Just how many points do Newcastle United need to guarantee Premier League survival this season?
It’s a question that many in and around St James’ Park will be pondering as the season goes on, and should poor results continue those thoughts will only intensify.
Steve Bruce’s men currently occupy 15th place in the league standings with 19 points from their opening 18 matches, and are only seven points above the relegation zone.
Fulham, West Bromwich Albion and Sheffield United are the three teams in the drop zone at this moment in time, but there is still more than half of the season left to play, so nothing is decided yet.
Just like the title race, the fight to avoid relegation could go down to the wire, and there will be many aiming to predict how the campaign will pan out.
Our colleagues at Leeds Live have attempted to do just that by working out how many points are needed for teams to stay in the Premier League for at least another season.
According to their calculations, Newcastle would need 36 points to theoretically avoid dropping back down to the Championship.
These workings are based on the average points from teams over the previous 10 years, with the points ‘guaranteeing’ safety considered to be one more than the team in 18th place at the end of the season.
In the past decade, only once has a team needed 40 points to avoid the drop, while the lowest to guarantee safety was 33 back in 2013-14.
The most regular occurring number of points needed to stay up over the last 10 years was 35, with the average being just above this.
Given that Sheffield United (5), West Brom (11) and Fulham (12) have considerably low points tallies for this stage of the season, it could be possible that a lower total is needed to survive.
Newcastle’s quest to avoid relegation from the Premier League continues on Saturday away to Aston Villa.
