Premier League shirts are going to look very different this season. Twenty years after the door was opened for gambling companies to put their logos on the front of jerseys, it has been closed after clubs voluntarily voted to ban them. For the past two campaigns, 11 of the 20 clubs have had their shirts adorned with the branding of some kind of betting firm - anything from online bookmakers to crypto casinos, sometimes who do not even operate in the UK. It shows how finding a shirt sponsor today is very different to how it was the 1980s, when corporate logos began to appear on kits regularly. Teams used to attract local companies or foreign firms well-known on these shores.

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Two of the teams fighting relegation meet on Sunday when Tottenham host Nottingham Forest, but are there more than just points at stake? If we do get a winner here, it is a huge boost for that team psychologically going into the international break, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. But, for the losing manager, it could mean the sack. That applies to Forest's Vitor Pereira as well as Igor Tudor at Spurs - this is a classic game where triumph or disaster awaits both clubs. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. His guests for week 31 are Amari Bacchus and Genesis Lynea, stars of new CBBC drama series Crookhaven. Crookhaven begins with a double bill on Sunday, 22 March at 15:05 GMT on BBC One and BBC iPlayer, and at 17:25 on CBBC. The full series will be available to watch on BBC iPlayer from this date.

Tottenham may have coasted through to the Champions League last 16, but their Premier League form remains a problem for boss Thomas Frank. I was at their draw with Burnley last week and there are a lot of angry Spurs fans out there, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Their domestic results are such a contrast to their record in Europe, and it could be another difficult afternoon for Frank when they face Manchester City on Sunday. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. His guest for week 24 is boxer Francesca Hennessy, who supports Chelsea . Hennessy faces Ellie Bouttell in a WBC title eliminator on Saturday, live on BBC Two from 20:00 GMT.

Aston Villa boss Unai Emery had an unhappy 18-month spell in charge of Arsenal that ended in 2019, but can he get the better of his old club on Tuesday? After the abuse he took from Arsenal fans, I'd love nothing more than Emery to go back to the Emirates and win, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. He absolutely didn't deserve that. Some of those fans should take a long, hard look at themselves for the way they mocked him. I hope Villa go there and spank them, just because of that. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 19 - which includes the final games of 2025 on Tuesday, 30 December and the first matches of 2026 on New Year's Day - he takes on singer-songwriter Tom A Smith, who is a Sunderland fan.

Forget Liverpool against Everton or Arsenal against Manchester City, the big fixture this weekend is Chris Sutton versus AI chatbot Copilot. Sutton claimed on this week's Monday Night Club that he is more intelligent than AI and the stats do support him, at least when it comes to football scores anyway. He is top of the BBC predictions league table (see bottom of page) so far, with three wins in the first four weeks - and he has beaten AI every time. I am 4-0 up on AI - I don't know if it feels pressure, but it should, Sutton said. Also, why is it not going to the best source? AI, however, does not agree that Sutton has superior intelligence, and seems to suggest that it is a bit early for him to be celebrating. When asked'are you worried that Chris Sutton is cleverer than you?' Copilot replied not in the slightest.

Analysis of the popular expected goals (xG) metric in soccer has determined that a (slightly) smaller number of high-quality attempts will likely yield more goals than a slew of low-quality ones. This observation has driven a change in shooting behavior. Teams are passing up on shots from outside the penalty box, in the hopes of generating a better shot closer to goal later on. This paper evaluates whether this decrease in long-distance shots is warranted. Therefore, we propose a novel generic framework to reason about decision-making in soccer by combining techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). First, we model how a team has behaved offensively over the course of two seasons by learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from event stream data. Second, we use reasoning techniques arising from the AI literature on verification to each team's MDP. This allows us to reason about the efficacy of certain potential decisions by posing counterfactual questions to the MDP. Our key conclusion is that teams would score more goals if they shot more often from outside the penalty box in a small number of team-specific locations. The proposed framework can easily be extended and applied to analyze other aspects of the game.

From Leicester City winning the title in 2016 to Liverpool overturning a 4-0 defeat to Barcelona in last season's Champions League, football is impossible to predict. Yet, bringing together world leading companies in data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), BT Sport has attempted to do just that. Combining historic performance data from sports industry leaders Opta and Squawka, BT Sport has fed the information into a machine learning model. This calculated the attacking and defensive strengths of each team, as well as the likelihood of events such as transfers and injuries, to calculate the probable scoreline of each match in the season. So where does the AI model's Premier League predictions 2019-20 place your team; where will they claim their biggest victory, and how will they perform against their biggest rivals?

Swansea's Gylfi Sigurdsson has been valued at £50m, Everton have spent £90m and Manchester United bought Romelu Lukaku for £75m - so is Newcastle boss Rafael Benitez right to call this summer's transfer window "a little bit crazy"? Premier League clubs' spending has already surpassed £500m since the end of last season - and business analysts Deloitte say they are on course to set another new record by 31 August. Teams spent a record £1.165bn last summer, rising to £1.38bn after the January window. Football finance expert Rob Wilson says the market "hyper-inflation" means anyone selling to an English club is adding "at least 40%, if not 50%, to the deal". And football agent Jon Smith says a £30m transfer - such as goalkeeper Jordan Pickford's move from Sunderland to Everton - is "the new norm".