Bill Connelly Oct 29, 2026, 11:09 AM ET

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Bill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.

About a quarter of the way through the club season, your place in the table only means so much. In the Premier League and Bundesliga , 14 teams -- including Ipswich Town , Paderborn and even Tottenham Hotspur -- are within six points of the top four. In Ligue 1 , it's 13. In LaLiga, 14 teams are within six points of the relegation zone . You can find some separation here and there, but we're just getting started, and we only have a partial picture of how things will end up.

We also know that the table is lying a little bit. We see funky results all the time, and they have an outsized impact when we're seen only a small portion of matches. Still, by this point in the 2026-27 campaign, each Big Five team has played hundreds and hundreds of possessions, and we know who is creating (or allowing) the best chances.…