The 2025-26 Premier League season in alternative tables

The 2025-26 Premier League season in alternative tablesImage source, Getty ImagesImage caption, What if the Premier League changed its rules and awarded the trophy to the winners by alternate means?ByDaniel AustinBBC Sport senior journalistPublished8 minutes agoCommentsArsenal might have ended their 22-year wait to the win the title, but is there any metric by which the Gunners wouldn't have been champions?Very few people would suggest Arsenal were not worthy champions, so is there some insight for us to gain by assessing the performances of all 20 teams in alternative ways?Just for fun, BBC Sport and Opta have crunched all the numbers to find out.How would the Premier League table look based on expected points?Now, I already know exactly what you're thinking - "It's real points that count, not expected ones!"And yes, you're right, points win prizes and that's why the real league table is the only one that matters.But expected points (xPTS) are useful for football analysts because they can serve as a decent indicator of whether a team over or under-performed across the course of a season.Expected points are calculated by comparing the quality of goalscoring chances a team makes (xG) and concedes (xGA) in every match throughout the campaign, and shows what the impact would have been on the team's points total.In theory, it measures how genuinely strong a team's attacking and defensive performance was.There are a few real outliers on xPTS, the most notable being Sunderland, who would have been relegated had they earned the amount of points they 'should' have done, according to the data.Aston Villa would also have finished in the bottom half, while Chelsea would have qualified for the Champions League.Maybe keep an eye on whether Sunderland and Villa fall off massively next season if you fancy figuring out once and for all whether 'expected' data is truly insightful or a heap of hogwash.What about home an...