Arsenal vs Chelsea Prediction and the Full Weekend Card, 4 to 6 September 2026

Arsenal host Chelsea at the Emirates on Sunday 6 September, 17:30 SAST, and our pick is Arsenal to win at 58% confidence. Arsenal won 1-0 at Aston Villa on Monday. Chelsea beat Brighton 4-3 at home on Sunday in a match that told you plenty about their defence. Below that we have picks for all ten Premier League Matchweek 5 fixtures and six Betway Premiership matches. We are not publishing picks on the US Open or the UFC card in Paris, and the reason why is the most useful part of this page.

Arsenal vs Chelsea prediction

Arsenal go into this on the back of a 1-0 win away at Aston Villa on Monday night, a result that looked like the sort of grind that wins title races rather than the sort that wins plaudits. Chelsea arrive from a 4-3 home win over Brighton, which is an entertaining scoreline and a slightly alarming one.

That difference is the whole fixture. Arsenal have found a way to win tight matches. Chelsea have found a way to win open ones. At the Emirates, against a side that has just kept a clean sheet at Villa Park, an open match is not the game Chelsea should want.

The 19% attached to Chelsea is the number worth sitting with. That is not a fixture the underlying numbers rate as a coin flip, and our own confidence lands almost exactly where the model does, which does not always happen.

Every Premier League Matchweek 5 pick

Ten matches across three days. Model win probabilities are shown alongside our confidence so you can see where we agree with them and where we do not.

Manchester City against Coventry at 80% is our only strong pick of the round, and the model has it even higher at 82.7%. Coventry are newly promoted and lost 1-0 at home to Hull last weekend. Everything else on that list is a coin flip dressed in different colours.

The one we are least comfortable with

Nottingham Forest against Tottenham at 40% is barely a pick at all. The model splits it 39.1% Forest, 33.4% Spurs, 27.5% draw, which is about as close to a three-way tie as the Premier League produces. We have published it because our rule is that we publish what the model says rather than hiding the awkward ones, but read the badge.

The Premier League is our worst league. We are publishing that too

Here is the section we could not write without a public record, and it is not flattering.

We grade every pick against the official result. As of our last full grading run on 30 August, we are on 39 wins and 29 losses from 68 graded picks, 57% overall. Broken down by competition, the spread is enormous.

What we take from it practically: the Premier League is the most heavily modelled, most efficiently priced league in world football. Everyone has data on it. Finding an edge there is hard, and our record says we have not found one yet. The leagues where we are performing are the ones with less attention on them.

Betway Premiership, 4 to 6 September

Six matches, and the headline fixture is Golden Arrows against Mamelodi Sundowns on Sunday, a match where the home side has scored one goal all season and conceded none.

Orlando Pirates went three points clear on Tuesday with a 4-0 win at Kruger United, their fifth straight victory. Full reasoning on the Sunday fixture is in our Golden Arrows v Mamelodi Sundowns preview.

US Open: the draw has been blown wide open

The last Grand Slam of the year runs from 30 August to 13 September at Flushing Meadows, and it has already lost two of the three men most people expected to contest it.

• Jannik Sinner withdrew before the tournament with a right knee injury, the first major he has missed since 2019. That handed the top seeding to Alexander Zverev.
• Novak Djokovic is out in the first round, beaten in five sets by Mariano Navone of Argentina. It is his earliest ever exit in New York.
• Carlos Alcaraz is the second seed and defending champion, playing his first singles event since a wrist injury in April.

Arthur Fils, Cameron Norrie and Matteo Arnaldi have also gone from the men draw. On the women side Belinda Bencic, Barbora Krejcikova, Maja Chwalinska and Sara Bejlek are out, though all ten top seeds reached the second round.

On current seedings the men projected quarter-finals are Alcaraz against Ben Shelton, Zverev against Alex de Minaur, and Felix Auger-Aliassime against Flavio Cobolli. In the women draw Elena Rybakina and Iga Swiatek have landed in the same quarter with Coco Gauff waiting beyond them, while Aryna Sabalenka projects to meet Linda Noskova.

Why we are not publishing tennis picks

Because we have no tennis model and no graded tennis record. Nothing stops us from writing that Alcaraz looks strong and attaching a number to it, and plenty of sites will do exactly that this week. But a confidence score with no record behind it is decoration.

Our confidence bands mean something in football because we have 68 graded picks proving they rank in the right order. In tennis we have nothing. So we will cover the tournament and we will not pretend to price it.

UFC Fight Night Paris: no pick, and here is why

The card is at the Accor Arena on Saturday 5 September, with the main event from roughly 22:40 SAST.

We published one UFC pick this season. It lost. Our MMA record is 0 and 1, and more importantly we have no model that produces MMA probabilities, so that one pick was a guess wearing a percentage sign.

Rather than keep guessing, we stopped. The card is above because plenty of our readers watch it and the schedule is useful. The empty column is deliberate.

Where the rest of the weekend sits

La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and MLS all continue this weekend and appear on our main predictions board with picks and confidence scores attached. The Champions League league phase begins on 8 and 9 September, which is where our strongest competition record so far, 7 wins from 10 in the Champions League, gets its next test.