What better time than the long, cavernous, empty second week of an international break to spend 5000 words guessing the prevailing mood at each of the 20 Premier League clubs?
Let us tell you, there is absolutely no better time to do that. Not like anything else is going to happen, is it? Not like a great big giant monsterbastard of a news story is going to drop and render this even more pointless than it already was, is it?
Ah well. It’s here if you want to read it anyway. No pressure.
20) Wolves
This is going very badly. Worse, it is also going very predictably badly for a club that ended last season in absolutely stinking form, to which the response was to sell the club’s most reliable defender (Max Kilman) most exciting if brittle attacker (Pedro Neto) and hand a still inexperienced manager a whacking great new four-year contract. That has to go down as one of the summer’s biggest errors.
A run of one league win in 10 games now duly stands at one league win in 17, with Wolves having amassed a mere six points in what now amounts to very nearly half a season of effort. It really isn’t all that far off Derby County levels over really quite an extended period.
There have been some games that haven’t been so bad; they have competed manfully in narrow defeats to Newcastle and Liverpool and weren’t disgraced at Arsenal on the opening day. They have also, though, shipped six at home to Chelsea and five at Brentford.
They have already conceded 21 goals – almost a full goal per game worse at this stage than any other team in the division – and that spells serious trouble for Gary O’Neil. It is that kind of defensive leakiness that is most likely to steer chairmen – even those who have just for some reason given you a four-year contract – towards wielding the axe. Because when you concede that many goals, quite obviously, you just aren’t even competing in enough games to have any chance.
It’s not just an unacceptable record for a decent team, it’s unacceptable for a relegation battle. It’s more than twice as many goals as Crystal Palace, for instance, have conceded in their own nightmare start. A team like Nottingham Forest, who Wolves finished 14 points above last season while conceding two fewer goals, now sit a worrying nine points but a truly absurd 15 goals better off than a theoretical rival.
We thought Wolves were f***ed last season. To their and O’Neil’s great credit they were in fact not that. But now they are.
19) Manchester United
A banter era that has nevertheless brought trophies in numbers that would make it a golden era for most clubs has entered a second decade with absolutely no sign of stopping. There truly is perhaps no quantity of Carabaos or FA Cups that could bring an end to this era, so high are United’s standards and so comical their ongoing shamblings.
Without any doubt the current proud owners of the crisis club albatross, while the sheer scale of them means that while the media have any sniff of blood in the water everything will remain fair game.
A perfect example this week with the news that Sir Ferg will no longer, after this season, be given £2m a year to be an ‘ambassador’ and come and watch games like he would do anyway. The general response to this, and if you step back from the cracked-badge crisis-club canvas on which this is all drawn it is impossible to rationalise, has been ‘Another misstep by Sir Jim FFS, how could they do this to the man who did so much for them?’ rather than ‘Hang on, the club were giving Ferg £2m a year for essentially f*** all?’
There really are only two options here. Either it was an entirely ambassadorial role, in which case cutting Ferguson off at 83 doesn’t really feel like that big a deal. Even on top of losing the winter fuel allowance. The alternative is that he actually did have meaningful impact on the club’s direction and activity while he was pocketing over £20m quid, in which case this decision is frankly long overdue.
Also long overdue is the decision to axe Erik Ten Hag but for some reason – and we suspect the covering of boardroom arses is prominent – that hasn’t happened yet despite United lurching this season between ‘sh*tbone awful’ and ‘even worse’. The 3-0 defeat to Liverpool was mortifying, and the even shonkier capitulation to Spurs by the same scoreline really should have been the final straw.
We’ve already seen and already know that everything is magnified, everything matters more, when it’s Manchester United Football Club You’re Talking About, and that also means that you can’t, as Ten Hag has become desperately wont to do as he clings on by his fingernails, continue to point to 0-0 draws against Crystal Palace and Aston Villa as signs of encouragement. Not for much longer anyway. Surely.
One does wonder how much longer United can style it out and pretend there remains any real tangible evidence that Ten Hag can turn the ship around for real, but he might have just been bought a bit more time by the fact United’s dawdling has allowed the FA to nip in and snaffle their top managerial target to the dismay of the Daily Mail and its dwindling band of red-faced, cloud-yelling readers. And so United remain stuck, going nowhere fast while the world watches on.
18) Southampton
We’re starting to grow fond of a theory that These Days far too many teams get promoted and think they can just start/continue playing proactive out-from-the-back Pepball straight out of the Barclays box.
Brentford didn’t do that. Heck, even Brighton didn’t do that. But Southampton appear to be the latest team to think Staying True To Your Principles is noble and not very often very stupid and they are going to pay a heavy price if something doesn’t change.
Most specifically, Russell Martin is going to pay a heavy price very soon if something doesn’t change. They look really quite f***ed right now, but it’s still not something a good old-fashioned firefighter can’t solve.
And as Burnley showed, there’s no point just placing faith in the manager who got you up in the first place knowing he’ll be the best man to get you back up again, because all that happens then is that manager who you probably should have sacked on at least nine separate occasions simply f***s off to Bayern Munich anyway.
In summary, then: miserable.
17) Crystal Palace
A stark reminder that the cruellest of all emotions in football, as in life, is and always will be hope. After picking up 19 points from the last 21 available last season under the exciting tutelage of Oliver Glasner, this season has been, to coin a phrase, absolute sh*t.
Look, nobody expected a flawless continuation of that absurd run-in form, with its thumping wins over Manchester United and Aston Villa and West Ham to go with thoroughly deserved successes against Liverpool and Newcastle, but it also didn’t seem remotely possible that such a team could rock up the next season and take just three points and no wins from a start that included Brentford, West Ham, Leicester, Man United and Everton.
The irreplaceable loss of Michael Olise has been felt even harder than expected, and it is a frustrating yet inevitable fact of life for clubs in Palace’s position that any time you feel like you’ve got a good thing going the rug will be pulled out from under you by some big bastard domestic or foreign, but it doesn’t explain this.
We were all absolutely certain this was finally going to be the season where Palace’s final points total wasn’t in the 40s, weren’t we? The big worry now is that we might have been right.
16) Tottenham
Those 10 games at the start of last season really are starting to look like one of the cruellest tricks ever played on any Premier League fanbase. Twenty-six points Spurs got from those games. Twenty. Six. Points. Proper, no-doubt-about-it Premier League title form.
And since then, mid-table slop. With the emphasis on slop. They are a relentlessly sloppy, infuriatingly stupid football team. That Ange Postecoglou has rocked up offering a glimpse of something real and better and an end to the Spursy behaviour and then actually built the single most ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ team the Premier League has ever seen is a remarkable act.
The thing is, while they are crap by ‘big six’ standards’, they are not crap by overall Tottenham Premier League standards. They are a lot of fun. They are, when the mood takes them, capable of playing some of the best football in the division. They are also, obviously, never more than one minor setback from playing some of the worst.
This itself becomes self-fulfilling because if teams never feel like they’re out of the game against you then teams never are in fact out of the game against you. Lads, it’s Tottenham.
Spurs know they could collapse at any moment. Every team they play knows they could collapse at any moment. It is always possible – likely, even – that the fondue they’ve set up on the nuclear power plant safety console is about to topple over.
Now there is a fairly substantial subsection of Tottenham fans who can live with this. Who actually wouldn’t mind going back to the pre-Big Six days of being reliably entertaining, of knowing that every season will bring its share of brilliant and memorable highs to go with the mortifying lows, while occasionally finishing fifth but more often winding up eighth or 10th.
It’s fine if that’s what you want – it’s certainly less stressful than having to be in a constant fight for fourth place that makes every single result matter and every single inevitable setback sting that much more.
But the problem you’ve got now is that this is not how Spurs see themselves in big 2024. They have the best stadium in the country. They have more money to spend than almost anyone. It’s rather overlooked that Big Ange has had more cash lavished on his underperforming squad than any of his predecessors.
There is always that disconnect with Spurs. They are a big club in all the ways that don’t really matter and not remotely a big club in the one way that does.
On the field, nothing is going to change under this set-up. There will be more ‘3-0 win at Old Trafford’ days, and plenty more ‘3-2 defeat at Brighton’. And so Spurs will remain forever stuck between how they are and how they see themselves, with almost no straightforward way to square that circle.
15) Bournemouth
It’s fine and it will probably stay fine and they are still above Manchester United in the Premier League table, but a 1-0 defeat at Leicester is not the result you want to spend two weeks ruminating on through the international break, is it? Previous defeats against Chelsea and Liverpool were minor, easily explained irritants in a way that latest defeat was not.
Luckily for Bournemouth, a football media annoyed at the discovery that their now PFM prince Gary O’Neil might be sh*t after all are unlikely to take that anger out on the club that so disgracefully replaced him with A Foreign just because they thought he was a better fit to be their manager. Certainly not while they’re busy sh*tting the entirety of their beds in public about England appointing a German – sorry, A GERMAN – as manager anyway.
Sometimes it’s nicer – and certainly quieter and less stressful – to just not really be noticed all that much. Sometimes it’s nice to be a club where having eight points from seven games is absolutely fine actually rather than a crisis that throws the very future of your entire world into doubt.
14) West Ham
The Ipswich game came at a good time for West Ham, who can be pretty grateful that Man United’s mega-crisis has provided plenty of cover. Because while it’s quite hard nowadays to imagine a world where all the Big Six are behaving sensibly all at the same time, it’s not hard to imagine that in such a world the Hammers would currently be getting both ‘careful what you wish for’ barrels for replacing David Moyes with the very, very foreign Julen Lopetegui.
While Moyes is currently to be found giving really quite weird quotes about Erik Ten Hag – although we guess won-a-trophy-to-mask-terrible-league season managers need to stick together – Lopetegui is still working out how to get the best out of the undeniably exciting group of players at his disposal after an eye-catching transfer window.
While he and they have been perhaps fortunate to escape greater scrutiny in these tricky opening months it’s also reasonable to expect that making the changes he wants to make is likely to take time and there really is no reason yet to draw any firm conclusions about his ability (or otherwise) to do so.
13) Everton
It’s a f*ck sight better than it was a month ago, that’s for sure, when a second consecutive 3-2 defeat from 2-0 up left Everton languishing miserably in banter club hell. At that point the threat felt existential, with no points and 13 goals conceded after just four games of the season. If Sean Dyche can’t even get the defence operating halfway effectively, ran the argument, then what is the point of Sean Dyche and by extension Everton themselves?
The threat of opening their shiny new stadium in a first second-tier season in living memory felt all too real.
But the volume on all that noise has been turned down a touch after Dyching their way to five points from three unbeaten games in which only two further goals have been conceded. That’s more like it.
And let’s not forget about that new stadium, either. If relegation fears can be properly put to bed – an inter-interlull run of Ipswich, Fulham, Southampton, West Ham offers a genuine opportunity to do just that – then fans can get on with enjoying the thought of the new place.
We’re properly excited by it, specifically the fact that Everton have taken the more German approach of building a new ground and choosing to build a beautifully modern but undeniably traditional football ground rather than just another vast, cavernous multi-use corporate entertainment enormodome. The pictures of the ground give off massive mid-90s White Hart Lane vibes, which does raise the slight concern that someone got confused by a brief that requested ‘a stadium like Tottenham’s’ but we are pretty sure it’s going to be brilliant.
12) Ipswich
Yeah, sure, you’d want a win in there for sure, and it’s still hard to see how it all ends in anything other than a return to the Championship. But there is every sign that they will at the very least Luton their way back to the Sky Bet rather than take the more miserable Sheffield United or Norwich route and that’s not nothing. They have shown more than enough to suggest they can compete against most of what the Barclays can throw at them, and only the hammering at West Ham can really go down as a proper disappointment.
Before that, it was possible to wonder if Ipswich hadn’t made the best and most encouraging six-game winless start to the Premier League ever. Which isn’t where you want to be but is much better than where Ipswich absolutely could have been.
11) Leicester City
They’re not very good but they’re also not anywhere near as bad as the gloomiest prognoses put forward by a pretty doom-laden and resigned supporter base before a ball was kicked.
Steve Cooper is a canny operator who did a better job than most gave him credit for in bringing Nottingham Forest’s disparate band of new players and forming them into some kind of functioning squad, and he’s quietly doing something pretty impressive in making Leicester the sort of team that possesses the priceless ability among those in the lower reaches to stay in games.
There was tangible reward on the very first night when a 1-1 draw was salvaged against Tottenham, and Leicester have been in every game since – including defeats against non-stupid big teams like Aston Villa and Arsenal. They came so close to what would have been one of the best and funniest points of the season at the Emirates before being undone in injury-time, but took enough encouragement from that to then turn Bournemouth over.
Every reason currently to think there may very well be three worse – or at least less well organised – teams in this division, and there’s also a nice-looking run of games coming up against contenders for such status in Southampton, Ipswich and Manchester United.
10) Manchester City
Their biggest win of the season came in a legal battle. And also may not actually have been a win. It all rather depends on how much knowledge you have of arcane and intricate legal rulings, or failing that how much stock you place in suspiciously quickly-written Martin Samuel columns welcoming our new ant overlords.
Previously with City, whatever your discomfort about how they came to be where they are or whatever concerns may have existed about their ability to dominate the league to a potentially boring degree that even United in their Fergie pomp never truly managed, they still felt like a different super-club. You never really felt like you wanted to begrudge the fans their new-found success, because they had been through so much more pain and strife than any equivalent set of fans.
Even now, watching Man United fans bemoan the impossibly miserable decade of banter and crisis they’ve just endured, one that had brought them only two FA Cups, two Carabao Cups and a Europa League title, must raise eyebrows across the city.
But, for the first time, there’s just the start of a sense that City fans – some City fans, anyway – are starting to go down the bitter and paranoid road that is seemingly impossible for fans of big clubs to resist for long. The ‘Red Cartel’ stuff is starting to sound really quite mental, lads.
9) Nottingham Forest
A curious one, because their overall season is going really very well indeed thank you very much but there is no getting away from the fact that at home they remain really quite bad, almost incapable of any win whatsoever and an unstoppable point-spaffing machine. And home form is always your bread and butter, isn’t it? It’s also, very obviously, more visible to more fans – especially at a club outside the big-boy elite.
It’s not enough to completely harsh the buzz, but we cannot avoid the notion that Forest fans would be much happier somehow if their perfectly acceptable haul of 10 points from seven games had been split 8-2 in favour of the City Ground rather than trips to Southampton, Liverpool, Brighton and Chelsea.
And yet even writing that down it feels mad, because eight points from those four games is an absurdly good return that would satisfy all but perhaps City and Arsenal.
But when the flipside is an inability to beat any of Bournemouth, Wolves and Fulham on your own patch, it is undeniably if perhaps illogically more irritating than if it had all happened the other way round.
8) Newcastle
Just hard to really know where they stand, really. Keen observers of all the City legal wrangling, with its obvious potential to unleash their own spending power but like the rest of us with no real clue precisely how or when those chips may fall.
The existence of tensions between the boardroom and the dressing room is increasingly clear and there is undoubtedly frustration that while they have made clear progress on the field since the Saudi takeover it doesn’t yet have the look or feel of something that ends in world domination or at the very least five Premier League titles in six years.
That uncertainty currently extends to on-field matters, where Newcastle’s results are currently outstripping performances, with the recent evidence from games against Fulham and Everton that this is might not level out in the way Newcastle would prefer.
It really does feel like two years from now they could be the best team in the country or they could be ninth and that neither one of those outcomes is more likely than the other, or indeed that there’s really anything much Newcastle themselves can currently do to nudge the needle in their favour.
In a way, every other Premier League club is currently a passenger waiting to see where the Manchester City legal journey takes them, but nowhere does that feel more the case than with Newcastle.
7) Brentford
The entertainers. Only five teams have scored more goals than the 13 Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo-inspired attack has plundered, and only three have conceded more than the 13 Brentford’s defence has conceded. For as long as these kind of antics deliver as many wins as defeats, that feels broadly fine. Their three defeats can also be cheerfully explained away by coming at Man City, Liverpool and to a lesser extent Tottenham, while match-going home fans have so far enjoyed an Arsenal-and-City-matching three wins and a draw from their four games.
So yeah, it’s all going quite pleasantly thank you very much as long as you are able to bury deep the nagging little thought that wonders when one of the bigger but far stupider clubs that exist up and down the Premier League decide they might like a bit of that Thomas Frank entertainment for themselves.
6) Brighton
A difficult little run of underwhelming draws and a pretty chastening first-half dismantling at Chelsea came to an end in spectacular and hilarious fashion with the sort of comeback win over Tottenham that can keep a smile on your face right through an international break and beyond.
Brighton are not the first and won’t be the last club to enjoy the revitalising effects of a visit from Dr Tottenham, but few have found the effect quite so invigorating. It really was very, very funny, the rare kind of game that is so good that it can lift the mood at 19 clubs because surely even Palace fans couldn’t resist a small chuckle.
5) Fulham
Have, under the watchful gaze of a Marco Silva who even the most outspoken of Soccer Saturday pundit must now concede knows a bit about Our League, spent the last couple of years establishing themselves as the Premier League’s most mid-table team.
To be absolutely clear: we mean this only as a compliment. This Fulham side is one that knows just how to mid-table. They do it perfectly. They will every now and then jump out and, say, win back-to-back games 5-0 for no good reason. They will always be ready to do the necessary when banter-addicted bigger clubs rock up in one of their funnier moods, but aren’t afraid of doing their own bits by losing to relegation-haunted miseries as well. They are, in essence, great value and bring a huge amount to their vital but often unsung role.
The league’s most mid-table team is also quite a fun gig for a supporter. None of the stress of worrying about how every single result affects your chances of qualifying for Europe, none of the utter dread fear of worrying about how every single result affects your hopes of beating the drop. Approaching any game at all with the thought ‘We could get something today’ and it being based on genuine rational hope rather than desperate delusions. ‘Snice.
And the great news is that this season already shows encouraging signs of being absolutely no different, with three wins, two draws and two defeats being an almost unimprovably mid-table start to the campaign, with Newcastle early victims of Fulham’s big-boy-bothering.
4) Chelsea
Deeper concerns remain as they must when your out-on-a-limb club is doing things so wildly and expensively different to everyone else that your owners can only be a) geniuses who have discovered a game-breaking cheat code or b) f*ckwits about to bring the club to its knees, with absolutely no middle ground whatsoever, but on the field at least Chelsea must sit as one of surprisingly few teams whose fans can look at the October interlull league table and go “Yes, this is actually going better than expected”.
The football is enormously watchable as well as demonstrably effective, while concerns about Enzo Maresca’s inexperience at this level have proved so far unfounded even if he has had to come out and say some extraordinary things about how having a 10-man Bomb Squad is perfectly normal actually that remind you why a bigger-name and more Barclays-savvy manager could not be sought to attempt this particularly difficult and at times degrading job.
There have been a couple of disappointing home draws along the way, sure, but when you’re scoring more goals than anyone apart from Man City and have made starts like the almost-impossibly-bad-by-big-six-standards starts Chelsea have made in the last two seasons, you are 100 per cent taking this one.
3) Arsenal
Hard to imagine how they could really be any happier at this stage of a season than they are after a start that has plonked them slap bang in the middle of another full-on title fight while still allowing the most online of all the fanbases to further indulge the idea that there exists at the very heart of the Premier League a conspiracy, one that involves the FA, the dreaded PGMOL and if need be UEFA, designed to keep one of the country’s very biggest clubs down for reasons that are so terrifying you would not be able to sleep at night if they even began to have any idea what they were talking about.
That Arsenal fans were still able to see evidence of The Conspiracy’s nefarious meddling hand in a 2-2 draw at Man City in which both Arsenal goals could quite feasibly have been disallowed just highlights the super advanced level at which these guys are operating right now. Frankly, no other club can or should compete with this.
But the main point is that it seems to make them happy. Well, not happy. Really angry. But that seems to make them happy. They love it, they must do. Otherwise it would be extraordinary to try and paint a red card for Leandro Trossard – a man whose face somehow makes him appear simultaneously 14 and 52 if anyone fancies investigating a real conspiracy – after he hoofed the ball away as an example of anything more than the petulance of youth or a mid-life crisis.
They probably do have a point about the whole Celebration Police thing, though.
READ: Five reasons why Arsenal are finally ready to overthrow Man City in the title race
2) Liverpool
Yeah, that’ll do, won’t it? Top of the league, two goals conceded, a new manager seamlessly bedded in and genuine signs that something special might be happening. It’s not and never could be ‘JURGEN WHO?’ but it’s hard not to be impressed by the way Arne Slot has come in and carefully, thoughtfully and delicately stitched some of his own ideas into the very decent squad Klopp left for him.
We’ve said before that in some ways it’s probably harder to replace a successful boss who’s walked away than a failed one who’s been binned off. Much harder to introduce your own ideas to a squad where the previous methods were working, and much less time to make a success of it before unpleasant and unflattering comparisons start to be drawn.
Slot has avoided all that and Liverpool are right there where they needed and wanted to be without any of the transitionary unpleasantness that might have been expected.
The one small remaining source of p*ss for those oh so delicious chips is one outside Slot’s and Liverpool’s control but one that must for now nevertheless nag: and that’s the almost impossibly kind fixture list Slot was handed to begin his Liverpool career.
They are still yet to face any of the other six teams who formed last year’s top seven, with their toughest on-paper assignment a trip to Manchester United. Sure, Liverpool ran out impressive 3-0 winners in that one, which is great, but also something we now know even Spurs can do and therefore might not in itself actually mean anything.
But surely better this way, that Slot only has to test himself against good teams once he’s got his feet under the table a bit and a blip can be ridden out easily enough.
And if Liverpool are still anywhere near their current position after upcoming games against Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton and Villa then it really will feel like the start of something enormously promising. For what it’s worth, we kind of think they will. Kindly fixtures or not, Liverpool have seemed like a team that passes the sniff test.
1) Aston Villa
It really is only two years since Stevie ‘Steven Gerrard’ G was leading them into the grim inevitability of another tooth-and-nail fight for their very Premier League survival. The quiet revolution under Unai Emery remains an utterly extraordinary achievement and one that probably remains underacknowledged and underappreciated in the wider Barclays sphere because of the more showy nonsense indulged in by noisier clubs and flashier managers.
But there is no such lack of appreciation among Villa supporters themselves who now find themselves once again supporting the kind of team that beats Bayern Munich in the Big Cup rather than the kind of team that loses 3-0 to Fulham.
For what is at this stage a frankly unnecessary additional layer of joy, Villa also possess in Jhon Duran the season’s breakout cult hero for his now near perfectly crafted bit of coming off the bench and scoring sh*tpingers for fun.
Just a lovely, lovely time to be a Villa fan and with almost no reason to fear it’s all about to come crashing down. Marvellous.
