Season Game State
How each club's matches unfolded against pre-match expectation. Green means they came through better than expected, winning comfortably or grinding out a result when it was tight. Orange and red mean they fell well short of what the situation looked like at kick-off.
Data correct as of
Reading the heatmap
Each row is a club, each cell is a Premier League match. The colour shows whether that club came through better or worse than the situation suggested before kick-off: green for beating expectations, red for falling short. Hover or tap any cell to see the score, result, and a full breakdown of how the match played out minute by minute.
The bar chart below shows how much of the season each club has spent in each state.
The five game states
Every minute of every match is labelled one of five states based on the
team's in-play win probability:
Comfortable: firmly in control, 60+ minutes
played
Protecting: holding an advantage, 60+ minutes
Level: evenly balanced or early in the game
Chasing: needing a goal, match still open
Desperate: two or more goals down and effectively
without any chance of a comeback, or chasing late with almost no time
left
Methodology
- Pre-match expectation is each team's modelled win probability at kick-off, derived from the Elo rating difference between the two clubs. That difference feeds a Poisson goal model (calibrated to ~2.7 goals per PL match) to produce a win probability excluding draws — this is the baseline the heatmap colour is measured against.
- Win probability is then updated each minute as goals change the scoreline, using the same Poisson model with time remaining. This minute-by-minute series drives both the game state labels and the heatmap colour.
- A match cell is green when the team's average in-play win probability beat the pre-match baseline by more than three points and they barely dipped below that baseline at any stage — a comfortable overperformance from start to finish. Otherwise the cell is shaded grey through orange to red by how far, on average, they fell below the baseline; a winning team that spent long spells behind can still shade orange.
- Game state thresholds: Comfortable ≥ 75% win probability and 60+ minutes played; Protecting ≥ 60%, 60+ minutes; Chasing ≤ 40%; Level everything else. Desperate fires in two situations: below 20% win probability with 20 or fewer minutes remaining, or below 10% win probability with a two-goal-or-greater deficit from minute 20 onward (this captures early annihilations that are effectively over regardless of time remaining). Minutes before the 60-minute mark that would otherwise be Comfortable or Protecting are classified as Level — early leads aren't treated as secured.
- Red cards are factored in. Each red card reduces that team's modelled goal rate by 25%, compounding for multiple cards in the same match. Scorelines beyond ±4 goals are clamped (no practical effect — win probability is already ≈ 100% at ±4).
- Elo ratings from Club Elo. Match event data from WhoScored. Fixture results from Sportmonks. Updated weekly.