They say misery loves company, and right now in this festive season of good cheer the Premier League is absolutely riddled with misery. In the same way you can throw a blanket over about 10 teams in the actual Premier League table, so too here in the all-important Mood Rankings.
We won’t bore you with the deeply scientific and immensely complicated formulae at work in carefully and methodically placing each team in the correct place – our own head would explode if we even began to have a clue what we were talking about – but suffice to say it is very scientific and very robust so if you think a team has been placed incorrectly you don’t need to worry: you’re just wrong.
October’s now equally wrong Mood Rankings can be found here if you want to peruse such a thing, with the rankings from that list in brackets below. Enjoy.
20) Southampton (18)
It’s just getting silly now, isn’t it? If there’s a theme developing among the clubs currently making shows of themselves, we might tentatively put forward that it’s the infuriating, mule-headed stubborn insistence on continuing to do stupid things stupidly while simultaneously dressing that up as a noble, steadfast adherence to founding principles in troubled times.
Nothing in Our League right now sends us more Proper Football Man than watching Southampton trying to play their way out of defence despite the overwhelming evidence that it’s just not working. And crucially, that it’s just not working at either end of the pitch. The justification for playing out from the back like you’re Manchester City is that the benefits outweigh the baked-in risk.
Even the teams that do it well make mistakes. And when those mistakes happen, it’s likely to be costly. The most Southampton performance of the season arguably in fact came from Manchester City against Tottenham.
But the argument is that playing out from the back through the opposition press allows you to create advantageous attacking situations and overloads by retaining possession and pulling opponents out of position. City more generally are the case in point here, while even Tottenham can at least point to their goal tally (if not much else) as justification here.
Southampton, as well as being comfortably the team most likely to just hand you a goal on a silver platter – the Saints are, absurdly, already into double-figures for errors leading to goals – are also the lowest scorers in the division. And even allowing for a lack of precision in the finishing only helps so much, with xG lifting them above Everton, Ipswich and Wolves but no more.
The Premier League appears to this season to be experimenting with a wild storyline where pretty much anyone can do a nonsense on pretty much anyone at any time. The exception thus far has been at the extremes – Liverpool and Southampton. Amusing, then, that the game between the two was actually enormously on brand for 24/25 in that it was an absolute ding-dong that Southampton really didn’t deserve to lose.
But they did. They nearly always do. Because of the errors. The frequent, identical, costly and unnecessary errors.
19) Wolves (20)
It really did pick up for a little while there, didn’t it? After a harrowing start to this season on the back of a harrowing end to last season and some deeply painful summer transfer business, Wolves and Gary O’Neil appeared to have found a corner to turn at least in a four-game run that brought their first two wins of the season and a couple of worthy draws.
Not many teams are going to saunter away from Craven Cottage with a 4-1 win under their belts, that’s for sure, and it seemed to set Wolves up nicely for a potentially season-defining period in the run-up to Christmas.
Which has all just proved once again that hope is a far, far, far bigger bastard than despair could ever be. It’s a cruel prick of a trickster, is hope.
It’s done Wolves right in. Since that four-game, eight-point run, things have gone – to use a technical term – entirely all the way to sh*t. Wolves have plenty about them as an attacking team, but it does little good if you keep shipping four goals in comical fashion. A home paddling off improving Bournemouth is one thing, but having your tummy tickled at Everton, the club where hope goes to die, is just mortifying for anyone.
Following that fiasco with another defeat at another club where giddiness is in gravely short supply in West Ham has propelled O’Neil right to the top of the Sack Race once more. The two remaining games before Christmas – Ipswich at home and Leicester away – appear uncomfortably vast and and the sixiest of six-pointers. It remains to be seen if the manager can last long enough to reach those games, never mind profit from them.
After that it’s Manchester United and Tottenham before the year is out, a silly pair of games at a silly time of year against a silly pair of clubs that absolutely scream New Manager Bounce.
18) Everton (13)
The last week has gone about as well as could possibly have been hoped, which is why they’re a lofty 18th instead of last. Wolves were well beaten in what was perhaps the most six-pointery game of the season thus far before the Merseyside Derby was postponed.
Both those things could be more significant than might otherwise have been the case for Everton, and in both cases it’s because of the genuinely absurd fixture list they are currently contemplating. Even without the Liverpool game, it’s a December that still includes Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Nottingham Forest. January is only slightly better, with what on current form looks a nasty trip to Bournemouth followed by a classic FA Cup hiding-to-nothing banana skin against Peterborough before Aston Villa, Spurs and Brighton in the league.
That’s why they simply had to beat Wolves, and the manner of that win is a pretty significant bonus. And while there’s merit in the argument that Everton might not get another chance to go into the Merseyside Derby on the back of a 4-0 win with Liverpool on the back of a disappointing draw, it’s also true that when it’s now played it might also not sit in a run of horrible nightmarish games.
Although given nobody likes fixture congestion it does seem like the sensible thing to do would be for everyone to just shake hands and agree on the standard Goodison 0-0 rather than unnecessarily add any further burden to anyone’s workload. It’s certainly a better guess than this sh*t AI came up with.
17) Tottenham (16)
Christ. Here we go. The main thing we want to address here is something we continue to hear quite a lot in the face of increasingly disastrous results. “It’s not dull, though, is it?!!? At least it’s exciting!!?!” Here’s the thing with that: it is dull and it isn’t exciting, and we’ll tell you for why.
Do you know what isn’t exciting? Predictability. And Spurs under Ange Postecoglou have turned predictable unpredictability into an absolute art form. They are entirely consistent in their inconsistency, and there is now something close to zero chance that what Postecoglou is attempting will bring any meaningful success in the medium to long term.
So it’s not exciting. It’s not exciting precisely because it cannot possibly lead anywhere. It was exciting in those early days of last season when the full flaws of “What we do, mate” were yet to be so brutally and frequently exposed. Back then it was just about possible to imagine we had miraculously found ourselves in the one universe of all the universes where Spurs actually do something.
But now we know this is not that universe, and in the complete absence of that potential what is there to get excited about, really? Sure, thrashing really good sides like Aston Villa and Manchester City is fun enough at the time, but ultimately there’s no point to those wins when they exist as they do in such absurd isolation.
After the City game, Spurs fans already knew exactly what was going to happen in the Fulham, Bournemouth and Chelsea games. And despite the gallows-humour lowness of those expectations, the team and manager have somehow contrived in those three games to fall beneath them.
The visit of Chelsea popped the bubble of delusion last season; this season it just hammered another nail in the coffin of Angeball. There were similarities between the two games – conceding four goals, conceding braindead penalties, losing both centre-backs for who knows how long – but with one big difference. This time it wasn’t a surprise.
Ultimately, Spurs are only really fun if you don’t actually support them. If you don’t support them then they are an absolute hoot. You literally cannot lose. Switch on a Spurs game and you’re either going to see them smash some other poor fools to pieces – while not ever having to worry about whether they might actually kick on and do something real as a result – or watch them step on rakes for 90 minutes. Either way, you’ve got a result.
Southampton away up next for these absolute clowns, and that’s absolutely perfect, isn’t it? On the face of it, there is literally no team better equipped to exploit Southampton’s own brand of witlessball than Spurs. We cannot think of a more ideal game for the neutral to enjoy given that the only two possible outcomes genuinely appear to be Spurs scoring about 723 goals or suffering their most pitiful defeat yet, and it’s something close to 50-50 as to which one you get. Brilliant. Unless you’re actually a Spurs fan.
16) Manchester United (19)
Erik Ten Hag is gone and Ruben Amorim is in, so that’s definitely a mood-booster for sure. Charisma alone isn’t enough to make you a successful Manchester United manager, but if you lack it like Ten Hag then it really does make this uniquely challenging job that much harder.
We expect Amorim to be a very good United manager, and probably the best of the bad post-Fergie bunch, but it’s also very quickly become very clear that it is going to take significant patience and major buy-in from everyone for that to happen.
Simply, he doesn’t currently have the squad he needs to make his style of football really work, and it’s unlikely to be something that can be adequately solved in one January transfer window. It really is going to be well into next season before we can make any kind of assessment, and it’s immensely frustrating that United so needlessly and expensively wasted the summer and as a result probably this entire season.
Behind the scenes, the club remains a shambles. Sir Jim Ratcliffe would be a runaway winner of World’s Most Ridiculous Billionaire if we lived on anything approaching a sane timeline, but there’s no shame in finishing a distant second to Twitter’s sh*tposter-in-chief. The Dan Ashworth saga joins the Erik Ten Hag saga as a completely ridiculous and distracting sh*tshow that really should have been handled far better by a club where it was hoped the grown-ups were going to be in charge now.
In summary then: Off the field a shambles that has no prospect of improving while on the field a shambles that has some hope of improving. So that’s… something? At least?
15) Manchester City (10)
Here’s the thing, okay? What if they are just now… not really any good? It makes you a bit dizzy just to think it, never mind type it. We still sort of assume that we’re all going to look like damn fools by April when City have won 15 games out of their last 16 and lead Liverpool and Arsenal by a point at the top of the table because it’s what they always do and specifically what they always do to the hopes and dreams of those two clubs in particular. But this year we just absolutely cannot see it.
This really is now an absolute nightmare run. It’s one win in 10 games across all competitions, which is just plain nutty, with seven – seven! – defeats thrown in. They hadn’t lost a game at all until that point.
And it’s not like the draws offer much encouragement, with a 3-0 Champions League lead spaffed away in 15 minutes and two comebacks required just to take a point from relegation-battling Crystal Palace.
The defeats are striking for their mundanity. Set aside for a moment the truly extraordinary 4-0 defeat to Spurs, a game in which City apparently decided for some reason to play not like Manchester City but like Southampton trying to play Manchester City, and the rest of the defeats they’ve suffered are just so… humdrum. So normal.
That’s really the worrying thing. The Tottenham defeat and the Feyenoord draw are wild outlier games stuffed with nonsense and silliness. Those are, while painful, in their own way easiest to ignore, to write off as ‘that’s football for you’. The other defeats – so ordinary, so deserved, so remarkably unremarkable in nature – are the ones that should terrify the champions.
Watch those games out of context and you just see a poor team playing poorly and losing to a better one. And it’s happening again and again and again. It’s fair to say City had been flying slightly by the seat of their pants before this run began and it did feel like a defeat was just around the corner. But not seven of them in six weeks. Not this. Nothing like this.
They have slipped from a title fight to a top-four battle and have – along with Real Madrid and PSG – contrived to somehow make the new Champions League group stage slightly interesting when it had been specifically and painstakingly devised to eradicate such frippery.
City are already out of top-eight contention, so at best it’s an awkward and undesirable two-leg play-off to squeeze into the schedule. And if they were to lose to PSG after the winter break they face the very real and very mortifying prospect of finding themselves outside Europe’s top 24 clubs.
Throw in Pep Guardiola admitting he absolutely would not have the energy to build something new at another club when building something new is precisely what is required at City right now and, yeah, it’s all really quite sh*t. And for once we’ve done a whole City update without having to even mention the Sword of Damocles charges hanging over them. Until just then, when we did mention it.
14) West Ham (14)
Michail Antonio’s horrific car crash puts everything else into perspective but while there’s no way to avoid mentioning something so genuinely real-world appalling you’ll have to excuse us for now sidelining it here a bit. We have to be able to pretend football actually matters when doing this stuff.
On the field, West Ham are a bit of a curate’s egg. They’re quite bad quite often and do appear to have made a misjudgement with Julen Lopetegui. It’s not quite a worst of both worlds scenario, but he just doesn’t represent a sufficiently significant change in style to make all the press-pack-upsetting hassle of ending David Moyes worth it. Lopetegui is a bit Spanish Moyes when you think about it.
You can’t really do the ‘Careful What You Wish For’ thing when West Ham fans aren’t really getting the thing they wished for. It’s not like they’re failing to deliver results while playing flowing eye-catching football. They’re just really not that different to Moyes’ Hammers. That wasn’t anybody’s plan for moving things forward.
And yet, they have scored a few very decent and/or important wins to keep the wolves from the door. Literally, on Monday.
The win at Newcastle was mighty impressive, while the Ten Hag-ending success against Manchester United was very, very funny which is just as good in its way. A 4-1 home win over Ipswich might not sound like much, but the only other team to do that sort of thing to Kieran McKenna’s side was a pre-blip Manchester City back in August.
The bad days are very bad, though, with thrashings off Chelsea and Arsenal one thing, but the fact they’re joined by heavy defeats against teams like Leicester and Forest and Tottenham far more damning.
West Ham fans won’t like to hear it, but dare we say it their results are really quite… Spursy.
13) Crystal Palace (17)
Haven’t quite fully kicked on from the pain relief provided by Dr Tottenham, but their condition has definitely stabilised. The win at Ipswich was narrow but vital, while they are at least picking up points with some regularity via draws – including some notable ones against Newcastle and Man City.
Have opened up a bit of a gap now on the bottom three and really should have enough about them to ease clear of any serious trouble through this middle third of the season. But it does all still feel distinctly underwhelming after that stunning if deceptive finish to last season.
We already had a fairly clear idea that Michael Olise was really very good indeed but to watch Palace and indeed Bayern Munich this season is to realise that the Premier League at large perhaps didn’t appreciate just quite how good the man who made Palace tick really was.
Overall it’s a far healthier picture and outlook for Palace than when we last did this back in October, albeit with the growing realisation that this is almost certainly now going to end up as another season where Palace finish somewhere in the third quarter of the division with a points total in the 40s.
12) Newcastle (8)
Really does look like there is now a genuine chance that a proud football club has entirely sold its soul for the Saudi coin in exchange for one briefly exciting but ultimately underwhelming Champions League campaign.
They are currently a mid-table team struggling and striving to break out of that group, and perhaps most worryingly don’t really look any better equipped than any of about half-a-dozen other teams to do so. They really do just look like a mid-table team under – yes, we are bravely and correctly going to say it – a mid-table manager.
The summer was a bungled mess on the incomings front which has left Eddie Howe desperately short in key areas.
The major positive was retaining all their big-ticket players – Alexander Isak, Anthony Gordon, Bruno Guimaraes – but even that is proving a double-edged sword. None of that top-tier trio is performing as they did last season and the prospect of departures looms.
Could Newcastle currently be trusted – or would they even be able – to replace any of those with players as good or better? The nagging concern for Newcastle currently isn’t just that they’re not really where they want to be or thought they’d be by now; it’s that if anything it looks likely to get worse before it gets better. And it might not ever get better.
There was already a sense of Newcastle’s dwindling status in Saudi Arabia’s collection of sportswashing trinkets even before they got themselves the 2034 World Cup. Newcastle risk now being forgotten altogether.
11) Ipswich (12)
Tricky, this, because they’re doing broadly fine in lots and lots of ways. They’re competitive in almost every game they play, but it’s not quite translating into as many points as it needs to in games when they aren’t playing the division’s most actively stupid clubs.
It’s all very well taking the Dr Tottenham option – so very many clubs have done so over the years – but the idea behind it is that it gives you the kind of boost you can then take into games against teams that aren’t as confused as they are. Ipswich did manage to follow it up with a point against Manchester United, but nobody noticed that because they were all distracted by Ruben Amorim and, to a far greater and really quite embarrassing extent, Ed Sheeran.
Since then, it’s been three narrow and slightly pissy defeats in a row. The home defeat to Bournemouth, in a game Ipswich led from the 21st minute to the 87th, is a particular gut punch. A lot of their festive mood is likely to be determined by what happens at Wolves on Saturday, because the fixture computer has filled their stocking with lumps of coal after that: Newcastle, Arsenal, Chelsea are the games with which Ipswich round out what has certainly been an eventful 2024.
Can’t be too gloomy because nobody expected anything but a relegation battle and they certainly haven’t embarrassed themselves in it and it’s not wildly impossible to imagine a world where they turn some of the narrow defeats into draws and some of the draws into wins and climb pretty quickly. But a lot of opportunities have already been spurned.
No team has spurned more points from winning positions. That’s never good for your mood.
10) Leicester (11)
From the outside looking in, the decision to bin Steve Cooper seemed an odd one but the reaction of the fans told you it wasn’t working out despite Leicester competing perfectly adequately in the lower reaches of the table.
As ever, we’d always like to see a bit of introspection from the big bosses when they sack a manager in this kind of scenario. You appointed him in the summer. He delivered results that cannot have been hugely surprising/disappointing to you, and yet it was all irretrievably broken within four months. Bin Cooper off by all means, but hard to see how the manager can really be the only or even biggest villain in that picture.
Anyway, they appear to have lucked out with Ruud van Nistelrooy who has certainly made an eye-catching start with four points from two games against West Ham and Brighton. Doesn’t take much of a new-manager bounce to trampoline a fair way up the table this season and Leicester have duly done so. The gap to the bottom three is now five points and there is now for the first time a slight sense of three becoming detached at the bottom which is always a bit of a boost for all those in the immediate vicinity on the other side of that line.
What happens when the Ruud honeymoon period comes to an end will be key, and it would certainly appear prudent for the Foxes to extend that buffer over the bottom three before Christmas if they possibly can. There do seem to be an awful lot of six-pointers involving Wolves at the moment, and their visit to Leicester the weekend before Christmas looms larger than most for both teams.
In Leicester’s case because it’s followed by a ticklish 10-day Christmas-New Year run that features Liverpool, Man City and Aston Villa.
9) Brighton (6)
An irritating stall at an inopportune time has slightly sucked the momentum from Brighton’s fine start to the season. The worry among Seagulls fans must be that they did much the same thing last year as the second half of the season became a directionless drift to the finish line. It would be a shame for history to repeat itself there given where they found themselves only a few weeks ago after a win at Bournemouth that looks more impressive by the day given the Cherries’ own recent efforts.
It’s not like it’s doom and gloom. Nothing is f***ed. They’re still seventh and only three points off the top four and one off the top five (which could be enough for the Champions League). But taking only two points from a three-game run against Southampton, Fulham and Leicester is undeniably disappointing given a win in the first of those games at home against the worst team in the division would have lifted them to second.
There are further decent-looking games on paper to come as well, with Palace, West Ham and Brentford (crucially, of course, at home to Brentford) before a trip to Villa rounds out a rollercoaster 2024 for a club that now measures missed opportunities by such things as ‘not climbing to second’. It’s still all quite good, isn’t it?
8) Fulham (5)
We have so much time for Fulham and Marco Silva. They are the Premier League’s most determinedly mid-table team – even in the current volatility between fifth and 14th in the Premier League they’ve managed to land in tenth as the Mood music stops – and there is absolutely no shame in that.
Especially as Fulham always make it fun. There is arguably no other mid-table team over the last few years that more cheerfully embodies the ‘anybody can beat anybody’ ethos than Fulham. That, of course, also means anybody can lose to anybody too, something Fulham have chipped in with this year by getting thrashed at home by Wolves and even more damningly losing to both the Manchester clubs.
Fulham’s last three home games have been a hard-fought draw against Arsenal, a fine win over Brighton and that humbling by Wolves. And really you do have to say that’s absolutely spot on. That is absolutely tip-top Fulhaming, it really is.
And there is scope for some truly extreme Christmas mischief if they fancy it, given their next three games involve trips to the top two and a home game against the bottom one. Come on, Cottagers, you know what to do.
7) Brentford (7)
We’ll not worry ourselves with that nightmarish away form, because frankly who cares about that when some bizarre alchemy has turned you, humble little Brentford, into the most exciting and watchable home team in all of football.
The numbers are now so far beyond the absurd. For starters, 22 points from eight games is ridiculous. But that really is only for starters. The Bees have scored at least six goals more than any other team has managed on their own ground this season, while only five teams in the division have scored more goals all in than Brentford’s 26 just at home.
Chuck in the fact that Brentford also somehow have the fourth-worst home defensive record despite everything and you’ve got magnificently enjoyable weapons-grade nonsense. There have been 40 goals in eight games at the Gtech this season, nine more than at any other ground.
It’s reached the stage where Brentford 1-1 West Ham – about the least remarkable football result of which it is possible to conceive – is the one that stands out. Because since that inexplicably ordinary game, Brentford’s home league games have ended 5-3, 4-3, 3-2, 4-1 and 4-2 and you have to say that’s magnificent.
And if anything the fact they’ve completely and utterly sacrificed their away form entirely in order to focus on delivering the greatest home season in Barclays history only makes us love them more.
6) Aston Villa (1)
Fair to say Villa were in need of the fixture computer’s kindness in this season of goodwill by handing them back-to-back Premier League home games to start December against the away version of Brentford and any version of Southampton. There are quite literally no easier tasks than those two, and Villa duly did the necessary with a pair of wins to silence some of the growing concerns after the entire month of November passed without a win in any competition.
They’ve now rolled those confidence-boosting wins into a genuinely impressive Champions League success at RB Leipzig which pretty much nailed down a play-off spot at the very, very least while also making the top eight a genuinely achievable new year’s resolution.
So the mood is a lot better than it was a few weeks ago, but the inevitable flipside of a kind run of games is the bum’s rush on the other side of it. If Villa’s mood is still on the up after December’s remaining games against Forest, Man City, Newcastle and Brighton then all will truly be well once more at a club that has enjoyed an astonishing resurgence in the last couple of years and now come out the other side of the first major stress test.
5) Bournemouth (15)
Yes, this is all starting to go very nicely indeed, isn’t it? We’re big fans of Andoni Iraola, who it turns out probably actually is a better football manager than Gary O’Neil. If there’s a fly in the Bournemouth ointment currently then it’s surely the nagging yet growing concern that the more attention he draws to himself with these eye-catching results then the greater the chance that one of the bigger beasts comes knocking. There are certainly Spurs fans casting admiring glances after the way his side so expertly dismantled Postecoglou’s.
That was also their third and least impressive home win over Big Six opposition in the last couple of months on the back of success against both Arsenal and Manchester City. The Cherries have lifted themselves right up towards the top of that giant mid-table morass from fifth to about 14th and don’t have the worst festive fixture list either. Could easily be top six by the new year at present speed and course, which is all tremendously exciting for a club proving that you absolutely don’t always have to be careful what you wish for as long as you can avoid being West Ham.
4) Arsenal (3)
That was a nasty little blip they had in late October and early November, but they’re very much out the other side of that now and starting to look far more like their normal selves. The return to full form and fitness of Martin Odegaard clearly a big factor there, but there have also been significant upticks in form from assorted other key Arsenal components.
The Champions League campaign has gone fine, with the Gunners well placed for the top eight and absolute certainties for the top 24. That last bit should be a given, of course, but tell that to Real Madrid, Man City or PSG.
With everything looking pretty much back on track, Arsenal do now have a huge opportunity during the winter Champions League break to make significant strides across three domestic competitions where the fixtures do not appear too daunting.
While the festive fixtures can always throw up rogue results – and ultimately scuppered Arsenal last year – there really is no excuse for making any kind of mess in the Everton, Palace, Ipswich run they’ve got coming up. There’s also a Carabao clash with Palace which again you’d expect Arsenal to negotiate.
They really could and should hit the new year in high spirits, to the extent that while it may be sacrilegious to say it, we can even see them emerging from a trip to Brentford without losing 4-3 or something. That’s how good we think Arsenal are right now.
3) Nottingham Forest (9)
Going all right, isn’t it? Forest really are starting to look more and more sustainable on their current trajectory. After the briefest of identity crises in the second half of a 3-1 defeat to Newcastle, they now seem right back on track.
They’ve got all manner of clever and fun players around the place, a gifted conductor in Morgan Gibbs-White and the Kiwi Haaland banging in goals up front.
There remains an expectation that a reversion to the mean is inevitably around an upcoming corner, but there are encouraging reasons to think that might not be a certainty.
Forest have emerged from a tough run of games still in decent shape, and already dodged a couple of moments that could easily have marked the start of that fall back into the mid-table sludge.
That defeat to Newcastle being followed unsurprisingly by a reverse at Arsenal could have been The Moment, but they did the necessary against Ipswich. A heavy defeat at Man City is more embarrassing at this time than at any other in about 15 years, but Forest recovered from that to give Man United a beating.
It says a lot about how this season is going for all the clubs involved that Forest’s run between now and Boxing Day contains games against Villa and Spurs that you would fully expect them to win and a trip to Brentford where they will, like everyone else, be obliged to lose 4-2 or some such daftness.
2) Chelsea (4)
Hands up everyone who expected Chelsea to be above Manchester City in both the league table and title betting by mid-December… put them back down, you massive liars.
We thought Chelsea would be better this season even after what at the time looked like a very weird and unnecessary managerial downgrade, but when we said ‘better’ we meant ‘genuine top-four contenders’ not ‘genuine title contenders’. There is even a case to be made now that Chelsea rather than Arsenal represent runaway leaders Liverpool’s biggest threat this season. Just read that sentence back and imagine it making any sense at all in August, by the way.
Chelsea are the best attacking team in the country right now, outscoring their two main title rivals by six goals apiece. So good are they going forward that they can go to Spurs and quite literally gift them a two-goal start before easing to a victory that never really felt in any doubt from the moment they pulled a goal back.
Idle thoughts of Cole Palmer being a one-season wonder are already dust; he’s kicked on magnificently and is now perhaps the Premier League’s most compelling all-round player. The other big signings Chelsea made a year ago all seem far better for the run and are settling into their work marvellously. It is undeniably a bit depressing for everyone else that Chelsea can succeed despite being a complete basket-case, that eventually ‘signing loads and loads of really good footballers for loads of money’ will deliver on-field success no matter how stupid you are, but for Chelsea that only makes it even more fun.
It would already constitute a major shock if they don’t at the very, very least win the Europa Conference this year. It’s a minor trinket in the grand scheme of course, but would allow Chelsea to become the first club to have all four proper UEFA trophies in their collection: Champions League/European Cup, Europa League/UEFA Cup, Cup Winners’ Cup, Conference.
1) Liverpool (2)
We suppose 19 wins and two draws out of 22 games is quite good, if you like that sort of thing. They win when they play well, they win when they play so badly that Arne Slot has no choice but to angrily fume about it afterwards. They win because they have the best goalkeeper in the world, they win without the best goalkeeper in the world.
Mo Salah’s contract grumbles might be slightly harshing the buzz, but even that looks like it might get sorted soon. And it’s not exactly hurting things on the pitch where he is, if anything, playing even better than he ever has for Liverpool.
Four points clear in the Premier League with a game in hand – albeit that game is at Goodison and therefore by ancient Barclays law is required to end in a 0-0 draw, so call it five points clear – and absolutely flying through the Champions League.
Even in a format specifically designed to eliminate stress and tension, Liverpool’s passage through it has been ludicrously serene. They sit flawlessly top of the pile and six points clear of ninth place with two games to go, meaning they can already stop worrying about having to squeeze a play-off round into the schedule next year.
Liverpool have more Champions League points this season than Real Madrid and Man City combined, which we can surely all agree is quite funny, while you can create a similar effect in the Premier League by combining Manchester United and Everton’s points tallies, which still trails in two behind Liverpool’s 35.
It’s going quite well, is what we’re saying here.
