Premier League CRISIS Rankings: Forest 2nd, West Ham 3rd, but what of Liverpool and Man Utd?
We’ve done mood rankings. We’ve done manager rankings. But we see now that was only ever building up to this moment. Everything has been leading to this. The Crisis Rankings. Or CRISIS Rankings, because it does feel like this important and serious work merits a tiny bit of panicked ALL CAPS headloss.
It is certainly crisis (CRISIS) season in the Premier League, anyway. That’s not our fault. Nothing we can do about that.
Sure we could do our usual thing of affecting a lofty superiority and pretending it’s all silly tish and daft fipsy. But really we love it. We love clicks just as much as Reach.
And we therefore will proceed to both have our cake by chuckling at the transparency of the collective media attempt to plunge absolutely every team up to and including Arsenal into crisis (and if you don’t believe us, just a reminder that this was the response to them winning a Champions League game 2-0) as the barren wasteland of a dreary international break stretches out endlessly before us all, and also eat said cake by leaning directly into the assorted deliciously stupid and stupidly delicious cracked-badge crisis narratives currently knocking about.
Here, then, are the inaugural F365 Crisis Rankings, ranked from least to most crisis-ridden (which we’re pretty sure you could have worked out for yourselves).
20) Crystal Palace
There absolutely are clubs for whom crisis talk can and does begin when a 19-match, trophy-winning unbeaten run comes to an end via a scrappy late goal at Everton. Crystal Palace are not one of those clubs.
They probably aren’t going to do a Leicester after all. We’ll tell the children etc. but while a bit of a shame it is no crisis.
Still if anything just about as far from crisis as it’s possible to be, at least until they lose two defenders to injury and/or a Glasner-enraging January transfer.
READ: Everton spare Liverpool blushes but not Wirtz’s as huge Crystal Palace weakness laid bare
19) Everton
A club all too familiar with crisis in recent years but currently well above all that kind of thing, thank you very much. They’ve got themselves a perfect new hero in Jack Grealish and have thus far made the awkward jump to a new ground and new surroundings look pretty straightforward indeed.
Don’t look at all like they’re liable to get themselves into any real bother at all this season. Look far more likely to actually be proper good fun. Long-suffering Everton fans will still have the automatic defence response of expecting the worst at any moment, but honestly guys it’s all absolutely fine here isn’t it? Just enjoy it, would be our advice.
There’s even a decent chance you might get to laugh at Liverpool quite a bit. And that’s been a while.
18) Arsenal
Seems deeply quaint now, given the sheer depth and breadth of the assorted CRISIS levels now beleaguering other clubs up and down the country, but if you cast your mind back into the deep, distant past of about a fortnight ago you’ll remember that Arsenal were themselves quite deep in crisis. Because of the handbrake.
Specifically, the handbrake that silly old Mikel Arteta refused to release in games against Liverpool and Manchester City.
Said handbrake has since been released in games against Newcastle and West Ham which, coupled with Liverpool’s own seven-stages-of-crisis descent, has allowed Arsenal to go top of the table.
And now they have every chance of opening up a really tidy lead from some kindly fixtures between the October and November interlulls having had to wade through some distinctly unpleasant games in August and September.
Obviously Arsenal are Arsenal and thus can never be entirely crisis-free. There are two main pillars in the current attempts to paint the current favourites to the win the Premier League and Champions League as still mired in some kind of crisis.
One was the really quite insane response to Arsenal maintaining their 100% Champions League record this season with a 2-0 win over Olympiacos, an event that was covered by our brave press with the kind of gravity normally reserved for the passing of a minor royal.
The other crisis pillar for Arsenal – and this is one that only the winning of actual trophies will quell – is the Arsenally factor. They have a great opportunity here, but what if they just Arsenal it up?
Related to this – a sub-pillar, if you will – is the fact they also really don’t like being called favourites. Because it inevitably invites subsequent accusations of bottling.
And there really is no way out of this maze for Arsenal until, like their near neighbours, they manage to shut the talk down with an actual trophy. Because until then, the ridiculous reality of the noise around this most noise-generating of modern clubs is that the two things that can lead them to crisis town are a) good football results and b) bad football results. And celebrating wrong, obviously. Always with the celebrating wrong.
17) Bournemouth
We thought there would be a crisis. By rights there should have been a crisis. When you sell four of your back five to assorted big buggers, a crisis seems inevitable.
But Andoni Iraola and Antoine Semenyo have had other ideas. Accepting the inevitable for the defence but holding firm on Semenyo is already looking like inspired pragmatic real-world transfer market realism from the Cherries. There’s a real skill for clubs in their situation in knowing when and where to fold and when to hold.
Iraola still feels like the real genius behind all this, though. Thanking Gary O’Neil for his sterling work in keeping Bournemouth in the Premier League after they’d been Scott Parkered and moving him on to bring in Iraola must now go down as one of the biggest and most significant upgrades made by a member of the ‘Small 14’.
As long as he remains in place, Bournemouth will be fine. Which does invite us to ponder the inevitable problem somewhere down the line. As wiser football minds than ours have opined: it is what it is.
16) Tottenham
We are very, very suspicious of this Tottenham start. We’re not actually at all convinced they’re really any good at all, but we also have a sneaking feeling that they may get away with it far more often than not and end up very much in and around the top-four picture despite themselves.
Also wouldn’t really be shocked at all if they’re 11th by the New Year. We’re keeping our options very much open here.
We do think that a summer of upheaval could have ended up much, much worse for Spurs. For all the banterous nature of the Morgan Gibbs-White and Eberechi Eze pursuits and their humiliating conclusions, Spurs have ended up…okay.
They’ve strengthened the areas they needed to strengthen and without yet being entirely convincing are already reaping the benefits. That Leeds game was an absolutely perfect example of precisely the sort of game they would have wilted and lost last season in the face of a physical and psychological test.
The simple fact that Spurs have won every game in which they’ve led this season is immensely encouraging given how p*ss-poor they were by that metric last year, and while it’s reasonable to ask questions about how precisely they got themselves into the pickles they did against Brighton or Wolves or Bodo/Glimt it must also be acknowledged that they found a way to at least get some of the way back out of them. That is not a trait one immediately associates with Spurs.
Joao Palhinha may provoke grumbling among some Spurs purists for his no-nonsense game but he is exactly the player for which they have been crying out to have in their midfield for some time now. There’s a fight and steel about Spurs now, a willingness and acceptance that sometimes in this league you are going to have to earn your right to play.
That Thomas Frank is also managing to get some decent output from encouraging Palhinha into more forward positions is also good news, suggesting a flexibility and thoughtfulness to both coach and player that is welcome at a club where things can get very dogmatic. We’re still very hopeful that Xavi Simons will eventually get up to the speed of things when given a run of games in a more settled role, and Mohammed Kudus is already looking far more like the season-one West Ham version than season-two.
We’re not quite sure exactly how Spurs have only lost one game this season, but they have, and they’ve got themselves into a tidy position in three competitions. They are still Spurs, they will always be Spurs and they can always go fully and entirely Spurs, but right now there is no crisis here.
15) Sunderland
Sunderland will be disappointed not to have come away from Manchester United with something. The very fact this is a sentence you can write with an entirely straight face tells you things are going pretty well for the Black Cats on the back of what looked for all the world like a dangerously premature promotion back to the big league.
But an expert summer of recruitment from a transfer net cast far and wide has given them every chance. At the very, very least they won’t be getting relegated without a damn good fight and that is all one can reasonably ask of unexpected play-off winners when coming into the Premier League, really.
Notable too that all their points have come against the established and settled Premier League set. There is nothing artificial or obviously deceptive about a set of results including wins over West Ham, Brentford and Forest alongside points against Palace and Villa. Those are results that indicate Sunderland are precisely what they currently appear to be: a perfectly capable mid-table Premier League side.
Still a genuinely incredible effort if they can keep that up for another seven months, but now no reason really to think otherwise.
14) Newcastle
Not currently in crisis, but definitely still on a crisis watchlist. The summer was hard and unpleasant for Newcastle, dominated as it was in the end by the Isak Saga and the great and at one time potentially never-ending quest for a replacement.
They spent an awful lot of money on Nick Woltemade and it did have about it a whiff of desperation, but Newcastle was a club desperate for a new hero and he already has the look and air and most importantly goals of a man heading for beloved cult status at a place that loves its big number nines. We think everyone loves big number nines, really, but Newcastle definitely love big number nines.
Results are on a general upward trend despite the late p*sser against Arsenal, and the fixture list for the month between October and November interlulls doesn’t look too bad at all either domestically or in the Champions League.
Late November and into December look like potentially choppier waters, though, where keen crisis watchers might just need a close eye on Eddie Howe and the lads.
13) Manchester City
We’re old enough to remember when everything was definitely going all 2024/25 after back-to-back defeats against Tottenham and Brighton plunged a new-look Manchester City and their manager into clear crisis territory.
They’ve since escaped that talk for now by not losing any more games, and winning most of them thanks to Erling Haaland scoring quite simply all the goals. We’ve even seen the team and manager that has won six of the last eight Premier League titles described as ‘dark horses’ to make that seven out of nine, which is quite funny given all the information in that sentence and the fact they are currently trailing by three whole points.
Perhaps the speed with which City have proved that all the talk of crisis after a couple of bad results might have been a bit much, and maybe we should learn something from that about the whole idea of deciding who is and isn’t in crisis at such an early stage of the season.
Reader, my friend, we haven’t learned a thing.
12) Brentford
Impressively not in crisis despite losing so much in the summer and taking the high-risk continuity option of entrusting their precious yet deceptively precarious Premier League status to a novice in Keith Andrews.
So far, it’s okay. Better, even. The high points have been very high. Victories over Villa in both league and Carabao, with the best of the lot clearly a thoroughly deserved win over Manchester United. Even managed to get the defeat to Nottingham Forest out of the way early enough for people not to realise how embarrassing that now is.
And, in general, the bad moments – defeats at Fulham and Sunderland as well as Forest have been sufficiently spread out that they don’t command attention. There’s always been another good day round the corner soon enough.
When you’re Brentford, that’s enough. They’re like a Reverse Man United. There, under the spotlight, it takes multiple good results to wash away the effect of the bad, while for Brentford it takes a proper run of bad results for people to forget taking four points off Chelsea and Man United, just as a for instance.
What we still fear is that such a run of bad results really could be just around the corner. It still feels very precarious; they’ve coped admirably with losing the guiding hand of Thomas Frank but it still feels like a club where a minor wobble could become worrying and before you know it, you fear for them, you really do.
December feels like it’s the key month for Brentford given the spread of games they’ve got during that always crucial and busy time. They play Spurs both home and away that month in obviously narrative-heavy games as well as Arsenal away and Bournemouth at home. Throw in a couple of potential six-pointers against Leeds and Wolves and you’ve got the perfect lab conditions for a crisis.
Or you take the optimistic alternative, where the perfect conditions to create a crisis must by definition offer the opportunity to thoroughly dispel the notion altogether.
11) Aston Villa
A reminder of how restorative a bit of Thursday night Europaball can be for a troubled club. Doesn’t always work and can definitely make things even worse (see Forest, Nottingham) but Villa aren’t the first team who’ve managed to inject a bit of life into a season turning toward the dreary thanks to some Thursday evening respite.
Having failed to win any of their first five Premier League games – failing even to score in the first four of them – and gone out of the Carabao on penalties to Brentford, Villa have now got themselves into a four-match winning run thanks to home league results against Fulham and Burnley to go with a pair of Euro victories.
It’s all feeling much better now than it did a few weeks ago, when it really did feel like we were approaching the end of a bold, often brilliant, but ultimately doomed attempt to re-insert Villa into the elite of English and European football.
We’re still quite a long way from last season’s Icarus-like highs as they soared so close to the sun on wings fashioned from unsustainable wages, but it’s a lot better than it was after failing to hold on to a lead against 10-man Sunderland.
We also very much reserve the right to reassess this reassessing of Villa’s Crisis Levels at the next international break, because they have perhaps the most troubling run of intra-interlull games of anyone. Their four league games in that time are all against teams currently in the top five: Tottenham, Man City, Liverpool, Bournemouth.
10) Brighton
Already shaping up to be their magnificent scampish big-boy-bothering selves this season. They’ve taken seven points from three games against Man City, Tottenham and Chelsea, and two points from four games against Fulham, Everton, Bournemouth and Wolves.
That remains in the ‘irritating’ rather than ‘crisis’ territory for now, but isn’t a trend you want to deepen too carelessly in what looks like being a particularly competitive season for those who’ve grown accustomed to easy and comfortable survival in the last couple of straight up, straight down seasons for promoted clubs.
We would very much like to see them continue their policy of winning Carabao games 6-0 away from home when they travel to Arsenal in the next round. Sure, some people might contend that winning 6-0 at Arsenal is harder than doing so at Oxford or Barnsley but as far as we’re concerned that’s loser talk. Aim high, always. Especially when you’re Brighton and as a general rule apparently prefer playing good teams.
9) Leeds
Feels like Leeds were very close to serious crisis levels after botching the last days and hours of the transfer window, leaving themselves pretty short of attacking weaponry and prompting plenty of chat that a decent shot at survival had been squandered.
They’re doing perfectly well, though, and have even started scoring goals. Since being ultimately outclassed at Arsenal – which is fair enough – they’ve been competitive with everyone and while their games against Newcastle, Bournemouth and Spurs may only have yielded two points in total they all showed that Leeds are perfectly capable of mixing it with decent teams.
It certainly doesn’t feel particularly crisis-y right now, even if Bournemouth’s last-gasp equaliser and the lack of reward for a very decent performance against Spurs are a bit annoying.
There is, though, perhaps no club outside the Big Six that faces a more defining period between these two upcoming international breaks. Leeds already occupy an unusual space in that their size as a club doesn’t quite tally with their status as a newly-promoted team, but it’s a fascinating run of games they’ve got coming up over the next five weeks or so.
Before we all take another unwanted rest for the November break, Leeds will face Burnley, West Ham, Brighton and Nottingham Forest. That is a set of fixtures to conjure with. It screams crisitunity. These are all games that should sit pretty high on target fixtures in Leeds’ survival roadmap, given what we’ve seen from all of them so far.
But at the same time three of those games are away from Elland Road. A month from now we could be looking at Leeds sitting loftily and confidently clear of the squabbling and bickering down at the bottom. Or if things haven’t gone quite to plan they could be right in there getting filthy with the rest of them.
8) Fulham
Almost impressive to be a London club and attract as little attention as Fulham. It can work both way but currently means that the only real response to successive 3-1 defeats at Aston Villa and Bournemouth has been to note that Marco Silva looked magnificent standing in the south-coast rain.
No crisis. Might just be the beginnings of one after they’ve played Arsenal and Newcastle, though.
7) Chelsea
A keen example of how finely balanced the see-saw can be between crisis and not-crisis. There’s no doubt that, overall, Chelsea’s results have been inadequate given all that talk in the summer – mainly from us, sure – that they ought to be title contenders now.
But also… they absolutely should be title contenders, shouldn’t they? Enzo Maresca can’t keep playing the “Little old us? Title challengers, aw shucks!” when they’ve spent the GDP of a small nation on wingers and Brighton players over the last few years.
Chelsea’s defeats have been eye-catchingly bad. Outclassed by Bayern Munich in the Champions League, mugged off again by Brighton late on in the Premier League and – most shaming of all – managing out-stupid Manchester United at Old Trafford. A feat of such crisis-inducing magnitude it’s almost impressive.
They also made uncomfortably hard work of negotiating Lincoln in the Carabao. They also did all those things in the space of four consecutive games.
They are, in short, neither the first nor surely last Big Six club to find themselves grateful that whatever daft things they might be getting up to are being overshadowed to some degree by the dafter things Manchester United are getting up to.
And the response to that run of a win that felt like a defeat and three defeats that felt like… even worse defeats has been undeniably impressive. Survived a meeting with the Special One in the Champions League and then of course lessened their own crisis ratings while deepening Liverpool’s on Saturday evening.
They’ve nudged clear of the deepest crisis alerts but certainly aren’t out of the woods just yet.
6) Burnley
It is perhaps an indicator of just how low the bar has become for promoted teams now that four points from seven games, with the only win against another promoted club, isn’t drawing more attention towards Scott Parker and his team.
In fairness, it’s also because Burnley did have an undeniably horrible start. Four of those seven games have been against members of the Big Six. And while all have been lost and two of them – against Spurs and City – heavily, there were huge reasons for encouragement amidst the agony of going down to late, late penalties against both Man United and Liverpool.
So no crisis yet, but if they don’t register a win in one of their next two games against Leeds and Wolves it will be an uncomfortably antsy and potentially bottom-three-marooned team that welcomes Arsenal to Turf Moor early next month.
5) Wolves
Looks a lot like a crisis right now, sure, but we’re not worried. Wolves do this a lot. It’s a crisis for Vitor Pereira, definitely, because he might have to be sacrificed, but Wolves making a terrible start to the season and then ending up 14th in May after taking 30 points in the second half of the season and saying ‘What were you worried about?’
They’ll be fine, but Pereira might unfortunately have to play his part by being unceremoniously sacked when they’re six points adrift of safety in mid-December.
Sergio Conceicao, if you’re interested, is our pick as the man to steer Wolves to safety in impressive style, prompting confidence of a much better campaign in 25/26, only to sit 19th after losing eight of their first 10 games and having to be replaced by someone else to continue a perpetual cycle that will outlast us all.
4) Liverpool
What a crash course in Barclays that is for Arne Slot, by the way. Hailed as a calm and quiet genius for delivering the title with a settled squad in his first season. Pretty much handed a second title after winning five games on the trot at the start of his second season.
And now, after an admittedly quite ropey fortnight that has seen Liverpool plummet from the very summit of the Premier League all the way down to second place and one whole point behind the new leaders, he is as bald and fraudulent as any Premier League manager has ever been. And those are some high levels of bald fraudulence.
His tactics are being questioned. His selections, his signings – even though they aren’t really his signings – his substitutions. Everything.
The man who delivered only Liverpool’s second league title since the invention of football, and who was pretty much being handed a second by a league apparently collectively bending the knee just two weeks ago, now finds himself level with Scott Parker in the Sack Race.
Of course the CRISIS talk around Liverpool is completely insane. But perhaps only Arsenal can rival Liverpool when it comes to a completely unhinged, overwrought and overplayed narrative. The good times are always the very best ever, but that means the lows are met with the same levels of wild overreaction.
Still, though. Definitely feels true that something’s not quite right here, doesn’t it? Definitely not a Liverpool – or Slot – with the same quiet unfussed equilibrium that steered them so calmly through last season. We’re perhaps all already guilty of forgetting both how easily Liverpool won the title and how unexpected that actually was at the start of the season and based on the club’s Premier League history.
They were so good, so quickly under Slot that it became normalised and perhaps even underappreciated.
But that calm authority hasn’t been there this season. There’s been a madcap, desperate nature to Liverpool’s performances that was every bit as much present in their late wins as it has been in their late defeats.
The late goals that have swung so many Liverpool games all bore the Hallmark of Champions™ when going in at the right end, so it’s only fair to ask what they have now they’ve started going in at the other.
Of course, once again, we’re in territory where both are overplayed.
But we nevertheless find ourselves already building up for what suddenly looks like an epic Liverpool-Man United clash on the other side of the international break, one where the loser will be unavoidably and inevitably plunged into a deep and lasting crisis.
Is it accurate, fair, funny or clever to call that game El Crisico? Absolutely not. Is there even the slightest chance that will stop us? Absolutely not.
3) West Ham
Things will, one suspects, eventually calm down a bit under Nuno Espirito Santo but it’s a smaller, quieter, reduced West Ham now, ambition and joy squeezed and squashed into a grim fight for perpetual Premier League survival where there is no greater or larger long-term purpose.
Maybe they’ll have the odd cup run. Maybe another season in Europe here or there. But it all just feels colourless and drab. They’re still in crisis, but it’s a boring and bland crisis. West Ham don’t even get entertaining crises now.
Just all very dispiriting. And worst of all, ceding everything they stand for in the name of drab, colourless survival and the growing apathy of the fans inside their drab, colourless bowl of a stadium might not even work.
The crisis might yet become very colourful indeed.
2) Nottingham Forest
You better believe that’s a crisis. It’s been an absolute masterclass in crisis creation, an almost entirely self-created and self-inflicted crisis full of dick-swinging and egos and very stupid men doing very stupid things for very stupid reasons.
Even if you accept the shaky premise that Nuno was developing ideas above his station and getting too argumentative with the all-powerful transfer guru Edu, then deciding to replace him during the season with about the single most philosophically diverging manager imaginable was and remains a choice.
It has now reached a point where sacking that manager after seven winless games might actually be less of a mad piece of behaviour than appointing him in the first place.
And while the sheer speed and scale of the unravelling might be graver than expected, it can’t really be claimed with any real credibility by anyone involved that this sort of outcome was not just possible but probable. Sure, maybe seven months felt more likely than seven weeks, but it just never looked like it could or should work.
If it didn’t work at Spurs with the squad profile they possessed – and in the Premier League, for about a year and a half, it very much did not work – how was it ever going to succeed for Forest’s squad with no time to adapt or adjust.
To their credit, the players really seem to have bought into it. There are no tools being downed here, and it’s further evidence of just how beguiling and inspiring a speaker Ange Postecoglou is. We remain entirely convinced that he can propel people to achieve things they never thought possible. He got Spurs players to win a f*cking trophy, for crying out loud.
But we’re just not at all convinced he can be a consistently successful Premier League football manager, and a club without the insulating protection provided by Big Six status – which still might not have been enough for Spurs in a more routine Premier League season without three catastrophically ill-equipped promoted sides – taking a gamble on him was just thoroughly reckless.
What might save him for a while is a truly joyless and uninspiring list of potential replacements, but that’s of no use to Forest fans right now. Graham Potter being the latest name linked provokes a very different reaction now than it would have a few years ago. Brutal game, football.
1) Manchester United
Of course they are in crisis. They have been pretty much permanently in crisis since Sir Alex Ferguson left, and he is, in his own way, one of the men most responsible for the fact that nobody else can match the impossible standards that became the norm across two ludicrous decades.
The question with United, one that most clubs don’t need to ask but that even those who do can concoct a plausible answer, is not “Are Man United in crisis?” But “How do Man United get out of their crisis?”
We genuinely don’t know what that would even look like any more. A non-crisis Manchester United. They’ve tried new players. They’ve tried new managers. They’ve tried new owners. If anything, it always just somehow gets worse. Despite that often appearing to be literally impossible.
It’s still less than a year, for instance, since Erik Ten Hag’s embarrassing banter reign that was saved by outplaying and beating a peak Man City side to win the FA Cup after an eighth-place finish was seen as the lowest United could possibly, imaginably sink. By the time of his long-inevitable departure it was widely agreed that this was surely United’s nadir.
Roll on 11 months and they’re ‘turning a corner’ by beating Sunderland at home to climb to 10th.
It might be an impossible task to ever get Manchester United back to those outrageous levels of dominance and success they enjoyed during the 90s and 00s, but with every attempt to relocate that spark they just drift further and further from it.
So you end up with a situation where United become the perfect storm. As the biggest club in the country it already takes far less for them to be in crisis than it does for Joe Mid-Table-Battler or Johnny Yo-Yo-Club, yet they have also contrived to be actually bad enough to constitute crisis at any of those clubs as well.
In essence they are deeper down the crisis well than any other club you care to name, yet because TIMUFCWTA they also have much further to climb to escape it any way. We don’t know what a solution might even look like.
But what we can say with some confidence is that it doesn’t look like Ruben Amorim. We really did think it might for a while there. He has the requisite charm and charisma to pull off the performance aspect of being Manchester United Manager. But while you can’t succeed in this job without that, it still isn’t enough on its own.
It’s far more symptom than cause of Manchester United’s ongoing crisis status, but this continued inability to string two wins together is a great bit. It was a running joke during Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s time that every month or so United would turn a corner down yet another cul-de-sac, but Amorim has perfected.
The list of terrible Premier League managers who have managed to win two games in a row at least once is a hilarious one, and the fact Amorim talked openly about it before the botched chance at Brentford is revealing in itself.
While the record is specifically around league games, it also highlights just how damaging United’s failure to a) qualify for Europe and then b) avoid total Carabao catastrophe at Grimsby has been.
Because their near total lack of midweek football just gives no chance for any forward momentum to develop while allowing whatever the latest setback might be to moulder and fester for an entire week. United are definitely in their own heads to an uncomfortable degree on this ‘two wins’ thing.
And it also means less chance of some easier games to help things along. You only have to look at Villa right now to see how even a bit of Thursday night Euroball can help change the mood.
United don’t have that option. They don’t have any option. For this once-mighty club, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is no end to the tunnel.
