A team wins five in a row and the run is treated as proof that something has clicked. Sequences of that length appear routinely in outcomes generated by nothing but chance.
Intuition underestimates clustering
People expect random results to alternate, and genuinely random sequences contain long runs far more often than that expectation allows.
Across a division of twenty clubs playing a full season, several noticeable streaks will occur every year without any club changing in any way.
The streaks are then explained after the fact, because a run that has already happened always has candidate causes available.
Football is not random, which makes it harder
Teams do genuinely differ in strength, so a strong side will produce longer winning runs than a weak one and the streak carries some information.
The difficulty is separating the part explained by quality from the part explained by chance, and a short run cannot do it.
A streak is consistent both with a team improving and with a good team having an ordinary run of luck, and it does not distinguish between them.
Fixture order does much of the work
Runs frequently coincide with a favourable stretch of opponents, and the sequence ends when the fixture list turns rather than when anything about the team changes.
Adjusting for opponent strength collapses a surprising number of dramatic streaks into ordinary performances against weak sides.
The adjustment is simple and rarely applied, which is why streaks retain their narrative power. The run and the fixture list are usually reported separately, so the connection between them is never made explicit.
What would count as evidence
A genuine change should be visible in how matches are played rather than only in their results, through territory, chance quality or a clear structural difference.
It should also persist against stronger opposition, since an improvement that vanishes against good teams is probably not an improvement.
Where both conditions hold, the streak is a symptom of something real. Where neither does, it is a pattern in a small sample.
Why this matters for a preview
Streaks attract disproportionate attention and shift expectations, which means the team on the run is frequently overrated ahead of its next match.
The correction usually arrives quietly, with the run ending against an opponent nobody expected to end it.
Reading form through opponent quality rather than through consecutive results avoids most of this, and it takes about a minute per team.