Premier League winners and losers: Arsenal, Postecoglou, Liverpool, Amorim, Spurs, Maresca
No surprise to see who heads up the winners section this week, even if their ascent to the top of the table does leave them with no choice but to accept the unwanted mantle of Premier League title favourites with all its associated risks and booby traps.
And the 2025/26 side aren’t the only Arsenal team to have had a good weekend, thanks to Crystal Palace’s first defeat of the season, while mini-crisis-ridden Liverpool and the world’s most beleaguered man, Ange Postecoglou, take their place among the losers.
Other more cheerful sorts include Tottenham, Bournemouth, Antoine Semenyo, the inevitable Erling Haaland and smiling philosopher-poet Jack Grealish.
Premier League winners
Arsenal
Some Gunners didn’t really like it when we called them favourites for the Premier League last week. They’ve no choice about that now.
We do understand the fear. To be called favourites is to invite tiresome accusations of bottle jobs if you end up second again. It’s no longer acceptable in the nuance-free culture war age even to just call second place first loser; second place is first bottler. When it’s happened three years in a row already and your last title is over 20 years ago, the reticence to accept the favourites mantle is understandable.
But there is simply no avoiding it. Arsenal are the best team in the country, and their second XI is probably about the fourth or fifth best team in the country.
They negotiated a horribly tough opening set of fixtures without suffering terminal damage – which was a valid concern given how little margin for error Premier League title challenges now permit – and they have now taken top spot as we hit the second interlull and look perfectly placed to really stretch their legs and open up a gap.
Arsenal’s four Premier League games before the November international break are against Fulham, Crystal Palace, Burnley and Sunderland.
Liverpool’s are against Manchester United, Brentford, Aston Villa and Man City.
Man City’s are against Everton, Aston Villa, Bournemouth and Liverpool.
Opportunity is knocking unignorably loudly right here, right now for Mikel Arteta and his side having successfully avoided the distinctly Arsenally trap they’ve tumbled into at home to West Ham in each of the last two seasons, despite pairing those bizarre home defeats to nil against the Hammers with 6-0 and 5-2 wins at the London Stadium.
The Invincibles
The first weekend of October, and already their defeat-avoiding ridiculousness is sure to go unmatched for another season.
Newcastle
It hasn’t been a comfortable start to the season for Newcastle after a difficult summer overshadowed by The Isak Unpleasantness, but there are now plenty of reasons to feel pretty encouraged about what comes next.
Their only defeats have been against Liverpool, Barcelona and Arsenal, and two of those were only sealed in heartbreakingly late fashion.
Apart from that elite trio, the only team to even score against Newcastle this season is Bradford in the Carabao, and that came when an already much-changed team had made four further in-game changes while leading 3-0.
Newcastle’s defence and midfield were impeccably solid on Sunday, albeit against a Forest side and manager currently providing a real-time six-week definition of the word beleaguered, and their high pressing forced Forest into goal-conceding errors.
There is still a bit of huff and puff about Newcastle’s attacking play as they adapt to the post-Isak reality, but the overall picture is probably brighter than six goals and just nine points from seven league games while sitting below even Manchester United in the table might suggest.
Nick Pope
His fifth clean sheet in seven Premier League games this season (more than anyone else, unsurprisingly) was surely among the easiest of his career but welcome nonetheless after he so thoroughly spoiled a 95-minute masterclass against Arsenal with two big errors in the build-up to the Gunners’ late, late winner.
Nick Woltemade
The most emphatic of penalties to further cement what already appears to be the German’s assured cult hero status on Tyneside. And hopefully it invites yet more salty, salty tears from Bayern Munich, who of course for their sins have to instead watch <checks notes> Harry Kane, who has only managed to score <checks notes> <checks them again> 18 goals for them so far this season.
Tottenham’s away form
We’re still not entirely sure which way Tottenham’s first Premier League season under Thomas Frank will eventually break. Underlying numbers hint that they are defying gravity a bit with their four wins and 14 points, but there is undeniably a new-found steel about this very work-in-progress side.
The glass half-full approach to it all is that Spurs have racked up a goodly number of points despite very obviously not yet entirely working out how best to go about marrying defensive steel and long-ball football with attacking thrust and craft in the many games where they will inevitably dominate the ball and the onus is on them to take the initiative.
One early quirk of the season is just how much more effective they’ve been on the road than at home. They’ve now taken 10 points from trips to Man City, West Ham, Brighton and Leeds which is clearly a return any club would settle for.
It’s comfortably the best away record in the league at this time, with the only other team unbeaten away from home – Newcastle – also winless and indeed goalless away from home.
And yet Spurs have managed only four points from home games against Burnley, Bournemouth and Wolves.
The two conspicuously bad league performances have both come in front of their own fans, against Bournemouth and Wolves, creating a truly ludicrous state of affairs: Spurs now have as many Premier League wins in four away games this season as they’ve managed in their last 17 at home.
Mohammed Kudus
Another quirk with Spurs is that there’s not one of their summer signings we’d put in our top 10 Premier League summer signings right now, but we also think few did better at addressing conspicuous weaknesses in the end.
Joao Palhinha is precisely the player Spurs have lacked in midfield pretty much since Mousa Dembele retired, and there are already encouraging signs that he and Frank are getting some success from working out how to get him involved higher up the pitch.
Xavi Simons showed some more glimpses of getting up to speed with things when finally given a proper chance in a proper No. 10 role with licence to roam wide, while Mathys Tel got a goal that could kickstart something for a player who has yet to show Spurs fans a fraction of what he’s capable of.
But the closest of Spurs’ summer arrivals to serious individual praise is surely Mohammed Kudus, who is looking far more like the player we saw in his first year at West Ham than the second.
Like Tel, there was an element of luck to his first goal of the season thanks to a deflection, yet like Tel he created the opportunity for luck to land on his side in a way perhaps no other player on the pitch could have done.
It’s worth remembering when considering Spurs’ sometimes infuriating lack of creative flair in these early days under Frank that they are still without James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski, either one of whom’s availability would go a long way to addressing the issues.
But what they do have in Kudus is a game-changer. Nobody has more than his four Premier League assists this season, and there is already plenty of reason to think that his partnership on the right for Spurs with Pedro Porro is just getting started.
Aston Villa
A powerful example of how the Europa League group stage, so often seen as a burden and chore, can really help kick a season into life. Having failed to win any of their first five Premier League games and gone out of the Carabao on penalties at Brentford, it’s now four wins in a row for Unai Emery to change the mood at Villa Park.
The first and third of those wins came in the Europa – most impressively away at Feyenoord last week – to go with a thoroughly restorative pair of home league wins over Fulham and Burnley.
It’s not changed everything, and the fundamental issues behind the scenes remain ahead of a period when league games against Tottenham, Man City and Liverpool may mean even more heavy lifting is required from the Europa to keep chins up, but it all looks a lot cheerier than it did not even a fortnight ago.
Donyell Malen
Had waited 15 games and 176 days to score his fourth Aston Villa goal, and then less than an hour – including half-time against Burnley – to bag his fifth.
Ruben Amorim
A win! A clean sheet! An international break when he definitely won’t get sacked! He probably wouldn’t have got sacked anyway, but he will surely nevertheless welcome the quiet and the chance, however brief, to allow some other clubs and managers to spend some time sweating under the harsh glare of the crisis spotlight.
Senne Lammens
It wasn’t entirely down to the Belgian goalkeeper that Manchester United’s first clean sheet of the season coincided with his debut, but he did give off an air of quiet competence that has been so desperately lacking for Manchester United for so long.
Here was a reminder that a calm and reassuring keeper can make a whole team appear much less jumpy.
Pep Guardiola
We remain unconvinced that this iteration of Man City can challenge Arsenal or Liverpool for the title, but we’re less certain about our doubts than we were after successive defeats to Tottenham and Brighton.
The initially comfortable but ultimately nervy 1-0 win at Brentford on Sunday was Guardiola’s 250th league win in just 349 Premier League games. No other manager has ever got to the landmark quicker with an English top-flight club.
Erling Haaland
Another goal from his Dortmund playbook, running on to Josko Gvardiol’s clipped long ball and simply barrelling Brentford’s centre-backs out of the way. He looks like an unstoppable playground bully when he plays like this and is clearly relishing City’s new-found willingness to play slightly more direct slightly more often.
He also filled one of the rare gaps on his Premier League CV with a first goal at the Gtech, leaving Anfield as the only ground he’s played at in the Premier League without scoring.
He now also has 94 Premier League goals – the same career total as Dimitar Berbatov. And the players he’s catching now only get more absurd in their iconic status in this league. He’s only one behind Ruud van Nistelrooy, and three behind Didier Drogba. These are absurd numbers.
Bournemouth
We are already very excited indeed for their clash with Crystal Palace in the first game back after the international break to decide which of the two officially takes on the ‘Could they really do a Leicester?’ mantle.
Antoine Semenyo
If we cheat a bit – and we are always fans of cheating to make stats say what we want them to say – and go back to the start of May rather than the start of this season, Semenyo has now been directly involved in more goals than any other player with 12 (eight goals, four assists).
Bournemouth had little choice but to cash in on their prized defensive assets, but holding firm despite widespread interest in Semenyo currently looks by far their most significant call of the summer.
Jack Grealish
Rarely if ever has a man been more obviously Enjoying His Football Again than Grealish, who popped up to score a dramatic late winner for Everton against previously unbeaten Palace before delivering a joyous and joyful post-match assessment that can only really be done justice when the philosopher-poet’s musings are presented, as surely intended, in the form of verse:
I like to do stuff in my life,
And when I like doing it,
I love doing it.
Football is one of them.
I love playing football.
When I’m enjoying it the way I am,
There’s nothing better
Jack Grealish
Chelsea’s wingers
Easy to look at Chelsea’s squad and conclude it has simply too many half-decent tricky wide players in it to function properly.
And then a whole bunch of those half-decent tricky wide players prove the difference-makers in a late-won yet fully deserved victory over the faltering champions and you wonder, not for the first time, whether Chelsea are in fact the sane ones in a world gone mad.
Enzo Maresca
A huge statement of a win, both for his team and Maresca personally. The vultures were circling after a stupid defeat to Manchester United and a sloppy, untidy one against Brighton.
But Chelsea outplayed and outlasted the Premier League champions on Saturday evening, while Maresca got everything right including the timing and specifics of his substitutions.
He’s bought himself significant time to work out how best to get this kind of output from this expensive yet sometime baffling collection of elite footballers, and that’s about as big a win as he could have hoped for this weekend.
Now read all 16 Conclusions from Chelsea’s win over Liverpool, if for some inexplicable reason you are still yet to do so.
Premier League losers
Ange Postecoglou
Nottingham Forest weren’t even that bad in defeat at Newcastle. They kept things tight well into the second half, and when they did concede it came from a long-range Bruno Guimaraes strike rather than some structural calamity.
Judging a manager a month into the job on an okay performance in defeat at a place like Newcastle would appear on the face of it a madness. But Postecoglou’s problem is that he has so thoroughly torched all semblance of goodwill in far easier games where his foibles have been more ruthlessly exposed.
Nobody would be calling this result a sacking offence if he’d managed not to lose against Swansea or Sunderland or Midtjylland.
But the response of the home fans at the City Ground on Thursday night was enough to tell you the manager is already on borrowed time, and that no benefit of any doubt will be granted for subsequent defeats. We can’t really think of many comparable examples of fans turning so quickly and viscerally on a manager after their appointment. They don’t expect this to get better, and in fairness to them they have a body of evidence from Postecoglou’s previous Premier League employment that is hard to argue with.
Still there remains this inability to strike a balance. An inability to play compelling attacking football without fatally exposing the defence, or competent defensive football without abandoning the attack altogether. And always, always, always the apparently fundamental and unresolvable weakness from set-pieces.
It’s not even that Postecoglou was wrong to set his team up to play more defensively at Newcastle; it’s just that it only further exposes the folly of making the kind of managerial change Forest made at the time they did it.
Nottingham Forest
Must now give serious thought to sacking a second manager this season before the leaves have finished falling from the tricky trees as they find themselves facing the troublingly real prospect of a relegation scrap of the sort they thought they had left behind.
Currently existing as a reminder to the others outside the gilded elite that no matter how secure you might feel, how far those feet seem to have slid under the table, you are never more than one or two errors of judgement away from potential catastrophe.
Liverpool
It makes no more sense to overreact to Liverpool conceding a couple of late, late winners than it did to overreact to Liverpool scoring a couple of late, late winners.
It is still far too early to scream crisis about a team that remains just a point off the top of the Premier League while still attempting to bed in several new signings.
Yet there is also no denying that something feels really quite wrong here. That the late winners Liverpool have scored were responsible for more masking than those they have conceded.
Crystal Palace and Chelsea both played well against Liverpool and were worthy winners. But they didn’t really do anything very differently to those other teams who came close to getting something only to be denied at the last.
Liverpool have not been smashed or grabbed by these late goals they’ve conceded. They’ve felt like the natural conclusion to drab and uninspired performances.
And they need to find solutions fast. This is not yet a crisis, but it really does feel like it could be a crisis’ origin story. Their post-interlull fixtures are unhelpful, with league games against Manchester United, Aston Villa and Man City alongside Champions League clashes with Eintracht Frankfurt and Real Madrid plus a Carabao encounter with their newly-minted nemesis Crystal Palace all offering further obvious potential for widening of cracks and deepening of concerns.
Arne Slot
Slot is a shrewd and intelligent man so is unlikely to be shocked by any of it, but he’s been given a stark reminder of just how fragile a Premier League manager’s existence really is.
A title winner in his first season and now here he is, just two weeks after leading his team to a fifth straight victory to start this season, he finds his tactics, signings, team selections and baldness all very much under the microscope while he sits alongside Scott Parker in the Sack Race betting.
Alexis Mac Allister
The promoted trio
We’re still very confident that this year’s crop of promoted clubs are better equipped than those of recent vintage to give us at the very, very least a proper relegation fight, but this was a chastening weekend.
For the first time this season, Leeds, Sunderland and Burnley all succumbed to defeat on the same matchday and while none of the defeats against Spurs, Man United and Villa were individually disastrous it was a reminder of just what they are still up against in trying to disturb the Settled Seventeen.
Fulham
No need for panic, not just yet. But Fulham have just quietly got themselves in a slight tangle with back-to-back 3-1 defeats at Aston Villa and Bournemouth.
With Arsenal and Newcastle to come directly after the international break, it’s a tangle that could get knottier yet.
West Ham
If they can’t even rely on the three banker points from a trip to the Emirates, then where exactly are they going to find the points to extricate themselves from this relegation fight? A troubling question indeed with no easy answer.
Wolves
Points on the board are welcome after the bleak five-game losing run to start the season, but conceding late equalisers to both Tottenham and Brighton means the recovery is far more stunted than might otherwise have been the case, while extending Wolves’ wait for a Premier League win to 11 games since the last of that dizzy run of six straight successes back in March and April.
Vitor Pereira
Sent off moments before Wolves’ opener against Brighton for ‘irresponsible behaviour in the technical area’ which is a simply sensational collection of words.
Was he running with scissors in the technical area? Putting hot drinks on top of monitors in the technical area? Lifting heavy items unsafely in the technical area?
Martin Odegaard
The first player ever to be substituted in the first half of three successive Premier League starts, Odegaard hasn’t managed more than 38 minutes in any Premier League game since starting and finishing at Old Trafford on the opening weekend.
A rotten run of injury luck at a particularly unhelpful time for a player who has more competition than ever for his place in Arsenal’s starting XI.
Manchester United
We’re really not sure winning games is currently in the long-term interests of Manchester United Football Club. At least not until Ruben Amorim can prove he actually can do it twice in a row.
Liverpool away next. No pressure, Ruben.
