The Super Sub Report - Premier League Gameweek 5

Gameweek 5 produced 82 substitutions across ten Premier League matches. On 81 occasions the player who came off and the player who replaced him reached a tally between them that the starter had not reached alone.

That is the whole column. Under bet365's Sub On Play On and the equivalent rules elsewhere, a replacement's tally continues the line, so the pair's combined figure is the one that matters on those markets. Nobody else computes it, and it produces a different set of names every week.

The cameo of the round

Conor Gallagher, six minutes, six thresholds. He replaced Sandro Tonali at 84 minutes in Tottenham Hotspur's 2-3 home defeat to Aston Villa and in those six minutes had a shot, put it on target, made three tackles and committed a foul.

Three tackles in six minutes is the number to sit with. It cleared the 1+, 2+ and 3+ tackle thresholds on his own account, and it took the Tonali pair to nine tackles between them. Tonali had come off with no shots on target and no fouls; the pair finished with one of each.

Where the pairs add most

Not every market behaves the same way. The column below counts how often, when a starter came off exactly one short of a threshold, the pair's combined total went on to reach it.

The shape is the same as it has been all season. Shots and tackles move most - a substitute attacker or midfielder arrives and immediately contributes to both - while shots on target barely move at all, because a replacement needs not just an attempt but a good one in twenty minutes. The 1+ fouls line carries the most volume by a distance: 44 starters came off short of it and 17 pairs got there anyway.

The rest of the week's cameos

Three more cleared six or four thresholds from the bench:

• Malick Fofana, 30 minutes for Sunderland at Manchester City: three shots, all three on target. Nilson Angulo had come off with two shots and one on target; the pair finished on five and four.
• James Maddison, 24 minutes in the same north London match: two shots and four tackles. Dominic Solanke came off with two tackles, and the pair reached six.
• Tyler Dibling, 24 minutes in Everton's 1-0 win over Ipswich Town: three shots, one on target, from a standing start.

Shorter still, and worth noting because the minutes are so small:

• Nico O'Reilly, five minutes at Manchester City: a shot, one on target, a tackle and a foul - four thresholds.
• Zian Flemming, nine minutes for Ipswich Town: a shot, a tackle and two fouls. He was the cameo of Gameweek 4 as well, that time in 27 minutes.
• Igor Jesus, 31 minutes in Nottingham Forest's 0-1 home defeat to Coventry City: two shots, one on target, one foul.

Season to date

Across 50 Premier League fixtures this season, 426 thresholds have been reached by a substitution pair that the starter had not reached alone. The distribution by line:

Fouls and tackles sit at the top because they are the thresholds a substitute can reach without needing the ball to fall kindly. That is the practical read of the whole series: the markets where a replacement's minutes count for most are the low-threshold physical ones, not the shooting lines.

What this is and is not

Every figure above is arithmetic on our own match data. It counts thresholds that a substitution pair reached between them and the starter did not reach alone.

It says nothing about whether a bookmaker offered any of these lines, whether anybody backed one, whether a Super Sub rule applied to that market at that bookmaker, or how anything settled. We cannot see bets and we do not claim to. The value here is that the underlying match data is settled fact, and that nobody else counts it.

18+. Please gamble responsibly - begambleaware.org. Match data from our own database. This column reports match events, not betting outcomes.