Possession Is No Longer Nine Tenths of the Law in the Premier League Analyst

Teams with less possession are winning more often than they're losing in thePremier League. Is this just a quirk or is there something deeper to the numbers?

We all do it, don't we? We check the stats after a game, and if one team has had considerably more possession than the other and lost, we raise a quizzical eyebrow wondering how on earth that happened.

The best teams have more of the ball, right? The more possession you have, the more opportunities you have to create chances and score, and for a long time, that was broadly borne out in results in the Premier League.

We have seen the pendulum swing a bit in recent times, though. Having less possession than your opponent might actually now be more conducive to winning in England's top flight.

Opta has detailed Premier League possession data since the start of the 2005-06 season, and it was a surprise to see what occurred in that first year of recorded numbers. In the 2005-06 campaign, 149 games were won by the team who had more than 50% possession, but 152 were won by the team with less than 50% possession.

Of course, in a match where the split was something like 51-49%, the difference is minimal so you can't hang your hat on that too much, but looking at games where one team had at least 55% of the ball, it was still 80 wins to 77 in favour of teams who had less than 45%. However, the next 19 seasons saw teams with more possession win more games than those with less.

You can see from the graph below that it has tended to work in cycles. After every season when the number of wins evened out, it then swung back to favouring those with more of the ball.

That was until last season, which followed the 2024-25 campaign in which wins for teams with more/less possession was broadly even. In 2025-26, though, the trend carried on and saw more teams with lower possession win games for the first time since 2005-06.

Across the 2025-26 Premier League campaign, 137 games were won by teams with over 50% of the ball, while 139 were won by teams with less than 50%. Again, though, you could argue those numbers might be skewed by games where there is minimal difference in possession.