WSL after five games: Arsenal faltering, Brighton’s underlying strength and pressing data
After five matches of the 2026-27 Women’s Super League, Manchester City have won all five games while Arsenal’s title hopes have been dented by a run of draws; Brighton sit ninth but rank third for expected points and Palace and promoted Birmingham stand out for pressing metrics.
Opta made Arsenal third favourites to win the WSL before a ball was kicked, and their week-one win at Brighton combined with Chelsea’s draw against Aston Villa briefly made Renée Slegers’ side narrow favourites. In the four games since, from which Arsenal have taken two points, those early expectations have been undone and their title chances have been described as torpedoed. The pattern of draws that they arguably deserved to win has carried over from 2025-26 into 2026-27.
Arsenal’s finishing problems are evident in game-level expected-goals data: their home matches against Crystal Palace (0-0) and Manchester United (1-1) showed positive xG margins of 2.2 and 1.2 respectively. Had Smilla Holmberg not scored with her only shot of the campaign in the 95th minute against United, the statistical picture would look even starker. Only Lisa Baum and Alessia Russo have also found the net for Arsenal, with Russo 1.28 goals below her expected-goal tally; scoring three goals in the international break may help Russo’s confidence.
Fitness metrics suggest another strand of Arsenal’s difficulties. Gradient Sports’ athleticism score, which combines stamina, explosiveness and game context, is available for 125 WSL players who have played at least 270 minutes this season. Steph Catley is Arsenal’s highest-ranked player at 31st and their only representative above 59th; every other club has at least two players in the top 50, with Chelsea having five and West Ham seven, a distribution that the source notes is “not a decisive factor in success.”
Brighton were forecast by Opta to finish seventh and currently sit ninth, but their underlying numbers place them third for expected points, 0.1 behind City. Their 1-1 draw with Villa was especially wasteful: Brighton registered an expected-goal total of 3.17 to Villa’s 0.03, only for Lynn Wilms’s 89th-minute goal to deny them victory. They also drew at Birmingham while leading the expected goals by 1.5 and missed four Opta-defined big chances in a 2-0 defeat at London City Lionesses; if they can convert that dominance into goals, the Seagulls are described as capable of at least matching the fifth-place finish they secured in 2024-25.
Opta’s high-turnover metric, which records when a team win the ball to begin a new open-play sequence of possession within 40m of the opposition goal, links productive pressing with better outcomes. Sorting the 2025-26 WSL by the number of high turnovers that led to shots shows the five clubs with the fewest were the bottom five that season. While the percentage of high turnovers that generated shots produced a slightly more mixed order, the top four teams for that efficiency finished in the WSL top five, and promoted London City had the fourth-least productive press by this measure.
Palace rank third for shot-ending high turnovers with 12, behind Chelsea on 17 and Tottenham on 15, and they lead the division for the percentage of possession regains in the final 40m that produced shots at 33.3%, with Birmingham second on 28.6%. Birmingham are tied with Tottenham for most goals from high turnovers on three, while Palace have two.
Océane Hurtré’s goals from productive pressing have been a defining feature for Birmingham: their three high-turnover goals were all scored by Hurtré, which has helped propel her to joint-first in the golden boot race with five goals. She won the ball for two of those three high-turnover goals, including one at Manchester City, and her other strikes arrived in the first and eighth minutes against Palace and Brighton respectively, underlining the reward of early pressing.