Nobody knows nothin' in the Premier League
Pundits, Supercomputers, Substackers ... everybody gets overconfident in those balmy days of the early season. Now we're in the cold dark of winter.
Liverpool were favorites. The only question was, could Arsenal challenge them?
Just a couple of months later, Arsenal had a 67% chance to win the league according to THE OPTA SUPERCOMPUTER! Liverpool were nowhere, cooked, deceased.
And in between, you could find your friendly neighborhood Substacker and Stephen Warnock, ex-Premier League fullback, agreeing sagely that Manchester City didn’t have the personnel to compete for the title this year. We doubted Chelsea’s credentials, too, and that may well hold up. But while I’d still back Warnock’s assessment that City don’t have “the same quality of players that they had four or five years ago,” we were both dead wrong with the idea that Arsenal and Liverpool would be a class above them.
In fact, there’s a whole new world of narrative we’re living in now. The scriptwriters are mailing it in with a reboot of 2022/23 — or is it 23/24 — where Arsenal start off hot but run out of steam, chased down by Pep Guardiola’s relentless predators in Sky Blue shirts. Mikel Arteta and his Gunners are young, combustible, emotional, and ultimately fragile, or so the story goes. The Citizens are coldly consistent, preparing for their customary 14 league wins in a row to signal the second half of the season is here and it’s all getting serious.
Except we should know better by now than to latch onto facile narratives. Who predicted that Aston Villa would be in the title conversation as the Festive Fixtures approach? For the record, I don’t really believe they are — or at least that they’ll be there come April. But they are there right now, they’ve beaten both Arsenal and City, and in a twist of scheduling fate, they’re set to play the North Londoners again at the end of the month.1 They’ve also got Chelsea, the would-be title challengers who’ve sunk down to fifth, at Stamford Bridge, and an improving Manchester United side. We could have a good idea of whether Villa are truly in or out by New Years. Or maybe there are still more twists than that to come for Unai Emery’s men.
Meanwhile, the defending champions who spent 20 bajillion pounds in the summer to confirm themselves as firm favorites are 10th. Every game for Liverpool seems to be a referendum on the manager, Arne Slot, and last season’s star — and one of the club’s greatest-ever players — is in open revolt. While everybody was writing Liverpool’s victory story before a ball was kicked, marveling at the addition of Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike and (shortly into the season) what looked like the cheat code signing of Alexander Isak, few were pointing out that it wasn’t inevitable that Mo Salah and Virgil Van Dijk would replicate the same performance levels in this campaign.
Readers of The Football Weekend might have heard mention of that — or that there was zero evidence Liverpool had actually improved at the fullback positions — but this was not a popular narrative in those warm and sunny days of late summer and early autumn.
And again, I thought this would be a Liverpool-Arsenal title race like pretty much everybody else. I thought the three newly promoted sides would go straight back down like everybody else, only to watch Sunderland start this season shot out of a cannon. The Black Cats are coming back to earth now, just in time for a visit from their hated local rivals — more on that below — but the hard truth remains: None of us knows anything. Nobody knows nothin’. Crystal Palace are in the Top Four, Everton are two points off them, and Liverpool are even with Sunderland and Brighton on 23 points.
The wildest bit is, with a decent run of form, the champions could zip up into the Champions League places with minimal fuss. They’re three points off Palace. They’re still only 10 points off Arsenal, and there are 69 points left to play for.
Which is to say: Cling to your chosen Narrative at your own peril. The new one seems to be that Arsenal can’t win big matches, despite their run of 22 against the Top Six without defeat that only ended with that Dominik Szoboszlai wonderfreekick to snatch all three points for Liverpool in a closely contested match at Anfield on the last day of August. (They won 13 of those 22 games, nearly 60%, but they could be better.) Arsenal’s away record in these fixtures isn’t great, and this title race might well come down to their trip to the Etihad on April 18, but what’s really killed them in recent years is dropping points against The Others. That includes Villa, but it also includes teams like West Ham.
Those are the kinds of matches that City have been losing this season. Newcastle, Brighton, and Tottenham have all beaten Guardiola’s side so far in addition to the aforementioned Villa, and they’re conceding a lot of goals even in victory. The 5-4 over Fulham at the beginning of this month was a good example, and City have conceded more goals generally than any other team in the Top Five. This might improve, or maybe they can just keep winning every shootout with Erling Haaland as their Top Gun, but it does not suggest juggernaut status is imminent.
Arsenal are the outstanding defensive team in the league, and they’re starting to score more goals — and not just from set pieces, a big setback for the laziest Narrativizers.2 Their biggest unknown is their injury record, for which Arteta will at some point have to answer.3 If Arsenal cannot keep their best players fit, they probably won’t win the league, and the two most important in that regard are their world-best center backs. William Saliba and Gabriel must find fitness, and Arsenal just can’t lose a new player every week like they have been.
That’s the kind of unknown that makes predictions impossible at this point, and which lays bare the absurdity of The Supercomputer and its 67%. Nobody knows. Enjoy the ride! Analyze where you can. We’ll all have the answers come May.
———————————
Speaking of Arsenal and Liverpool and all that, here’s a classic clip from the podcast featuring Andrew Mangan of Arseblog:
———————————
A few more matches worth your time this weekend…
LIVERPOOL vs BRIGHTON
Sat @ 10am ET, 3pm UK
The hosts stopped the rot this week with a 1-0 victory over Inter away at the San Siro, and Arne Slot will be hoping it’s the dawn of a new season for Liverpool. The one they’re in so far has not been pretty: They’re 10th in the league, even on points with Brighton but two places behind their guests thanks to a zero goal difference. This is another test, though the visitors are in some indifferent form. They failed to beat West Ham last time out!
There’s also CHELSEA vs EVERTON in this window, fifth against seventh with one point between them. David Moyes and his outfit have quietly won four of their last five, while Chelsea haven’t tasted victory in the league since November 22.
BURNLEY vs FULHAM
Sat @ 12:30pm ET, 5:30pm UK
This is a regulation scrapper, even if Fulham look a class above the true drop candidates. Burnley have lost eight of their last 10 and look like the candidate among the three newly promoted clubs most likely to yo-yo. They need a result, or the trapdoor will truly start to open beneath them.
SUNDERLAND vs NEWCASTLE
Sun @ 11:30am ET, 4:30pm UK
When these two last met in the FA Cup Third Round back in January 2024, Newcastle fans were required by the authorities to take a special bus service to Sunderland’s Stadium of Light. “Anyone who is intent on using the game as an excuse to cause trouble” should know “that this will not be tolerated,” the Northumbria police added in a statement. There was another indication of just what a police priority this one is with a video that went viral this week:
This is the Tyne-Wear Derby, named for the rivers that run through Newcastle and Sunderland respectively. The beef goes well beyond football, by The Guardian’s account, with roots that stretch back to the 17th century. There was a dispute over royal trading rights for coal that ultimately put these two towns, 12 miles apart, on opposite sides of the English Civil War. Newcastle, whose traders had consistently been granted trading rights, sided with King Charles I. Sunderland, which had been spurned by the king and economically battered as a result, went with Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians. There was even a battle on a field between the two cities, with Sunderland and its Scottish allies seizing victory — and eventually the town of Newcastle.
The football side of this feud kicked off in the 1880s, and plenty more blood has been spilled since. It’s also been remarkably even: That January 2024 encounter was the 156th meeting between these two, and Newcastle’s 3-0 victory was their 54th triumph. Sunderland have won 53, and while their opponents here have had all the big-money investment and the Champions League football in recent years, it’s the Black Cats who started this Premier League season so strongly.
They’ve slid down to ninth now, just a point clear of the visiting Magpies, and they might just feel the cold chill of reality setting in. Still, they’ve won six of the last seven league meetings between these titans of the North East, and they haven’t lost one since 2011.
As an alternative in the same window, there’s also NOTTINGHAM FOREST vs TOTTENHAM, or a Top Four clash between CRYSTAL PALACE and MANCHESTER CITY.
BOLOGNA vs JUVENTUS
Sun @ 2:45pm ET, 7:30pm UK
The hosts are having a great season so far and will welcome the mighty Old Lady to the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara with two points between them. This is the fixture I got to see when I visited Bologna in the spring, when these two were duking it out for a Champions League place. This time, Juventus come in two points behind and struggling for consistency. They’re still only eight points off AC Milan at the top, however, as Serie A is a wild jumble of good teams this year. Best to tune in.
If you want to witness the possible demise of Xabi Alonso, though, DEPORTIVO ALAVÉS vs REAL MADRID kicks off 15 minutes later. A decent showing against Manchester City in the Champions League this week might have bought the Madrid boss some time, but after defeat to Celta Vigo last weekend and poor results against Girona, Elche, and Rayo Vallecano in the weeks prior, another bad one here could see Alonso on his way out.
How often do teams play each other home and away in the league 24 days apart?
As a not-at-all-touchy Arsenal supporter, the #1 sign someone doesn’t watch the team regularly is when they float this idea that Arsenal are hoofing the ball forward and playing it off somebody’s knee near the byline to win a corner they can score from.
When a manager wields the kind of immense power that Arteta does at Arsenal, he’s got to take responsibility for the load that’s placed on players and the injuries that result.