The Seven Best Premier League Stats from Matchday 3

The third matchday of 2024-25 is over, and our excellent team at OptaJoe have got all sorts of facts from the weekend. Here, we look over the best Premier League stats from Matchday 3.

Everton were leading 2-0 until the 87th minute. This is the latest a team has ever been 2+ goals ahead in a game and gone on to lose in Premier League history.

Just when things looked to have started going right for Everton, they drastically took a turn for the worse. Saturday’s 3-2 home defeat to Bournemouth, which they led 2-0 until Antoine Semenyo scored the Cherries’ first goal at 86:36, felt like the nadir.

They still led the game going into added time, until Lewis Cook equalised at 91:14. They then did the unthinkable by conceding a winner at 95:37 via Luis Sinisterra.

That was the first time in Premier League history that a team has led by two goals as late as the 87th minute and still lost the match. Bournemouth took the record away from Reading, who defeated West Bromwich Albion 3-2 at home after being two goals down until Jimmy Kébé scored their first goal of the afternoon at 81:01. Goals from Adam Le Fondre and Pavel Pogrebnyak then went on to win the Royals the game that day.

But if any team were going to win a match from a seemingly impossible position, it was always going to be Bournemouth. They were given the official Premier League award for the ‘Most Improbable Comeback’ in both 2022-23 (3-2 away at Nottingham Forest) and 2023-24 (4-3 vs Luton Town after being 3-0 down at half-time). Now they’ve staked an early claim to 2024-25’s gong.

Since Boxing Day 2019 – Mikel Arteta’s first game in charge of Arsenal – the Gunners have been shown 16 red cards in the Premier League, at least three more than any other side.

Declan Rice was sent off on Saturday for two yellow cards. While there’s no doubt that he deserved his first of the afternoon, his second was slightly more controversial.

Either way, it led to the 16th dismissal that Arsenal have had in the Premier League since Mikel Arteta took over – three more than the next most in the competition in that time (Wolves and Everton).

While they are top of the ranking in this period, it’s slightly unfair on the current Arsenal squad, who have been shown just three red cards in 41 Premier League matches since the start of last season, with seven teams being given more.

Across managerial spells of at least 100 games at a club in the Premier League, Arteta’s average of 10.9 games per red card is the joint-15th highest, and actually better than the average for Arsenal under Arsène Wenger (10.6 games per red).

The manager with the worst record in Premier League history is Mark Hughes at Blackburn, who saw his team receive 21 red cards in 147 games (7 games per red), which is top ahead of Steve Bruce’s reign at Birmingham City (8.7 games per red).

Erling Haaland became the first player to score a hat-trick in two of a team’s first three league games in a season since Paul Jewell for Bradford in 1994-95.

Erling Haaland scored his second Premier League hat-trick of the season this weekend and we’re only three matchdays into the 2024-25 campaign. With his treble at West Ham, he became the first player to score a hat-trick in two of his team’s first three league games of a season since Paul Jewell for Bradford in 1994-95, when he did so in the third tier.

The Norwegian now has eight Premier League hat-tricks since making his debut in the competition in 2022-23, just four away from Sergio Agüero’s record tally of 12, which also all came for Manchester City.

Quite ridiculously, this means that Haaland has averaged a hat-trick every 8.6 appearances in the competition, and has already equalled the tally scored by some of the best strikers in Premier League history – Thierry Henry, Harry Kane and Michael Owen.

He’s so far fallen short of Alan Shearer’s record tally of five hat-tricks in a single Premier League campaign, which he set in 1995-96, coming closest in 2022-23 when he netted four as Man City won the title. He needs just three more trebles in City’s 35 remaining games of 2024-25 to equal Shearer’s feat.

Cole Palmer has provided four assists in Chelsea’s three Premier League matches this season, becoming the first player to provide 4+ assists in a team’s first three matches since Paul Pogba in 2021-22 (5).

Cole Palmer grabbed another assist in Chelsea’s 1-1 draw against Crystal Palace on MD 3 to add to his hat-trick of assists in the win over Wolves a week earlier. This takes him to four inside the opening three matchweeks.

Paul Pogba was the last player to eclipse this feat inside the opening three matchdays of a Premier League season, when he assisted five for Manchester United. However, Pogba only managed four more assists the rest of that season to finish on nine overall – some way off the Premier League season record.

The seasonal record is held by both Thierry Henry in 2002-03 (for Arsenal) and Kevin De Bruyne in 2019-20 (for Man City), who each assisted 20 times in a single campaign for their respective clubs.

Interestingly, Palmer’s expected assists (xA) total this season is just 0.93 – below eight other players in the Premier League 2024-25 rankings, with De Bruyne top (1.61). The Belgian only has one ‘real’ assist to his name, however. If only Man City had someone to put the chances away, eh?

None of the last 80 league meetings between Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur have been goalless; it’s only the seventh fixture in English top-flight history to go 80+ games in a row without a 0-0.

We can always rely on Newcastle and Tottenham to entertain us, and the MD 3 meeting at St James’ Park didn’t disappoint. Eddie Howe’s side enjoyed a 2-1 win to keep up their unbeaten start to the campaign, while Spurs suffered their first league defeat of 2024-25.

This was the 80th consecutive league meeting between Newcastle and Spurs to see at least one goal scored, with no 0-0 played out between these clubs in league competition since 18 August 1971.

Eighty games without a 0-0 is a lot, but it’s not the most. Across English top-flight history, six fixtures have seen a longer run without a goalless draw, with Chelsea vs West Brom (94 in a row) holding that record – a run that is still ongoing.

Arne Slot became just the third manager to win each of his first three Premier League games without conceding, after Sven-Göran Eriksson in 2007 and José Mourinho in 2004.

The Arne Slot era at Liverpool has started very well, with three wins from three in the Premier League, including an away win against rivals Manchester United this weekend. They haven’t even conceded a goal yet, either.

Of course, it has to be said that Slot’s start has been on the kinder side, with Liverpool’s opening five games deemed the easiest when we analysed the Premier League fixtures ahead of MD 1.

Liverpool’s next three Premier League fixtures see them play Nottingham Forest (H), Bournemouth (H) and Wolverhampton Wanderers (A) – a winnable trio of games, on paper at least. Should Slot lead Liverpool to victory in all three of those matches, he’d equal the best Premier League winning run by a manager at the start of their career in the competition, currently shared by Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola.

Slot will still have to go nine more games without a Premier League defeat to equal the Premier League’s best ever unbeaten start by a coach.

Maurizio Sarri enjoyed a 12-game unbeaten run to life as a Premier League manager in 2018-19, when he began his stint as Chelsea boss with eight wins and four draws. That overtook Frank Clark’s record from 1994, which was an 11-game unbeaten run as Nottingham Forest manager.

More recently, Ange Postecoglou started very well at Tottenham last season after taking over, winning eight and drawing two of his first 10 games as a Premier League manager, before injuries and suspensions began to pile up and Spurs eventually finished fifth.

Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa became the first players to score in both of Brentford’s first two home games in a league season since Ollie Watkins and Neal Maupay both did so in 2018-19.

With Ivan Toney completing a deadline-day move to Saudi Arabian side Al-Ahli, Brentford will need Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa to find the goals.

They shouldn’t have too much concern, though, with the pair scoring 16 goals combined across the 22 Premier League matches that the Bees had to play while Toney sat out his suspension between May 2023 and mid-January 2024.

So far this season, Brentford have won two of their three games, and Wissa and Mbeumo have both scored in those victories. Saturday’s efforts versus Southampton were the 13th different Premier League game that both players have scored in, and underlined what a valuable pairing they are for Thomas Frank.

That saw them overtake the record of Andy Cole and Dwight Yorke as a pairing, who both scored in the same match for the same team on 12 occasions (9 times for Man Utd, 3 times for Blackburn), but it’s still some way off the Premier League record.

That record is held by Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, who both scored at least one goal in 37 different matches for Tottenham across their Premier League careers.

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