Back in the summer we set every Premier League team a target for the season. Some teams have hit those targets perfectly, some have exceeded them by comically wide margins. Others have failed miserably to listen to good common sense and ignored our suggestions to their own great and terrible cost.
Here we have a quick check-in on how everyone is getting on with regard to that initial goal, offering revised and updated ones where necessary for those teams who have outperformed expectations marvellously as well as those with the most conspicuously beshatted beds.
The full pre-season targets can be reviewed here.
Arsenal
Pre-season target: Season-long title challenge, silverware
Mid-season target: Silverware
The season-long title challenge thing was really predicated on the then-obvious, now-fanciful idea that Man City would once again win it. So while Arsenal may be just about meeting the strict definition of that task, they haven’t really achieved the spirit of it.
With no City to worry about, they should be doing far more than clinging to the coat-tails of a phase-one transitional Liverpool side under Arne Slot. It’s a very good Liverpool team, but it shouldn’t really be a romping-to-the-title unopposed one.
Arsenal still have time and opportunity to change that, of course, and showed last year that they can absolutely go on a second-half-of-the-season rampage if need be. It wasn’t enough to reel in City, but might be enough to cause more stress to a Liverpool side less accustomed to winning the league year upon year upon year.
With the FA Cup out of the picture and Carabao hopes hanging by a thread, the target for Arsenal therefore crystallises between now and the summer. Win the league, or win the Champions League. Brutal – unfair even – as it may be, anything less will see awkward questions being asked about what tangible outcome there is to show for all the transformative work Arsenal have done under Mikel Arteta.
READ: Arsenal surrender inexplicable as Liverpool handed title by Arteta’s biggest liability
Aston Villa
Pre-season target: Champions League knockouts, top-six finish
Mid-season target: Deep Champions League knockout run, top-six finish
It’s not always been plain sailing for Villa this season, with Unai Emery’s side not the first and surely not the last to discover that combining Champions League and Premier League tasks is even more tricky than they’d imagined.
But thanks in large part to their own resourcefulness and toughness and in smaller but still significant part to the utter collapse of some anticipated rivals, Villa can approach the remainder of the season with at least matching that August target very much within range.
They are going to be in the Champions League knockouts and could yet dodge the play-off round by finishing in the top eight. Something like the quarter-finals would now appear to be a reasonable marker for success based on what we’ve seen in that competition so far.
Domestically, Villa sit eighth and two points off the top six. Very doable, then.
Bournemouth
Pre-season target: Top-half finish
Mid-season target: Top-six finish
The upward shift in targets is itself a pretty neat measure of what Andoni Iraola and his team have achieved already. To use a technical term, they are proper.
So good and consistent have they become that just meeting that pretty stiff pre-season target would now be distinctly underwhelming; they hold a nine-point lead over 11th-placed Brentford with little evidence to suggest it’s about to be frittered away.
Before Saturday’s spectacular win at Newcastle, we’d probably still have only nudged their target up as far as top eight, but having moved to within a point of the sixth-placed Magpies and made a significant dent in their goal-difference deficit as a lovely bonus, it seems perfectly reasonable to set the aim higher yet.
Brentford
Pre-season target: Avoid any repeat of last season’s relegation flirtation
Mid-season target: Be good at home and away at the same time
Pretty safe tick for that August challenge, we’d say. Brentford have never really drifted too far from a mid-table course this season and now sit a cosy 12 points above the bottom three with an awful lot of very stupid football clubs between them and any genuine peril.
What they have done, though, is go about that mid-table course in unusual fashion. They spent the first half of the season absolutely smashing everyone at home and getting paddled every time they left TW8.
Yet they’ve now lost four of their last five home games – with largely reasonable claims about the calibre of opposition involved scuppered slightly by one of those defeats coming against Championship strugglers Plymouth in the cup – yet picking up four of their five away points for the season in their last two games.
So the challenge is clear: just try to be good in home games and away games at the same time. Simple. To be honest, we don’t know why they didn’t think of this before. They are fools not to have even considered it, frankly.
Oh, and if reports knocking about this week are to be believed there is a second goal for the months ahead: keep Thomas Frank out of Tottenham’s greedy paws.
Brighton
Pre-season target: Top-half finish
Mid-season target: Top-half finish
Brighton have developed a bit of a pattern. They start the season really well, then it all goes a bit wrong and they end up being somewhere in mid-table. Sometimes it’s good, upwardly-mobile mid-table but often it’s slightly underwhelming mid-table. Because of the start.
Also, this standard season upon which Brighton have settled over the last few years includes the apparently compulsory element of beating Manchester United at Old Trafford, which we can surely all agree is a really good bit.
Needless to say, Brighton are currently doing their Brighton season absolutely perfectly. They lost just one of their first nine games, managed an eight-game run without a win that nobody even really noticed because it had some decent-ish draws in it but mainly went unnoticed because it is Brighton, and sit entirely correctly in ninth and looking slightly short of what’s required for a European challenge but absolutely rock solid for that top half.
Chelsea
Pre-season target: Win the Europa Conference and complete the set
Mid-season target: Win the Europa Conference and complete the set, plus top-four finish
Two things are true here. We underestimated Enzo Maresca. Everybody else also underestimated Enzo Maresca.
Although there has been a fair bit of evidence recently of Chelsea reverting to the mean, and also that with all that money spent actually they probably should be challenging for the title, absolutely nobody back in August was seriously tipping Chelsea as title contenders after they’d seemingly tossed away even the promise of last season’s brilliant end to the season by binning Mauricio Pochettino for a manager Leicester fans weren’t even that sad to see go.
They sustained a title challenge for half a season, though. And while failing to sustain that can be explained away, it would be awkward now if they don’t even finish in the top four having spent a good chunk of the season looking like Liverpool’s main challengers. Man City not really the team you want breathing down your neck here.
To return to our apparent need to make two points about Chelsea, here are two bits of very good news. One, fifth place will probably be enough for a Champions League spot anyway, which helps, and a big part of the reason for that is the merciless way Chelsea are steamrollering the opposition as they go about what already appears to be the formality of completing that August goal we set them. Well done.
Crystal Palace
Pre-season target: 50 points
Mid-season target: 50 points
Crystal Palace’s list of points totals since they returned to the Premier League for the 2013/14 season remains one of our very favourite stats in the game. Those points totals are: 45, 48, 42, 41, 44, 49, 43, 44, 48, 45, 49.
It truly freaks our nut how you can be that consistently mediocre. It’s somehow far more impressive in its unlikelihood than consistent excellence. Man City getting 90 points every season does nothing for us, certainly not in comparison to Palace’s ability to get 40-something anyway. It’s just that relentless refusal to throw in even one rogue season where everything goes right or everything goes wrong.
For the first eight winless games of this season, it did look like it might all go wrong for a Palace side that under Oliver Glasner had sprinted to the finish line last season to come so close to finally smashing through that 50-point ceiling.
But they’ve had one of the most rejuvenating Dr Tottenham experiences we’ve ever seen. Having got their first win from the good doctor they’ve gone on to win five more games and lose just twice since late October.
They now sit happily in their customary position just below halfway with 27 points from 22 games, which would average out at a final total of 46. We’d bloody love them to do that, because it is simultaneously none-more-Palace but also a specific 40-something total they’ve never actually landed on.
But we’re sticking with our pre-season plea. From that first win onwards they’ve picked up 24 points from 14 games. If they can maintain that PPG of 1.71 from now until the end of the season, they’ll hit 54 points.
Somewhere in between their overall season record and their fine record since that horrible start would seem like a reasonable target for the remaining months of the season. And what’s somewhere right between 46 and 54? Exactly.
Everton
Pre-season target: Keep all the points they win
Mid-season target: Make sure that’s enough points to stay out of the bottom three
They really should be fine here now. Especially if David Moyes’ new-(returning?-)manager bounce continues to involve playing like 2009 Barcelona. We do suspect that particular surprising element of the bounce may have had slightly more to do with the specific stupidity of a specific opponent, but time will tell.
The slightly facetious yet undeniably smart August advice to not have any points deductions does appear to have been taken on board at this stage, so that’s good. Here’s hoping Everton continue to very sensibly listen to our good advice and now ensure they secure more points than at least three other teams in the division.
We cannot stress enough what a key metric that is for teams aiming to avoid relegation.
Fulham
Pre-season target: Just keep Fulhaming away
Mid-season target: Top-half finish while Fulhaming away
We were clear with Fulham that what we wanted/expected/rudely demanded was not just predictable mid-table security but predictable mid-table security achieved with wildly unpredictable results like last season.
Our gut feel was that this year’s predictable mid-table security had been slightly down on the wildly unpredictable results front, but looking back on those results now this may simply be greediness on our part. Okay, it probably isn’t quite as good as last year where they struggled horribly against Burnley and Sheffield United while taking four points off Arsenal and so forth, but by any reasonable standards it’s still been pretty good.
Back-to-back draws against Arsenal and Liverpool, for instance, coming a few short weeks after a 4-1 home paddling off of Wolves and just before another draw against a Southampton side making a genuine stab at becoming the worst Premier League side of all time. And then following that result with a first win at Chelsea in living memory.
In summary, then: bang on track.
Ipswich Town
Pre-season target: Be the new Luton
Mid-season target: Stay up
Huge tick for that pre-season target. To the extent that survival is now a perfectly reasonable target over the closing months of the campaign for a side that has had its inevitable paddlings off some of the big boys but remained impressively competitive in the vast majority of games.
One further target, of course, is that if they do go down as still seems probable they will then need to stop following the Luton path. It becomes a bad path.
Leicester City
Pre-season target: Survive
Mid-season target: Survive
Hmm. Those four points from Ruud van Nistelrooy’s first two games after Leicester were blinded by the sheer charisma of the man as he interimmed his way to two wins against them with Manchester United seem a long time ago now despite somehow only in fact being last month.
That new manager bounce was brief and now long, long gone, with the dawning reality that Leicester have now left themselves fighting relegation with an inexperienced manager who doesn’t have the same plot armour and main-character energy at the King Power as he does at Old Trafford.
Somehow, a run of seven straight league defeats for a team that was already in huge trouble hasn’t cast them adrift; they remain incongruously a mere two points behind 17th place and safety. But it could happen soon.
If upcoming six-pointers against Tottenham and Everton don’t deliver something in the points column it seems likely the Foxes will be searching for another new-manager bounce in a subsequent nine-game run featuring Arsenal, Chelsea, both Manchester clubs, Newcastle, Brighton and Liverpool.
READ: Who will be the next Premier League manager to be sacked?
Liverpool
Pre-season target: Reach season’s end with no doubts around Arne Slot
Mid-season target: Win the title
Our rationale in August here was that if nobody was seriously questioning Slot’s suitability as Jurgen Klopp’s successor come May then by definition the season must have gone quite well.
We will cheerfully and gladly admit we didn’t mean or expect it to be quite this well.
The temptation here is to put ‘Quadruple’ as a target even though it is a silly target because it never actually happens. But if you reach the end of January even being able to talk about it as a viable option, then you are having a very good time of it.
And to be clear, this isn’t ‘on course for the quadruple’ as it’s usually used because technically you remain in all four competitions. Liverpool are odds-on favourites to win the league, favourites for the Champions League after a flawless run through the league stage thus far, still favourites for the Carabao despite a narrow defeat at Spurs in the first leg of the semi-final and second favourites for the FA Cup behind a resurgent Man City.
It’s going very well, is the point here.
But while there’s every chance that this season now brings multiple trophies, there’s little doubt it is the league that must be the main priority and big prize. For Slot to become only the second Liverpool manager to win the Premier League and do it in his very first season would be huge. Anything else – and there very possibly will be – is a bonus.
READ: Liverpool crash European power rankings with Forest just behind Real and Premier League leader
Manchester City
Pre-season target: Win the league, don’t get point-penaltied into oblivion
Mid-season target: Win Champions League
So that’s a no and a TBC on those August targets, then. Disappointing, Pep. Very disappointing.
But City are potentially the biggest winners of the new Champions League format, because in any other season their autumn collapse would likely have seen them facing the mortifying prospect of dropping into the Europa League. How ghastly.
Now, with things having improved to an acceptable approximation of usual City standards, they still have plenty of scope to save their season in the Big Cup and the potential advantage of being able to unapologetically prioritise it with no title fight to bother them this time around.
It all starts tonight against PSG, a game which not only gives City the chance to effectively secure their own place in the play-off safety net but push the Paris side to the brink of elimination. The reverse is also true, but best not to think about that right now.
Manchester United
Pre-season target: Be proved right on Erik Ten Hag
Mid-season target: Be proved right on Ruben Amorim
Ah. Well! Nevertheless,
In a truly shocking turn of events that literally nobody could possibly have predicted, it came to pass that completely revising Ten Hag’s end-of-year appraisal on the back of one result against Man City was not in fact a good idea. And nor was spending an entire summer publicly undermining him before seemingly reluctantly and uncertainly deciding to kind of sort of back him a bit and then also spend another bunch of money on players for him.
But we did at least think they’d got a good one when replacing Ten Hag with Ruben Amorim. That too now looks decidedly dicey with Amorim already appearing to feel the strain of struggling for the first time really in his coaching career.
His response to the latest setback against Brighton was to call his team the worst Manchester United team ever – which is only accurate if we play the ‘football was invented in 1992’ card. So it really isn’t that bad is it? Ruben? We said, it’s not that bad. Ah, he can’t hear us because he’s smashing a telly.
Not sure that’s the best idea, to be honest, fella. For one thing, Sir Jim will definitely make you pay for its replacement.
That’s the other thing United could do with at some point. As well as some evidence that they’ve replaced an unloved, unsuitable manager with a better one, it would ease at least some of the fraying nerves around the place if there were even one shred of evidence cartoon supervillain Scrooge McRatcliffe is any kind of improvement on the Glazers. Who are still there in the background anyway.
Other possible targets for United include: fixing the roof, not getting relegated. Yeah, it really hasn’t gone well.
MAILBOX: Was appointing Amorim ‘stupidest’ move or relegation plan genius from Ratcliffe?
Newcastle
Pre-season target: Get back in Europe
Mid-season target: Get back in Europe, silverware
There have been sticky moments this season, but they appear to have settled in to a good thing now with the Guimaraes-Tonali-Joelinton midfield axis clearly among the very best in the league and Alexander Isak hitting top form to show once again the crazy value that having one of the few genuinely elite strikers knocking around the league brings.
Last weekend’s thumping home defeat to Bournemouth was a significant setback for sure, but one Newcastle do appear capable of riding out. They sit sixth, level on points with Manchester City in fifth, and a return to Europe should be achieved now.
Put simply, there is nobody currently below them you would currently expect to finish above them.
But while that league target remains perfectly valid, there has to be an extra one now. With Newcastle playing this well (the best team in Europe right now) and with one foot in the Carabao final and a kindly enough fourth-round draw in the FA Cup it’s not unreasonable to ask for this to be the season the most absurd major trophy drought in English football comes to an end. Especially with no continental action to distract and weary them.
Nottingham Forest
Pre-season target: Keep all the points, don’t get relegated
Mid-season target: Champions Actual League
Yeah, going to have to lose an awful lot of the points from target one to bring target two back into doubt, aren’t they?
With 44 points in the bag, we’re going to go right ahead and say Forest aren’t going down this season.
But can they really secure Champions League football? It would be an incredible thing to see the two-time European Cup winners back in the biggest of big times, and there really is absolutely nothing about the way Forest are currently going about things to suggest it’s not very, very on.
If we work on the reasonable if not definite assumption that fifth place will be enough, then Forest don’t even have to worry about City going full second-half-of-the-season City.
That’s where Forest have positioned themselves. Even if they lose their two-point advantage over Chelsea and their six-point advantage over City, they could still be in the Champions League. It’s Newcastle, also six points back, who Forest really need to keep an eye on. And possibly Bournemouth, because this season is great.
Southampton
Pre-season target: Don’t go full Burnley
Mid-season target: Don’t go full Derby
They just don’t listen, do they? Truly don’t know where these Premier League teams get the nerve, to think they can just sit there and know their own business better than a formerly good website that should leave the politics out of it and stick to the football but also not stick to the football because we are also always wrong about that.
Southampton thought they knew best, didn’t they? ‘Don’t go Full Burnley’ we said. So what did they do, presumably out of some stubborn foolish pride? They didn’t just go Full Burnley. They went Double Burnley. They insisted on playing even woker football under Russell Martin and doing so even less effectively.
And now they’re left with no chance of survival and desperately hoping to just scrape together enough points to at least avoid a seat at Derby County’s table of shame.
But now we’ve told them to get more points than Derby they’ll probably just deliberately get less than them, won’t they? No helping some people. Don’t know why we bother.
Tottenham
Pre-season target: Win a bloody trophy, any trophy
Mid-season target: Win a bloody trophy, any trophy (but also maybe don’t Spurs your way into the Championship in the process, yeah?)
Just brilliantly, impossibly and perfectly Spurs that they find themselves in the midst of a season worse even than almost all their very deepest 1990s lows and yet despite that – and even to some extent because of that – in great shape to actually hit a season target that banter convention dictates must actually be noted as the toughest thing we asked of anyone. Because Spurs and trophies, you see. They don’t win them, do they? Spurs? The trophies? Never win them.
Ange Postecoglou does, though. He wins the trophies. He said it, didn’t he? He said he wins trophies in his second year, and to be fair to the big guy he never said he would also avoid relegation. Just that he would win trophies.
It is mind-meltingly absurd that the only other club in England that at this time retains the same chances in as many competitions as Spurs do is runaway Premier League and Champions League pacesetters Liverpool. Utterly ludicrous. But true.
Spurs have a semi-final lead in the Carabao. They are in the fourth round of the FA Cup, just about. They are pretty much assured of a Europa League play-off spot at worst despite failing to win any of their last three games in that competition and pretty much running out of players altogether for this week’s trip to Germany.
They have three entirely plausible routes to removing an albatross that has hung around their neck for 17 years. And if they can just manage to avoid going completely insane and getting dragged into the relegation fight for real, a rare chance to focus what energy/players they do have available at those cup competitions rather than a financially-mandated need to put that focus on the more lucrative if less romantically Glory, Glory target of finishing fourth. Because they will not be finishing fourth.
Maybe Ange has been playing 4D chess all along by torpedoing the league season to the extent that even Daniel Levy can’t ask him to put all his eggs in that fourth-place basket.
READ: Premier League winners and losers: Bournemouth, Van Nistelrooy, Moyes, Postecoglou, Liverpool sub
West Ham
Pre-season target: Better football yielding similar results
Mid-season target: Any football yielding similar results
There’s been a bit of ‘careful what you wish for’ bumwash around West Ham this season. It’s bumwash not because things haven’t got worse after binning off David Moyes, but because this was specifically not what West Ham fans wished for.
They didn’t want rid of Moyes because his football was just so avant-garde and daring that they pined for a dull Spaniard to pare things back to the very basics. They wanted something to make them feel alive again in their dead, soulless, bubbly athletics stadium.
Julen Lopetegui was not what Hammers fans were wishing for. Graham Potter, though: he might be. It absolutely could now get a bit better. But firmly extricating themselves from the fringes of that busy-looking relegation fight is still priority one. Then some better football and upward mobility again.
Wolves
Pre-season target: A good start
Mid-season target: A good finish
Another team that inexplicably failed to take our excellent advice and paid a heavy price. In the case of Gary O’Neil specifically, a price paid with his job.
We couldn’t have been clearer, really. We told Wolves to have a good start or find themselves in a relegation fight. What did they do? Win none of their first 10 games. And where are they? A relegation fight. The great big dafties.
They kind of had an okay middle, with a curious run of two wins followed by four defeats and then two more wins. But they do now appear to have exhausted the new-manager bounce from Vitor Pereira and have lost their last three games in a row, conceding three in each of them.
The caveat is that those three games have been against Forest, Newcastle and Chelsea, who are all quite good.
The counterpoint to that caveat is that Wolves’ next four Premier League games are against Arsenal, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth. Which means they’ll have played seven of the current top eight back-to-back and might be in a whole world of pain by that point.
The response to the counterpoint to that caveat is that by definition that gives them an easier run-in than most.
So having so damagingly failed to heed our advice about having a good start, let’s hope they listen a bit more carefully this time as well them to have a good finish, yeah?
