Sunderland vs. Arsenal: What do two of Premier League’s best performers need over next 28 games?

It’s the derby of teams who can be extremely happy with their lot on Saturday as Sunderland welcome Arsenal to the Stadium of Light. At the 10 game mark, both find themselves in positions they could scarcely have dreamed of before a ball had been kicked and will know that a win in this game could set them up perfectly for the business end of the season in the months ahead.

For Arsenal it is not so much the table position that is cause for optimism — their title credentials were long since established — but the state of the field behind them. Battered and bruised by injuries to their front line, Mikel Arteta’s side still find themselves six points ahead of second place. Win on Saturday and they will increase their lead on at least one of their title rivals with Manchester City hosting Liverpool the next day.

There is no such need for detailed explanation as to why Sunderland’s start has been so brilliant. They’re fourth. For most newly promoted sides being 14th would be a triumph at this stage of the season, all the more so if, like Regis Le Bris’, they looked a bit ahead of schedule in their escape from the Championship. Sunderland had recruited shrewdly after their promotion, building out experience in the back half of the pitch, but most, this column included, suspected that that business would merely ensure they went down swinging.

Now? Well they’re going to need to take a Michael Spinks style beatdown just to hit the canvas. Even that might not be enough. Let’s see what it would take over the next 28 games for Sunderland to get relegated and, why not, for Arsenal to hold on to top spot.

Viewing information

• Date: Saturday, Nov. 8 | Time: 10 a.m. ET
• Location: Stadium of Light — Sunderland, United Kingdom
• Live stream: Paramount+
• Odds: Slavia Prague +1000; Draw +400; Arsenal -400

Arsenal just need to maintain the pace

Through 10 Premier League games this season Arsenal have accrued 25 points, enough to hand them a sizeable advantage over the chasing pack. Now I’ve grabbed my Casio (other brands are available) and after detailed research can confirm that the league leaders are currently tracking at two and a half points per game. Run that out across the course of the season and Arsenal would end up with 95 points, a mark that has only been reached on five occasions in Premier League history. Four of those came between 2017 and 2020, when Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola were knocking lumps out of each other in routinely thrilling title races.

Since then the tally required for a Premier League champion has dropped a notable amount. Last season Liverpool won the title with just 84 points; only twice this century has a lesser return won the league, Manchester United in 2002-03 (83) and Leicester City in the gas leak year that was 2015-16. Arsenal would feel they have a good chance of winning the title if they can hit the average for first place over the last five years. That, rounding to the nearest whole number, is 89. That got them second place in 2023-24 and would be one short of the club record set by the Invincibles.

Of course Arteta will be the first to insist this is a marathon not a sprint. Asked on Friday if it was only Arsenal who could stop Arsenal winning the league he was unequivocal. “Any team has the capacity and I’m sure the belief as well that they can do it. We are fully aware of that. We know our strength, we know the things that we have to improve as well and we just focus on that.”

He would, however, surely have to admit that Arsenal have burst out of the traps with impressive speed. Keep it up and there might be no catching them.

Suppose that Arsenal keep motoring at their current 95 point pace. Catching them would require something miraculous for Manchester City and to a minutely greater extent Liverpool. Mission 95 from here on out would require a 2.71 points per game pace from City, over a full season that’s 103 points. 

In other words take the most successful point generating machine in England’s footballing history — Guardiola’s centurions of 2017-18 — and find another win somewhere. To get 76 points from 28 games City could get away with two losses, if they won 25 of the other games. Win just 24 and they need to go undefeated. For Liverpool? That’ll be 25 wins, two draws and one loss, to say nothing for the goal difference disadvantage they’d have to overcome.

Let’s give the chasing pack the benefit of the doubt then. Let’s suppose Arsenal drop back to being an average title winner in the 2020s and hit 89 points. It doesn’t take much of a drop off in performances for that to happen, it’s totally foreseeable that injuries to Gabriel Magalhaes, Bukayo Saka and/or a few others might make this an 87 points per season team. What then? Well City and Liverpool would both, just about, have to accrue points for the remainder of the season like Arsenal are now at that 2.5 point per game rate.

And here’s the kicker. Neither of these two teams look like they’re about to start performing as well as the league leaders are. Both City and Liverpool are a long way behind the Gunners’ league best non-penalty expected goal difference (npxGD) of 10.22, which on a per game basis is right up there with the teams that won the title in 2020-21 and 2024-25. Those two teams, by the way, ended up on 86 and 84 points, for the chasing pack to hit that they’d need to hit 90 point pace from here on out.

At the 10 game mark, xG is more predictive of future results than points and right now neither of the teams in second (City at 8.78) and third (Liverpool at 4.86) compare favorably to the league leaders. All that is required for Arsenal, then, is that they maintain their current standards. Beat Sunderland and what is demanded of the chasing pack becomes that scintilla more difficult.

Sunderland might not be able to tank this

When the points tallies are this high, though, there is a lot more margin for error. If Arsenal lost their next two they’d go from a 95 point pace to sub-80. They might not even top the table on gameweek 12. A lot can go wrong in a short space of time in the title race.

Not for Sunderland. Where they’re concerned a lot needs to go wrong in a particularly long run of time before they risk this season being a disappointment. Before a ball had been kicked Le Bris spoke of a team who would “struggle for sure,” but those difficult moments are yet to come, five wins and three draws from their first 10 league games good enough for fourth place. Theirs has been a triumph of defense and organization, their eight goals conceded a record bettered only by Arsenal. It is not entirely unsustainable either, since the start of 2020-21 only 21 teams have allowed fewer npxG per game than Sunderland’s 1.06.

No wonder owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus is talking about approaching the January transfer window “with a top 10 position in mind.” Ask a Sunderland fan in late July for their points target come the start of the season and a fair few would probably have landed on the 40 that is the archetype for survival. Well they’re nearly halfway there. Twenty two points over their 28 games, that’s 30 point pace over the course of the season.

Then again, those of you familiar with the Premier League will know that it has been a long while since you could go down with 40 to your name, dating back to the “too good to go down” West Ham side relegated on 42. Blackpool and Birmingham City fell through the trapdoor on 39 in 2010-11 but since then the mark for survival has been dropping further. An average of the 14 years since would suggest that 34 points would do the trick. 

In the post-COVID years it has frequently been the case that a number in the high 20s might have you clinging on to Premier League status by your finger nails but Sunderland would doubtless like some breathing room. Let’s run with 33 as an end point with which this team could get relegated. How inept would Sunderland have to be to drop into the bottom three? Or indeed does this go beyond inadvertent incompetence and into the world of some misguided version of the Process era Philadelphia 76ers?

Well not quite that level. Fifteen points over 28 games equates to a shade under 23 across the course of an entire season. There are 10 teams that have limboed under that particular bar, including two past Sunderland iterations. It is possible to imagine that any newly promoted team could deliver low 20s or worse performances for a long time because, well, a lot of them have. Here’s looking at you Sheffield United, Norwich and Ipswich. 

Perhaps there’s another way of viewing this, however. What about if something flipped in Sunderland and they became one of the worst teams in Premier League history for the rest of the season? Say they hired Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom as directors of football, benched steady veterans like Granit Xhaka, Reinildo and the excellent Omar Alderete, got really weird with this all. In short, suppose they dropped a Derby County 2007-08, the ignominious 11 point season of such depths that even last season’s Southampton couldn’t plumb them.

If Sunderland accrued points at Derby pace for what is left of the season they would end the campaign on 26. Care to guess where that would have landed them in 2024-25?

Seventeenth.

This season might well be different. The bottom three is made up of seasoned Premier League sides, the sort who will feel compelled to spend their way out of trouble if they still find themselves in the danger zone come January. They’ll hope to drag some stragglers back in but that group probably won’t include Sunderland. Their points tally is a generous return from their games so far — Opta’s expected points model has them on 12.5 — but teams with a -0.14 xGD after 10 games, a smidge below league average, generally aren’t going to get dragged into the mire when they’ve won themselves an 11 point cushion. Sunderland could try to fail from here on out. It might still not be enough to drag them down to the mire.

Perhaps best not to test that theory though.