Here's a list of all of the people who, before the start of the 2024-25 season, thought Nottingham Forest would qualify for the UEFA Champions League:
... And yet, with eight games to go, it's quite likely that they do. The betting markets put the odds at well above a coin toss, while projections from other analysts give them a 4-in-5 shot at landing within the top five.
Now yes, this unlikely European Cup push is aided by an all-but-guaranteed fifth Champions League place for the Premier League this season. But even without that, projections from analyst Simon Tinsley give Forest a greater-than-60% shot at finishing in the top four.
Before the season, according to the site Sports Odds History, Forest's over/under point total was 35.5 -- the third lowest in the league. They hit the over before the end of last year.
Not only was this unexpected before the season, but it still seems surprising during the season.
The underlying numbers suggest as much: Forest's plus-2.5 expected-goal differential ranks ninth in the Premier League. But you don't need an algorithm to understand the situation. In an era where we're used to the best teams controlling matches and dominating shot counts, Forest have allowed 33 more shots than they've attempted.
This got me thinking: Who are the "worst" Premier League teams to ever qualify for the Champions League? We don't have advanced data -- or even just shot data -- all the way to when the breakaway league began in 1992, so we're going back only to the 2013-14 season for our analysis.
When we look at the previous 45 Champions League qualifiers, and the five sides currently in the top five by points per game, here's how the bottom 10 shakes out.
10. Manchester United, 2017-18
• Points per game: 2.13
• Finishing position: second
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.6
First: unsustainable results. Then: ridiculous expectations. Then: regression to the mean. Then: The coach gets fired. Then: Repeat it all again and again and again, forever.
9. Chelsea, 2024-25
• Points per game: 1.74
• Current position: fourth
• Adjusted goal differential: plus-0.57
Per some recent analysis by Stats Perform's Nils Mackay, the betting markets view Chelsea as the fourth-best team in the Premier League right now.
When you compare the odds for every match and cross-reference them with each other, you can derive a power rating for every team. Represented by what the market expects each team to do against an average Premier League team on a neutral field, here's what Mackay found:
1) Liverpool: plus-1.6
2) Arsenal: plus-1.2
3) Manchester City: plus-1.1
4) Chelsea: plus-1.0
I'd quibble with City and Chelsea being that close to Arsenal, but that order doesn't seem wrong if we're projecting team strength for the rest of the season.
So what does it mean if the fourth-best team in the league by both points and performance is on pace to be one of the 10 worst teams to make the Champions League since 2013?
Pretty simple: the Premier League is quite weak at the top this season. Liverpool are playing at a level that would've made them competitive for the title in almost every other season, but there's no other genuine title-level team this season. Arsenal have played at a top-four level all season -- hence, them not being on this list -- but after the Gunners, there's really no other side that has played at a clear-cut Champions League level this year.
Instead, there's just a mass of teams fighting it out for the final three spots: eight clubs within seven points of fifth place.
8. Manchester City, 2024-25
• Points per game: 1.7
• Current position: fifth
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.52
Counting this season, 240 different teams have played in the Premier League since 2013-14. Starting in 2013-14 and counting forward chronologically, here's where Manchester City's seasons have ranked in adjusted-goal differential: 8th, 20th, 32nd, 13th, 3rd, 2nd, 5th, 15th, 1st, 9th, 10th and 48th.
In other words: They've barely -- just barely -- been worthy of a Champions League spot this season.
7. Manchester United, 2020-21
• Points per game: 1.95
• Finishing position: second
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.58
Stop me if you heard this one before: Manchester United rode some unsustainable results to a surprisingly high finish in the table, expectations got way too high, they regressed and then they fired the coach.
United finished second in the table in 2020-21, but were fourth by adjusted-goal differential. They signed Cristiano Ronaldo the following summer, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was out of a job before Christmas, and United finished the season with as many goals scored as conceded.
6. Arsenal, 2013-14
• Points per game: 2.08
• Finishing position: third
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.46
Finally, a team that made it onto this list without totally collapsing the following season.
A big reason: The Gunners signed some guy named Alexis Sánchez in the summer. And since Arsenal never won anything major with either guy, we don't talk much about how they signed Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez in consecutive summers.
Sanchez was only 25 when arrived, and he'd averaged more than 1.0 goals+assists per 90 minutes in 27 starts for Barcelona the season prior. Ozil was only 24, and he'd averaged 0.97 goals+assists per 90 in 23 starts for Real Madrid.
Can you imagine this happening today -- in an era where Premier League teams have even more money than before? Ozil and Sanchez were two of the best attackers in the world -- full stop. They were both just entering their prime years. They'd each averaged a goal or assist per 90 minutes.
They were both playing a ton for Real Madrid and Barcelona. And Arsenal paid less than €90 million combined in transfer fees to get both. The Messi-Ronaldo era really made everyone completely forget how to assess the talent of soccer players.
Although, say, Nottingham Forest can't just go out and get the next Sanchez and Ozil, the lesson here is to not let a surprise top-four-of-five finish prevent you from trying to make sizable upgrades to the talent level of your squad.
It might not seem like it because the results didn't change all that much, but the Ozil and Sanchez signings kept Arsenal from slipping out of Champions League contention for another few years.
5. Manchester United, 2022-23
• Points per game: 1.97
• Finishing position: third
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.44
Listen, I understand why it was easy to get swept up in all this. It was Erik ten Hag's first season in charge, and Manchester United had bounced back into the top three after finishing sixth the season prior. Plus, it's Manchester United. They're soccer's Dallas Cowboys -- we say they're going to win the league when they're simply good; we call them a disgrace to football when they're simply bad.
Now, I'm not going to say that it was easy to see Manchester United so rapidly becoming a genuine bottom-half-of-the-table team. But it was easy to see why this season was a false dawn -- and you don't even need fancy stats to know why.
In the 2022-23 season, Manchester United scored 58 goals and conceded 43. Their plus-15 goal differential was the sixth best in the Premier League. Among the 112 Premier League teams that have ever qualified for the Champions League, only two have had a worse goal differential.
4. Manchester United, 2014-15
• Points per game: 1.84
• Finishing position: fourth
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.4
This is funny for a couple of reasons. The first is that, well, they were better the season before. You know, that terrible first year after Sir Alex Ferguson when they let David Moyes go before the season was even over.
Moyes, so the story went, just wasn't able to handle the demands of managing a big club. See: United finishing in seventh, their first time outside of the top three since the Premier League was formed. So they brought in Louis van Gaal, who was coming off a successful World Cup run with the Netherlands, had won the Champions League, and had managed Barcelona and Bayern Munich. He got United back into the Champions League.
The big club needed a big personality, and it seemed like the move worked -- if you completely ignored the underlying numbers. United finished fifth the following season. Their leading goal scorer, Anthony Martial, had 11. And Van Gaal was soon out of a job.
And yet, they were still miles ahead of where they are now. The club's current adjusted-goal differential for the 2024-25 season: minus-0.13.
3. Tottenham, 2018-19
• Points per game: 1.87
• Finishing position: fourth
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.37
The reason most of the teams on this list disappointed the following season is twofold: If you appear on this list, you probably didn't have a great season the next year, and that's due to a combination of factors: (1) Your presence on this list suggests that you won a lot more points than your underlying performance level typically would, and (2) you have to play in the Champions League the next season, so those extra games will stress a squad already getting by through some smoke and mirrors.
Yes, Spurs reached the Champions League final in 2018-19. But then they fired Mauricio Pochettino a few months into the following season and hired Jose Mourinho, and they've only been back to the Champions League one time since.
2. Nottingham Forest, 2024-25
• Points per game: 1.9
• Current position: third
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.19
Forest earned the spot ahead of Aston Villa because of a superior point total, but the two clubs converged on the exact same performance level from completely opposite directions. The former did it by scoring and allowing a lot of goals; the latter have done it by making it hard for their opponents to score and eking out just enough goals on the other end.
If we look at just the attacking end, Forest's adjusted-goal number (1.39 per game) is lower than any other Champions League qualifier we have data for and any of the other sides in contention for a top-five spot this season.
In an era when every manager is looking for another player to invert into midfield to leverage positional play into territorial dominance or whatever, Nuno Espirito Santo's Champions League playbook reads: "Defend deep, attack fast and trust in Chris Wood."
Forest's possessions start closer to their own goal than anyone else in the league, but then they move the ball upfield faster than anyone. And once the ball gets up there, their 6-foot-3, 33-year-old striker turns seemingly everything touches into a goal:
At PFF FC, they track a statistic they call unsavable shots. (You can figure that one out without my help.) Among players with at least 30 attempts, no one has a higher unsavable shot rate than 16% -- except Wood. He's all the way up at 23%.
Is it repeatable or replicable? Probably not. Is it working? Absolutely.
1. Aston Villa, 2023-24
• Points per game: 1.79
• Finishing position: fourth
• Adjusted-goal differential: plus-0.19
Outside of the one tie, these rankings hinge on adjusted goal differential -- that's a blend of 70% expected goals and 30% goals.
When Liverpool won the 2019-20 league title with a second-best-ever, 99-point haul but merely a pretty good expected-goal differential, the analyst Ben Torvaney wondered if there might be some insight to be gleaned from looking at not only expected goals or goals alone, but a blend of the two. He went back four seasons and used a number of different blends to try to predict the actual outcome of games. The most accurate predictor: the 70-30 blend I'm referring to as adjusted-goal differential.
And by this number, last year's Aston Villa are the "worst" team in our dataset. What, particularly, makes them the worst? Their defense.
Last season, Villa conceded 61 goals. To put that into perspective, Everton, who finished 15th, conceded 10 fewer goals than Villa did last year. Or, how's this? Villa conceded seven more goals than any of the 112 other teams that have ever qualified for the Champions League out of the Premier League.