Premier League mood rankings: 14 places between Liverpool and Man Utd
The end of the interlull is upon us. Congratulations everyone.
We’ve made it through, and some of us without developing a weird obsession in a national newspaper for making everything about the injured Jude Bellingham.
But with a heavy diet of Premier League and European football to sustain us for the next month, and the first Sack Race casualty and replacement already in the books, the time has surely come to turn our attention once more to the deeply vital and scientific business of the Premier League Mood Rankings.
Fair to say we got Newcastle a bit wrong last time. Who have we got catastrophically wrong now? Let’s find out. Newcastle’s and the other slightly less wrong mid-summer rankings are in brackets.
20) Newcastle United (3)
We were baffled by the response when we had Newcastle that high less than two months ago. Fair enough, we’re less baffled now. Because what we actually were was wrong. Desperately, badly wrong.
Sometimes it takes a big man to admit they’ve made a mistake. And sometimes the mistake is writing ‘No apparent need to or significant risk of selling any of their many very excellent players – most notably of course Alexander Isak’ and you are so bang to rights you have no choice but to admit you’ve f*cked it.
It was hilariously soon after those fateful words that the whole Alexander Isak Saga kicked off and so dominated the final six weeks of the transfer window.
The good news, at least, is that we are no longer baffled by Newcastle fans feeling down in the dumps, and that surely must lift their spirits significantly. Guys? Guys? No? Fair enough, suit yourselves.
As bad as the drawn-out and bitter Isak saga was the ritual humiliations Newcastle endured in trying to source a suitable replacement, and the fact that when they eventually did in bringing Yoane Wissa to St James’ Park, it played out in such a way that they all had to look awkwardly at their shoes or abandon all semblance of self-awareness after spending the previous weeks declaring Isak’s open disloyalty had brought indelible and grave shame on him and his legacy for the rest of days.
Newcastle did also manage to sign Nick Woltemade from Stuttgart, but – while we’re loathe to jump to any conclusions – we’re not sure there’s ever been a more conspicuous and desperate example of the Bundesliga Tax. Suffice to say this was one deal where Newcastle were in absolutely no danger of being hijacked or gazumped at the last by a rival bid.
On the field, it’s been a largely grim start to the season. The goalless draws against Villa and Leeds exposed the already very obvious weakness in Newcastle’s squad to a sarcastic degree, while the admirable heart and fight shown with 10 men against Liverpool only ended up exposing them to the most sickening of sucker-punches.
READ: Newcastle set booed Nick Woltemade up to fail by ‘overpaying’ as ‘smile’ could soon disappear
19) Wolves (12)
Why are you always like this? Hmm? It feels like some kind of deep-rooted self-sabotage at this point. Managers come and go, players come and go, Wolves start the season looking absolutely sh*tbone awful.
Three defeats from three for a side who really did look to have landed on something in the spring is just so dispiriting, yet so on brand.
They didn’t win a Premier League game until November last season, won one of their first six in 23/24, one of their first nine in 22/23, and like this season lost the first three in 21/22.
There’s a glass half-full element to this, of course, in that none of those seasons ended with actual relegation. Wolves are always apparently able to drag themselves out of the trouble they’ve created for themselves in the end.
But this one feels especially galling. Most clubs outside the elite suffered player drain this summer, and Wolves were no exception with Rayan Ait-Nouri and Matheus Cunha heading to Manchester, but it still surely needn’t have become this bleak this quickly.
Not for a team that was giddily winning six matches in a row, scoring 15 goals in the process, only five months ago.
And yet it also feels just so predictable. That run ended any lingering relegation concerns for Wolves, but when they followed it by taking just a single point from the four remaining games of the season you already just knew how this one would begin.
A maddening exercise in self-fulfilling prophecies at this point. Sure, they’ll probably be fine in the end. History tells us that.
But history also tells us that a club that has had managerial changes in June 2021, October 2022, August 2023 and December 2024 might have to also make a sacrificial lamb Vitor Pereira in order to fulfil the prophecy. And that just feels like a terrible waste.
18) West Ham (19)
There has perhaps been no individual result across the early days and weeks of this season more water-muddying than West Ham’s genuinely inexplicable 3-0 win over Nottingham Forest.
It was a result that provided Mr Marinakis just enough cover to make the managerial change he – and increasingly obviously by the end even Nuno Espirito Santo himself – wanted to make at the City Ground, but what if anything does it mean for West Ham?
Until then, it was all very straightforward: absolutely everything was f*cked. The team was playing football the fans hated at a stadium the fans hate under owners the fans hate and a manager whose departure already seemed to be a case of when not if.
They had been slapped silly on the opening day by Sunderland, mercilessly thrashed by Chelsea, and dumped out of the Carabao by rock-bottom Wolves despite leading 2-1 going into the final 10 minutes at Molineux.
A shambolic early exit from the Carabao on the back of chastening defeat to giddy promoted team and a shortcomings-exposing paddling from a title contender just appeared such classic staging posts on the road to an early managerial change that any other course of action appeared unthinkable.
And then came those crazy closing minutes at the City Ground to cast doubt upon everything we thought we knew.
If West Ham can follow that up with a result in their cup final on Saturday evening – and West Ham do historically reserve some of their very best nonsenses for Tottenham games – then we really won’t know what to think.
17) Aston Villa (8)
We all know that league positions are decided across the entire 10 months of a season and not on the final day, but we’re all also simple creatures who love the appeal of pinning everything on that final twist of the fates.
Sure, Aston Villa could have done any number of things slightly better or slightly differently at any other point of the season to ensure the final-day defeat to Manchester United didn’t end up costing them Champions League football.
But they didn’t and so in the end it did. And it was such a stupid defeat, too, to such a stupid team. And the significance of its consequences are already starting to be laid bare.
From Emi Martinez’s absurd red card against the team he would later unsuccessfully attempt to join to one of the more ridiculous disallowed goals we’ve ever seen in the VAR era, you have to be wilfully obtuse not to understand Villa fans’ gnawing frustration and hurt about it all.
It shouldn’t necessarily have felt quite so much like a sudden jolting stop to three years of progress, and if last season taught us anything it’s that the Europa League can cover a multitude of sins, but it did feel like something ended that day.
Having failed to make either Marcus Rashford or Marco Asensio’s blockbuster loan moves permanent, a slightly desperate Villa moved late in the window to throw a vast chunk of Jadon Sancho’s wages the way of a grateful Manchester United.
It does rather scream of lessons not being learned at a club that continues to teeter and totter on the very brink of PSR ruin with an unsustainable wage bill.
At no other club does the ranting about the unfairness of PSR feel more misplaced than Villa, who will be making all the same noise and looking anywhere but at themselves when they find themselves forced to cash in on Morgan Rogers next summer.
Wild prediction time: Unai Emery won’t be at Villa Park by the time that happens. Yeah, we said it.
16) Manchester United (18)
Oh boy. The club is a mess, obviously, the team is a mess, obviously. Manchester United is now a club so consumed by banter that even when losing in the second round of the Carabao – a Carabao round where even just having to play in it while being Manchester United is already a sign of failure – to Grimsby Town isn’t the end of the banter.
The revelation that Grimsby fielded an ineligible player in that tie left United in the grip of an inescapable banter prison. They had already committed the season’s most humiliating act by losing that game, and were now in a position where they either accepted that fate or looked to profit from either an expulsion or a replay. Which would arguably have been even more humiliating and would certainly have prompted even greater waves of banter.
That the one saving grace of their season currently is managing to scrape past promoted Burnley 3-2 at home in a game where they tossed away two leads before having the good sense to take the third lead so late that not even they could spaff it is revealing in its own way.
They are not very good, and even after spending vast sums of money after spending the last two years pleading poverty and making penny-pinching, miserly savings at the expense of ordinary employees, they are still not very good.
They face Manchester City this weekend in a game that is both derby and an early-season Crisis Club play-off.
And their beleaguered manager has already provided one of the season’s starkest memes by sitting playing with his little magnetic tactics board while 2-0 down. At Grimsby.
Manchester United long ago stopped being the club that ruined your childhood, but through all their assorted post-Fergie struggles we’ve always just sort of blithely, unthinkingly assumed they’ll sort it all out and get back to the top one day.
Just always felt like they’re simply too big for that not to happen. But as more and more time passes we find ourselves thinking that maybe they actually might not do that. This might actually be them. This might just actually be what they really are now. Quite a thought.
15) Leeds United (4)
On the field, four points from three games against Everton, Arsenal and Newcastle represents an enormously satisfactory opening to the season for any promoted team. It’s a return that sits somewhere right towards the top end of reasonable expectation for pretty much anyone outside the Big Six/Eight/Whatever from that set of games.
But the mood is nowhere near as buoyant as it otherwise would be due to the unavoidable sense that Leeds and Daniel Farke were badly let down by the owners in the closing days and weeks of the window.
There was some good work done early on, but the 49ers lads had made a lot of noise about setting Leeds up to truly compete in the Premier League, so to respond to Farke’s desperate yet obviously correct insistence after the final pre-interlull game that he needed two more attacking players by signing, in fact, no more attacking players has sucked all the early-season optimism out of Elland Road.
Those four points have been amassed via a late and contentious penalty winner against Everton, a goalless draw against an at-the-time similarly toothless Newcastle and an in-your-place hiding from Arsenal. And it does feel rather like a blueprint has been set for Leeds games this year, one where they will be swiftly outclassed by the best and rely on everything going their way and absolutely nothing going wrong against everyone else.
And the legitimate fear for fans now is that it’s all started to look like four points from those three games isn’t just a good return but an unrepeatably fortuitous one.
14) Brentford (17)
Bournemouth are showing that good things can happen even if you lose three or four of your very best players, as long as you can keep hold of your very good manager.
Brentford will, we suspect, as the season’s stagger unwinds show what happens when you lose three or four of your very best players but also what was perhaps pound-for-pound the league’s most irreplaceable manager.
Even the win they have managed this season feels like one that said a lot more about the beaten Aston Villa than it did Brentford.
We fear for them, we really do.
13) Manchester City (10)
Shall we be melodramatic and rule them out of the title race already? We’re very tempted to be melodramatic and rule them out of the title race already.
Two defeats in the first three games of the season – neither of which came against title rivals and both of which came meekly and deservedly – is not the foundation upon which a modern title fight is built.
How deep into the season will we get before Arsenal have shed six points to non-rivals? How deep before Liverpool have discarded six points to anyone?
Man City are in the early days of a significant, complex and by definition difficult regeneration. But these early missteps are significant and potentially costly ones already, on the back of what was by the lofty standards Pep Guardiola has set a catastrophic 24/25 featuring no trophy of any kind and no meaningful sustained tilt at either of the big prizes.
City’s and Pep’s pedigree means they do deserve to be cut more slack than others. Even his very best City teams were always (even) better at the end of a season than its beginning. There is, very, very obviously a vast amount of time for things to change.
But this new-look City team is just so visibly a very early work in progress, and we remain wildly unconvinced the manager has the energy or inclination to see that progress through.
READ: Amorim and United should smell City blood before Manchester derby
12) Burnley (14)
One win, two defeats. That’s a start to the season most promoted teams would take, we reckon. And there was a fair bit of encouragement even in those defeats.
The late heartbreak at Manchester United was brutal, but just being that close to that kind of away point this early in the season isn’t nothing. And even in the 3-0 opening-day defeat at Spurs, there were lengthy spells in the 55 minutes of play between Richarlison’s two goals – the second of which is an early goal-of-the-season contender – where Burnley were the better side and an equaliser appeared on the cards.
But it’s still a start that comes with concerns and caveats. Their one win was against a fellow promoted side, and shipping three goals in both the games against established Premier League sides is a stark early reminder that ‘we will simply concede no goals’ was never likely to be as effective a survival tool as it was a promotion one.
Burnley have already conceded only one goal fewer in the Premier League this calendar year than they did in the Championship. And their next three Premier League games are against Liverpool, a newly Angeballin’ Nottingham Forest, and Manchester City.
We’re really not sure September is going to be very much fun at all, and when so many compelling survival bids from promoted teams are built on early-season momentum it still leaves us fearing the worst for them.
11) Crystal Palace (5)
Are running this season on a fuel of pure righteous anger and we are here for it. Had the summer window ended as it could have done, with Marc Guehi and Oliver Glasner both leaving, then all would surely have been lost.
As it is, we do still see a route to everything turning out for the best. Sure, they’re going to lose Guehi for either peanuts in January or nothing in June, but we really do think that might be worth it.
Even in the very simplest terms of being what it took to keep Glasner at the helm. They might have muddled through okay until January following the loss of Guehi, but there really wouldn’t have been a transfer fee imaginable that could have made up for losing Glasner with the season under way.
And we don’t have Glasner down as the sort to make hasty idle threats. If reports he threatened to walk are accurate, then he meant it.
The atmosphere is likely to be testy for a while now, we’d imagine. There are a few relationships that need some strains sorting out. But there’s also the chance for Palace to win an extremely winnable European trophy this season, and for Guehi to lift it as his final act for the club. What a thing that would be.
Certainly at the very least it still feels like Palace have emerged blinking from a summer full of unpleasantness and difficulty and vast and varied challenges into a reality that could have been a lot worse than it is.
10) Fulham (7)
As is their custom, treated the transfer window like something that only opens for a few days right at the arse end of August. Fine, that’s up to them.
Results sit squarely in ‘adequate’ territory after draws with Brighton and Man United and a defeat to Chelsea. It’s classic Fulham in a sort of going along unnoticed kind of way.
Will surely need some wins from an upcoming run of games against Leeds, Brentford and Villa lest they start being noticed for the wrong reasons.
9) Brighton (6)
Sold some players for big profits, bought the next lot of players whose futures are the same, and had the usual Brightonian mix of results that range from okay, to midly irritating to quite sh*t to staggeringly good.
It’s just all very Brighton so far, and that’s absolutely fine at this stage we reckon.
8) Arsenal (16)
Arsenal fans have had a fair bit to enjoy thus far across the summer and early part of the season. The transfer window had much to recommend it; Arsenal have strengthened all over the pitch and finally, finally, finally have the striker they hope will solve that particular long-standing problem.
The signing of Eberechi Eze produced perhaps the biggest endorphin rush of any signing anywhere, perfect storm of a transfer that it was. Really exciting player, the chance to bring one of their own home, and most importantly of all the chance to once again thoroughly pants Tottenham. Carlsberg don’t do transfers, but…
Winning at Manchester United when not playing well laid down a very early Hallmark of Champions marker, while flattening Leeds is something almost everyone enjoys.
The defeat at Liverpool, and the air of timidity with which Arsenal approached a trip to such a key rival whose potential defensive frailties had been on display against both Bournemouth and Newcastle, was a buzzkill, though. No getting away from it.
It’s very early in the season for the threepeat runners-up to look quite this compellingly better than absolutely everyone else in the country apart from one team.
7) Tottenham Hotspur (2)
Tottenham Hotspur is a football club where everything is always changing.
They are a football team that almost never gets beyond phase two of any new, shiny project. Constantly starting over, forever regenerating. Forever in transition.
The now-departed Ange Postecoglou was the first Spurs manager to start and finish two full seasons since Mauricio Pochettino, who was the first to do it since Harry Redknapp.
Thomas Frank is the 13th permanent manager Tottenham have appointed in the 21st century. It’s a relevant timeframe for more than just brain-pleasing round-number reasons.
Frank was also the 13th and we now know last managerial appointment of Daniel Levy’s reign as Tottenham chairman.
And that means that while yes, this is a club well used to constant churn, chop and change, this is still nevertheless a time of even greater flux and uncertainty.
Because for the last 25 years, there behind it all has been Levy, a rare executive chair in a world of non-execs and CEOs.
With his departure, the sands shift once again beneath Tottenham’s feet. There is huge celebration among plenty of fans who had grown tired and increasingly frustrated by Levy’s supposed penny-pinching and inability or unwillingness to make the sort of transfer splash – and thus accept not always getting the best possible price for every incoming and outgoing – that might allow them a fighting chance at achieving his stated goals of winning one of the two big prizes.
There are others who are wary of the change, more appreciative of the work Levy did to transform Spurs from mid-table sleeping giant into a member of the Big Six. The idea that Levy has been great for Spurs off the pitch but disastrous for them on the pitch has always been a loud and compelling one, with plenty of reasonable frustrations underpinning it.
But it’s also worth remembering that Spurs had been mostly crap on the pitch for most of the 90s having pretty emphatically missed the Premier League Boat they as a club did so much to help launch.
The Spurs Levy leaves is unrecognisable – literally and figuratively – from the one he joined.
And now at this club where uncertainty is always the watchword we find ourselves with even more of it.
The Lewis family have always been largely hands-off owners, Joe Lewis wisely preferring to spend time with his money on his yacht in the Bahamas than worry too much what a stupid football club in North London is up to. But that seems to have changed.
The abruptness and timing of Levy’s departure was a surprise, but in truth we should all have seen it coming. There have been plenty of signs, from Levy himself and around him.
His new-found willingness to front up both for in-house interviews and with Gary Neville on The Overlap hinted at a man who suddenly, for the first time, felt it necessary to try and explain himself. There have been new arrivals that, in hindsight, always looked like they could be used to ease Levy out. Long-time Lewis confidant Peter Charrington – now in position as non-executive chairman – came to the club six months ago, followed by former Arsenal man Vinai Venkatesham.
He is now the CEO and will be the closest thing to a replacement for Levy in the new, more standard structure.
There is a very valid argument that Levy had taken Spurs as far as he possibly could. That everything he had achieved in repositioning the club as a 21st century behemoth off the field would never be replicated on the field while he remained wedded to retaining the Premier League’s lowest wage:turnover ratio.
It might very well be a change that had to happen. Spurs might now compete more robustly in the transfer market with the rest of the Big Six, and are perhaps now in less danger of being instead swallowed up by Aston Villa and Newcastle and other upwardly-mobile members of the Premier League’s middle-classes.
But it might also go catastrophically wrong, something that can never be entirely ruled out at Spurs.
On the field there is little more clarity right now either, with a lot of the encouraging signs from Frank’s first few games undone by an alarmingly drab display against Bournemouth before the international break in which Spurs struggled to create anything at all.
The new signings brought in to address that also feed into a general air of cautious excitement and a step into the unknown. Xavi Simons in particular feels like he should become a Premier League superstar and Face of the Franchise here. But he might also just be another Bundesliga flop.
We just don’t know. What, precisely, ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ or ‘Spursy’ mean right now is less clear than ever before.
And for the first time in a quarter of a century, Spurs fans don’t even reflexively and instantly know who they should blame if it does all go horribly wrong.
6) Everton (9)
The bittersweetness of it all is inevitable after leaving an evocative grand old ground so full of ghosts and memories as Goodison Park, but Everton have made a fine start to the season and appear to have themselves a new fan favourite in Jack Grealish.
You’d need a heart of stone or to be of a relentlessly Liverpool disposition not to derive joy from seeing Grealish in full Just Feels Like He’s Enjoying His Football Again flow, and it does seem like Everton is an ideal place for him.
Grealish is a player far more effective as the player that makes the whole thing tick rather than just another cog in a more impressive overall piece of machinery. There’s nothing wrong with that; being unsuited to Pepball is not a sign of moral failure.
There’s not much we’re more invested in this season than Grealish and by extension Everton having just a lovely old time of it and couldn’t be happier with how that’s going now after the Toffees started the season in troublingly moribund fashion up at Leeds.
That does seem to be very much out of their system now.
5) Bournemouth (15)
Andoni Iraola is a genius. Here was a man who saw pretty much his entire defence ripped away from him by the game’s biggest beasts in a summer of intense feeding on smaller clubs. He had every excuse to walk away, and even more excuse for being a bit rubbish at the start of the season.
Instead his Bournemouth side have scared the crap out of Liverpool at Anfield, beaten Wolves and then gone with an entirely new-look defence to a full-of-beans Spurs and shut their entire system down entirely in an enormously impressive victory the story of which barely has its surface scratched by a 1-0 scoreline.
What Bournemouth did to Spurs at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was an even more thorough, and thoroughly impressive, version of what Spurs had done to Manchester City at the Etihad a week earlier.
In the space of three games they’ve gone from Fear For Them to Potential Outsider For Europe, and that’s an outrageous early-season effort.
Now to ensure the momentum isn’t lost across an easier looking set of games between now and the next interlull. For all that we’re huge fans of Iraola and what he’s doing with Bournemouth, throughout his time there they have been prone to baffling and infuriating slumps in form at the most seemingly unlikely of moments.
4) Chelsea (1)
For a while now, and to our enormous surprise, we’ve found ourselves coming round to the idea that Chelsea’s transfer model is actually good.
But what’s key is how, precisely, we frame ‘good’. Good for the game? For players? For competitiveness within and across leagues and countries? Oh, dear me no. For all those things it is absolutely dreadful.
But for Chelsea? And as a model in the specific transfer market and football economy that we have today? It is absolutely good.
What you have to do with Chelsea is to stop viewing them as a football club altogether. It’s a stretch to say the football is incidental, but only a stretch rather than an absurdity.
Chelsea obviously aren’t alone in placing significance on the future value of an asset (or ‘footballer’ as they used to be called) but are the only club where this at times appears to be the only significance. Or certainly the primary one.
Everyone else is trying – some not as hard as others, looking at you, Aston Villa – to be financially responsible but the obvious primary goal is to build a successful, coherent and functional squad of football players to play actual football matches with an acceptable degree of success.
That’s not really the model Chelsea are now pursuing. They will have good teams and good squads and the ensuing on-field success, but that feels more and more like a by-product of the primary business. Which is player trading.
What Clearlake have done is taken what was the necessary evil of player trading and made it the core business. And it’s worth noting that all they’ve actually done is to just go further along a path Roman Abramovich had already started down.
Chelsea now acquire players the way other businesses acquire assets. They might be useful to the side-hustle of trying to win football matches, they might not. It’s almost stopped mattering – to the business, if not the fans.
The long contracts Chelsea tie their players down to are something we were all guilty of misunderstanding in the early stages. They weren’t just a ruse to help with amortisation but that would ultimately stitch them up down the line; they were key to the whole caper.
If you’re signing players as tradeable assets, it’s no use if they’re just going to be available for free four years later.
Sure, you’re going to run into problems with this approach from time to time and end up paying Raheem Sterling £300k a week to train with the youth team, but in the main what Chelsea are doing is protecting the resale value of every player they sign.
It’s already visible on the balance sheet. The absurd front-end outlays and selling-hotels-to-themselves machinations of the early windows have gone. They have pretty much broken even this window despite another vast outlay running into the hundreds of millions.
They’ll take a loss here and there, but they make a profit in the round, and every now and then accidentally sign a Cole Palmer who turns out to be a generational talent, so that’s nice.
It’s also why blasting players for perceived lack of loyalty is only becoming more and more futile. You can shake your head sadly at Viktor Gyokeres or Alexander Isak doing what they did to ‘get their move’ but Gyokeres was entirely right to point out that this is a two-way street and clubs show no loyalty of their own to players they no longer want.
It’s not a pleasant reality, but this is 2025. We don’t do pleasant realities any more.
Chelsea’s multi-club structure helps provide further space to accommodate all the players they acquire, and potential shop windows via loans. And Chelsea know the reality of football right now and the sheer scale of the Premier League’s financial heft means there will (almost) always be takers when it’s deemed time to cash in.
We’re already at a stage where even Bayern Munich aren’t above rummaging around in Chelsea’s garbage and handing over eye-watering sums for the privilege.
It’s not the transfer model football needs, but it is the transfer model football deserves. One where players are treated not like athletes or even human beings but simply another commodity to be bought and sold.
Even 74 charges brought by the FA cannot dim their light.
3) Nottingham Forest (11)
We’ve actually delayed publication on this by a couple of days just to be sure of accurately reflecting the prevailing mood at Forest because we weren’t at all certain what it would be.
Giddy and chipper would appear to be that prevailing thought after they sacked the manager who took them to Europe and replaced him with the manager who finished 10 points and 27 points behind them last season.
Which we’d argue is an unusual response to such a scenario. But we’re being facetious, of course. Because Ange Postecoglou is a manager who inevitably prompts giddiness. It is very intoxicating as an idea, is Angeball.
The obvious fear, of course, is that we’ve already seen what happens to it after extended exposure to the harsh glare of Premier League reality. And that was with a far more suitable squad.
We’ve already made the point elsewhere that going for Ange at this delicate stage of their encouraging development as an improving Premier League side might prove a damagingly hubristic act, with the mischievous thought that of the two wild high-profile appointments that appealed to Mr Marinakis it really might be that Jose Mourinho was the less damaging.
It really is hard to imagine more directly opposite methods than Nuno’s tight, compact, controlled football that had worked so well and Postecoglou’s chaos. And it’s also worth remembering that the times when Forest did come unstuck last season were often on the occasions when they tried to move away from or beyond what was working so well.
But the squad isn’t entirely unsuited to Ange’s ways, especially the attacking players. It does also feel like it will make or quite literally break Elliot Anderson as an elite all-round midfielder.
It’s the defence that we worry about, though. We suspect Oleksandr Zinchenko possesses the nous and technical quality to work quite well as a Pedro Porro-style full-back-No 10 hybrid, but nothing about the rest of that defence screams ‘set up camp on the halfway line’.
There’s nothing wrong with a managerial change providing such a stark shift in style. It’s often, by definition, precisely what was needed. But it can also be an indicator of chaos, of uncertainty, of a lack of overall clarity in vision.
We’re not saying for sure which one this is. Just that September is the worst possible month to attempt such a shift. And it’s not like Nuno has been removed because of his on-field methods.
2) Liverpool (N/A)
We couldn’t even bring ourselves to give Liverpool a summer rating, so soon as it was after the heartbreaking Diogo Jota tragedy.
It was a reminder that however carried away any of us get, football really is never more than the most important of all the unimportant things and there was amid the horror of it all something undeniably reassuring about the way, even in the deepest midst of football’s unending and impossible tribal culture ways, a significant break in hostilities took place.
We do, though, just as vividly remember thinking at the time that people saying this would represent a fundamental long-lasting shift in how football fans spoke and treated each other were always going to be well wide of the mark.
And sure enough, two months later, everything’s gone back pretty much exactly to the way it was before, with the esteemed F365 Mailbox coming in recent weeks to be thoroughly dominated by other fans telling Liverpool they are buying the league and we thought you hated that, and Liverpool fans replying in their definitely not-rattled masses to explain why it’s different, actually.
Nature is healing. And you know what? We think on balance we really wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure, we don’t all need to be going around being horrible to each other all the time, but at the same time football fandom isn’t and shouldn’t be some sanitised and pleasant thing. The rivalries, the needle, the niggle are all part of it. When done rightly, like for instance arguing relentlessly about net spend.
Whatever your view on where it puts Liverpool in the all-important Moral Premier League table, what is beyond doubt is that they delivered one of the most exciting transfer windows of anyone ever. A genuinely absurd array of attacking talent has come through the doors, and the fact that took them all summer and meant they didn’t actually have any time left in the last few hours of September 1 to sign the centre-back it had been obvious they desperately needed is, for the rest of us, even better news.
One because it makes it slightly less likely they just run away with the league because let’s face it all of us without a dog in the fight would quite like a proper title race again please, but also because it already looks set to make Liverpool even more entertaining to watch even if they do run away with it again.
There is a vulnerability to them that wasn’t there last season, and the fact it might not even actually matter at all is sensational.
They are a new-look team that very clearly hasn’t fully bedded in yet, have vast scope for improvement, have already had those potential defensive flaws alarmingly exposed by Bournemouth and a 10-man Newcastle side who haven’t managed to score another goal anywhere else all season.
And yet they’ve also won three games out of three, including a vital early three points against the team that looks like their biggest and very possibly only meaningful rival.
So it’s going quite well, is what we’re saying here. Just maybe take a deep breath and get some fresh air the next time someone tries to bait you with the ‘buying the league’ stuff. It will never matter how righteous and valid ‘but net spend’ is as a response for any club; it always just sounds whiny.
1) Sunderland (13)
Have already won as many Premier League games this season as Southampton managed last season, and are already over halfway to taking care of the first order of business for any promoted side: going past Derby.
The thrilling nature of their two home wins, running amok against West Ham and then staging a late comeback against Brentford, has already given Sunderland fans genuine high points that will do so much to help carry them across the inevitable lows.
As well as the nature of the wins, the identity of the opposition is also just so important. They really could be perfect wins, providing both the confidence of belonging at this level by coming against a pair of established Premier League sides, yet also being six-pointer successes against teams that could absolutely be holding the Black Cats above the dropzone when everything starts to get properly real further down the line.
