Who needs what and will they get it on the final day of the Premier League?

Three seasons ago Bournemouth needed to win at Everton in their last Premier League game to have a chance of staying up. They did win but still went down. There can be agony as well as ecstasy in a final round of fixtures.

Tomorrow the roles will be reversed. Well, almost. Everton play at home to Bournemouth knowing that if they win they are sure to stay up. Will they?

Teams who need points from their last game are more likely to get them than they would have been if they had faced the same opponents at the same venue earlier in the campaign. How much more?

I studied the past 25 Premier League seasons, 1997-98 to 2021-22. Teams who needed to win their last game to stay up, or to have a chance of staying up, won 39 per cent of the time. Earlier in the season they had won 23 per cent of their games.

So teams in danger of relegation won their concluding fixture 16 per cent more often than we might have anticipated from their previous results. That is similar to what I found in the EFL, where the difference was 21 per cent. There was a larger sample across the three divisions of the EFL.

Tomorrow Leicester need a win to have a chance of staying in the Premier League. So do Leeds, but for them there is a complication: they play at home to Tottenham, who will need something, most likely a win, to have a chance of a Europa Conference League place.

Brentford also need to win for a chance of the Conference League, while for Aston Villa three points would guarantee the Conference League.

A British football season usually begins and ends in sunshine. The spectators are pixels of colour. In between there are grey skies and freezing temperatures, but at the start and finish nearly always there is lovely weather. A football season follows the natural seasons.

Tomorrow in the Premier League there will be five games that matter to neither team, four games that matter only to one team and just a single game that matters to both teams. That is about par for the course. Over the previous quarter-century of final days, half of games mattered to neither side and nearly all of the rest mattered only to one of the two sides.

What is at stake influences how far players will push themselves to get it. This can be seen in the number of cards referees show. In many bookings markets, each yellow counts as ten points and each red as 25 points. Here are the figures from the past 25 seasons for the final round of fixtures. The average bookings makeup was 26 points when neither team had anything to play for, 34 points when one team had something to play for and 43 points when both teams had something to play for.

Records equalled could turn into records broken

Manchester City’s domination of English football could become unprecedented.

They are champions for the third year in a row. That has been done before five times – by Huddersfield in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the 1980s and Manchester United at the turn of the Millenium and again in the first decade of this century.

City’s title was also their fifth in six years. That has been done before as well, though only twice. Liverpool were champions five years out of six between 1979 and 1984, Manchester United between 1996 and 2001.

Next season, though, City could set new records. Nobody has been champions of England four seasons in a row, or in six seasons out of seven.

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