Fulham vs Crystal Palace: nobody here has a point yet

There is one fixture this weekend in which both clubs have taken nothing from the season so far, and it is at Craven Cottage on Saturday afternoon. Fulham are sixteenth with no points. Crystal Palace are eighteenth with no points. Between them they have played four matches and scored one goal, and that goal was put in by an opposition goalkeeper.

Somebody has to win it. Whoever does not will go into the second week of September on nothing from three, which in this division is not fatal in September and is very expensive by November.

Fulham cannot hit the target

Fulham’s opening match was a 3-2 home defeat to Chelsea, which is the kind of result a club can live with. Last weekend at the Stadium of Light was different.

They had 58.4% of the ball against Sunderland. They took eleven shots. They put none of them on target. Not one, across ninety minutes, from a side with a majority of the possession. Wilson Isidor scored for Sunderland on seventy-five minutes and that was the game.

Eleven attempts and nothing on target is a rare enough line to be worth pausing on. It is not a defensive failure or a lack of territory — Fulham got into the areas they wanted. It is a finishing and final-ball problem, and those are the ones that take longest to fix because they cannot be drilled out in a fortnight.

Palace cannot get near the ball

Palace lost 2-0 at Everton on the opening weekend and 4-1 at home to Manchester City last Friday, and the second of those was as one-sided as a Premier League match gets.

City had 72.2% of the possession, eighteen shots and nine on target. Palace had 27.8%, nine shots and one on target. Erling Haaland headed City in front on seventeen minutes, Rayan Cherki scored twice in five minutes either side of the hour, and Haaland added a fourth on eighty-four.

Palace’s goal, and their only goal of the season, came on fifty-six minutes when Gianluigi Donnarumma turned the ball into his own net. That is the entire attacking output of Crystal Palace’s 2026-27 campaign so far: one own goal by the opposition goalkeeper.

Why this is the most important match of the weekend for both

The tempting line is that a fixture between two winless clubs in early September does not matter much. The evidence says otherwise, and not for mystical reasons.

Clubs that take nothing from their opening three matches spend a disproportionate amount of the season in the bottom six, because the points are not the only thing lost — the fixture list keeps moving, the next opponents are in form, and by the time the run is broken the gap to safety has been set by everyone else. Five clubs went into this weekend on nothing: Fulham, Coventry, Palace, Aston Villa and Tottenham. Two of them play each other here, which guarantees at least one escapes.

There is a version of this match that is dreadful and finishes 0-0, and both sets of supporters go home having watched two sides too frightened to lose. There is another version in which the first goal, whenever it arrives, effectively ends the contest, because neither of these teams has shown any evidence of being able to chase a game.

The one point of contact between them

These two clubs have already played opponents in common, and the comparison is not kind to either. Fulham lost 3-2 at home to Chelsea; Palace lost 4-1 at home to Manchester City. Fulham lost 1-0 at Sunderland; Palace lost 2-0 at Everton.

In all four matches the losing side here was beaten by a margin that was settled well before full time. Neither Fulham nor Crystal Palace has led a Premier League match for a single minute this season, which is the statistic that sits underneath everything else.

What each needs to change

Fulham need a shot on target, which sounds facetious and is not. They have the ball and the territory; they have not had the final action. Palace need the opposite: they have been pinned into their own half in both matches and have taken ten shots all season across two games.

The neat thing about this fixture is that it should give each of them exactly what they have been missing. Palace will see more of the ball here than they have all season. Fulham will face a defence that has already conceded six.

Which is why, of the ten matches this weekend, this is the one where the form guide is least useful. Both of these clubs have been playing opponents who dictated the terms. Here, for the first time, one of them will have to.

You can play it out yourself on the Premier League simulator on this site, with the real table and the real remaining fixture list behind it.