of time to improve and come good, to make up for lost time.

Wissa, though, is already 29 years old.

The five best transfers so far

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Arteta: Zubimendi joined Arsenal despite many opportunities

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta believes new signing Martín Zubimendi joined the club despite “many opportunities.”

5. Martín Zubimendi, €70 million, Real Sociedad to Arsenal

He is the defensive midfielder for the best defensive team of the decade, and he’s immediately slotted into the starting XI and played nearly every minute of every match. On top of that, per Gradient Sports, he’s completed 62 line-breaking passes — 24 more than any of his teammates and more than all but six other players in the league.

For a big-money deal for an already-in-his-prime player to work out, you need the player to contribute immediately, and Zubimendi has played at a league-winning level right from the start.

4. The young, midtable goalkeepers: Djordje Petrovic and Caoimhín Kelleher

The minutes-based methodology either rewards or punishes keepers in an outsize fashion since most teams don’t rotate keepers across the season and no teams will consistently sub out their starting goalkeeper. But 26-year-old Petrovic (€28.9 million from Chelsea) and 25-year-old Kelleher (€14.8 million from Liverpool) have both played every minute of every Premier League match for Bournemouth and Brentford, respectively.

It’s still too early to say too much about their shot-stopping performance but both clubs could have found their starting goalkeepers for at least the next half-decade.

3. Álvaro Carreras, €50 million, Benfica to Real Madrid

Just as we all expected, Madrid have solidified one-half of their fullback pair with one of the better passers at his position in the world. It’s just that it’s Carreras on the left, and not Trent Alexander-Arnold on the right. While TAA has barely played meaningful competitive minutes for Madrid yet, the 22-year-old Carreras has played 99.3% of all of the LaLiga minutes so far. And they’re not empty minutes, either. He’s completed 108 progressive passes, while no one else on the team has more than 72.

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Why Bryan Mbeumo is a ‘great signing’ for Manchester United

Mark Ogden reacts to Manchester United completing the signing of Bryan Mbeumo.

2. Bryan Mbeumo, €75 million, Brentford to Manchester United

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most successful short-term moves skew much older than the least successful ones. The average age of the 20 worst-rated deals is 21.1, while the average age of the top 20 deals is 24.7.

As I wrote about over the summer, I didn’t think the 26-year-old Mbeumo made sense for United, given how old he’d be when United might next realistically challenge for a league title. But if you wanted to make your team better immediately, there were few surer bets than Mbeumo, who had already been a very good Premier League player for multiple seasons and had done so while occupying just about every possible attacking role over his six years with Brentford.

Despite being an attacker, he’s played about 97% of the minutes for United so far this season, and he’s providing just north of 0.5 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes. There’s nothing to suggest that performance is unsustainable, so if he keeps it up and remains healthy, he’ll end the season with around 17 non-penalty goals and three assists.

1. Lucas Chevalier, €40 million, Lille to PSG

We’ll see if Chevalier ends up being the long-term No. 1 answer in Paris, but he’s one of only six players in our dataset who have played every minute of every game: five goalkeepers, along with Sunderland‘s Granit Xhaka. And he’s the only one doing it for the defending European champions.