The points ruler

The row of numbers at the top answers the end-of-season question before you enter anything. Each total from 33 to 42 is checked against every Premier League season from 2000/01 to 2025/26, and the Championship tab does the same for 45 to 54 from 2004/05. A season counts as clear when the total beats the best team that went down that year, and as level when it ties that team, which leaves goal difference to decide.

In the Premier League 36 points were clear in 17 of 26 seasons and level in 4 more, while 40 points were clear in 25 of 26. The one exception was 2002/03, when West Ham went down with 42. Tapping a number sets the pace slider to whatever it would take to finish on it.

Teams that stood where you stand

The two steppers, or a tap anywhere on the chart, set games played and points in the table. The calculator then lists every team that had exactly that many points after exactly that many of its own games, so a postponed match does not move anyone into the wrong group. If fewer than eight teams match, the search widens by one point each way, up to three, and the page says which range it used. A team that had points deducted in a season is left out of this search for that season, because its running total did not match the table it was playing in. That removes 18 of the 1,048 team-seasons.

The answer is a count rather than a percentage, because a group of twelve teams is twelve stories, not a probability. Nine points from ten Premier League games puts you in a group where 16 of 20 stayed up; six points from ten games gives 6 of 19. Three points in October separate a group that mostly survived from one that mostly went down. Each name in the two lists under the chart highlights that team’s path, and in the first four games the page warns that history has little to say yet.

The pace slider

The slider sets points per game for the rest of the season and places the finishing total on the ruler. It starts at the pace the matched teams managed from your point onward, and the green bar above it marks the middle half of that group. With six points from ten games, the middle team in the group took 1.00 a game from there and the middle half sat between 0.84 and 1.18. At 1.00 a game the finish is 34 points, clear in only 8 of 26 seasons, with 7 more decided on goal difference.

The chart

Every thin line is one team from the matched group, drawn from your point to the final game: solid green for teams that stayed up, dashed red for teams that went down. The white dotted line is your own projection from the slider. The red strip on the right edge spans the points of the best relegated team in each season, with a tick for every year, so your projection can be read against all of them at once.

Results come from the openfootball match archive, which is public domain. Relegation is read from the division each club played in the following season, and points deductions, including those of Portsmouth, Everton and Nottingham Forest in the Premier League and the affected Championship clubs, are applied to final totals. The data runs to the end of the 2025/26 season.

More football tools: the Football IQ Test and the Football Tactical Compass.