Sunderland join top 10 Premier League clubs ‘doing things right’
While coming to the conclusion that Arsenal are currently doing things more correctly than just about anyone else, we naturally started to ponder which other clubs are currently getting it right.
It’s sometimes all too easy and all too fun to just take the p*ss out of the clubs who are getting everything wrong, but really who out there honestly needs to read more words about Manchester United’s never-ending banter era? Oh, what’s that? You do need that?
Ah. Well… tough. This is about clubs who are at least doing more things right than wrong. Sorry if that’s less fun. If it’s any help, at least some of the compliments in here are delivered with the back of the hand. And we’re sure there will be more laughing and pointing at Manchester United very soon.
Chelsea
Once you realise that ‘doing things right’ from Chelsea’s perspective has almost nothing to do with on-field results, it all makes sense. On-field success is a possible and obviously welcome but by no means a vital or mandatory side-effect of becoming what is now the world’s pre-eminent and most wildly successful Football Player Trading Company.
At Chelsea, footballers are literally just assets to be bought, sold and loaned for profit. Sure, part of making that work is that sometimes you have to arrange a collection of those players on a football pitch for a football match but it doesn’t really matter what happens to them there as long as someone is still willing to cut a large cheque for any shop-soiled Joao Felixes you might have lying around the place gathering dust.
Everton
They’ve got Jack Grealish Enjoying His Football Again and that alone is enough. That is something we should all be happy to see.
But a club that has spent far too much of its recent history in dread fear of impending doom is now at least able to slightly enjoy life again. As long as they don’t worry too much about that red lot.
A new stadium is a tricky business and, in the short term at least, has serious double-edged-sword potential. But there is absolutely no sense here that Everton are at major risk of being dragged into anything unpleasant as they adjust to their plush new surroundings.
This really might be a season that’s just quite good fun for Everton. Eventually they’ll want and need and demand more than that, but for now that will very much do.
Tottenham
Still a work in progress under Thomas Frank, and there are clearly some lessons the new manager needs to learn about his new environment and the large number of games where it is now on him and his side to set the tone and be the aggressor.
At the moment, Frank’s Spurs appear better at punching up than down. But we’d argue it’s easier to resolve the ‘problem’ when it’s that way round and there’s little doubt things are looking tentatively promising. If you went back a year and offered Spurs fans a major trophy, Levy out and a proper No. 6 we reckon they’d have taken that.
Joao Palhinha and Mohammed Kudus already look a significant pair of upgrades on what Spurs had before, and we’re still confident Xavi Simons joins that category once everyone – himself included – have worked out how best to make that happen.
Brentford
They knew the day would come. Thomas the Frank Engine wasn’t going to stay on that branch line forever. The lure of the mainline was always going to prove too strong in the end.
But losing him in the same summer they lost three such key players as Christian Norgaard, Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa made it a tough challenge.
We still think they were batsh*t to just casually promote Keith Andrews from within for what threatened to be a deeply traumatic relegation fight, but the lesson to be learned here is that nobody knows Brentford like Brentford know Brentford. They know what they’re about.
Our concern was that attempting a continuity candidate approach in a summer of such enforced flux was a refusal to face reality. But they really might know exactly what they’re doing.
Most impressive, though, is Brentford’s unerring ability to just summon up goalscorers whenever the need arises. Which is often. These are the most valuable and highly-sought-after players in the game; for a club of Brentford’s stature to lose Wissa, Mbeumo and Ivan Toney in little more than a year and simply keep on rolling on without missing a beat is hugely impressive.
Brighton
May perhaps have lost their hard-earned ‘Best-run smallish Premier League club beginning with B’ crown to Bournemouth, but still getting a lot more right than wrong as they make their merry way around the top half of the Premier League.
Any football club where Danny Welbeck is scoring dramatic late goals in big 2025 is a football club where things are being done right.
And when those dramatic late goals are coming against a team that considers you their unofficial feeder club then so much the better.
In the last three-and-a-bit years, Brighton have made a cool £250m in player sales to Chelsea. In 2025 alone, Brighton have beaten Chelsea three teams by a combined aggregate score of 8-2.
It’s probably just as well Chelsea don’t have to play Strasbourg on the regular, frankly.
Sunderland
At some point every newly promoted club is going to understand that this is perhaps not just the best but may well be the only way to go about it. Just buy a whole new squad of better players and trust it will all come together.
Hoping your new gang of actual first-tier-level players are able to gel and work it all out is just now so clearly a better policy than opting for loyalty and continuity and hoping that your squad of Championship-level players magically all become good enough to make what is now a giant leap in standard.
Slightly different rules might apply to clubs who are getting back into the Premier League after only a year or two away where some core of Premier League experience and quality lingers, but for clubs getting to the rarefied Barclays air for either the first time ever or the first time in ages, this is the way to go.
And as Nottingham Forest have shown, even if you get kicked up the arse by PSR, it’s still probably worth it. The risk of PSR showing an interest is just so obviously worth taking when the reward is potential Premier League survival over meekly accepting relegation.
READ: Three Sunderland players gatecrash Premier League XI of the season so far
Bournemouth
Genuinely incredible now to look back at the reaction to Bournemouth’s decision to replace Gary O’Neil with Andoni Iraola.
O’Neil did brilliantly to keep Bournemouth up in very trying circumstances after Scott Parker’s ‘No Way To Prevent This’ destroy and exit. His story remains a crucial one, alongside Parker’s, in how Bournemouth have got to where they’ve got.
But that one brave/brutal (delete as appropriate) managerial decision has proved one of the most inspired in recent Premier League history.
O’Neil has many admirable qualities and even now after his chastening experience at Wolves retains the vital ability to Speak Well, I Thought on Monday Night Football at the drop of a hat. But it is simply impossible to conceive of him putting Bournemouth anywhere like where they now find themselves.
The battle to be the best-run smallish Premier League club beginning with B is a keenly contested one in which Brighton and Bournemouth remain worthy adversaries, but for now it is surely Bournemouth who hold the crown.
To bring in over £200m selling pretty much your entire defensive unit to absurdly high-status clubs in Arsenal, Liverpool, Real Madrid and PSG in one summer, and the consequence of that being you go from conceding 1.21 goals per Premier League game last season to conceding 1.17 goals per Premier League this season is just a truly excellent bit.
Liverpool
It is quite easy now to forget, when dealing with a club who are Premier League champions and for whom crisis constitutes dropping your first points six games into the season and only having a two-point lead over your nearest rivals who you have already beaten, that little more than a year ago they had failed to make meaningful improvements to their existing squad and were embarking on life under a new manager with pretty widespread expectation that they might slip back into the Big Six pack where Jurgen Klopp had found them all those years ago.
The quiet summer of incomings that accompanied Arne Slot proved an (accidental?) masterstroke, with player continuity and a manager bringing evolution not revolution a combination for which the rest of the Premier League had simply no answer.
And now, after that beyond-wildest-dreams successful first season they have gone out and bought all manner of absurdly exciting and shiny new players. Sure, one of them should probably have been an experienced first-team centre-back, but that’s nit-picking really.
Arsenal
We’ve said it all here, basically, so go read that. We shan’t repeat ourselves. TL;DR: Arsenal might for now remain a byword for banter have gone from top-four bottler to consistent title challengers and over the last 12 months have quietly gone from having a brilliant first XI but no depth to possessing the strongest, deepest and broadest squad in the division.
They do need to win something, though. But the good news is we’re increasingly convinced they will.
Crystal Palace
A painfully difficult summer has given way to more good times now the football is back. And they really do have every chance of winning the Conference League which is now, along with Nottingham Forest falling completely on their arse and anus in the Europa League, something we desperately want to happen because the funniest possible outcome is always the best one.
What Palace did right in the summer while all the European wrangling was occurring was how they dealt with sales. It’s an unavoidable fact of life for clubs like Palace, but they showed that there are times to accept those realities and admit defeat, as they did with Eberechi Eze, and when to actually dig your heels in and not allow yourselves to be bullied, as they did with Marc Guehi.
Guehi will now leave on a free next summer with Palace effectively writing off £35m by not selling him in the last breaths of the transfer window.
But what they might get instead of that money by backing their elite-level manager could be priceless. They’ve already won an FA Cup and Community Shield, and we are genuinely now just one Arsenal slip-up from asking with something approaching earnestness whether Palace can ‘Do a Leicester’.
