The midsummer Premier League Mood Rankings can always present a challenge, but never more so than this year. We’ve bottled one decision altogether, for which we hope you can forgive us.
We neither ask nor expect you to be so forgiving about the inevitably wrong (in whichever direction) assessment we’ve delivered of your club.
Here’s the current state of play, with June’s post-season rankings in brackets and the full nonsense here.
N/A: Liverpool (4)
Fair to say we’ve never wrestled with where exactly anyone should sit on this ultimately trivial and meaningless list quite like we have with this one. We hope you’ll understand and forgive the cop-out of just not even trying to decide whether Liverpool and their fans are happier or more miserable than Newcastle or Burnley or whatever.
In time we’ll all learn precisely how the genuine tragedy that has hit this club this summer comes to influence and define the football that will ultimately in the end return to the front of everyone’s thoughts. Our suspicion is that the ‘For Diogo’ inspiration and bonding will prove a powerful unifying force for what is undeniably if at this time so triflingly unimportantly an imposing squad that will set out to defend the Premier League title won so impressively last season.
But even this sort of talk feels in bad taste, as if anything that Diogo Jota’s tragic untimely death could do to Liverpool’s football for better or worse is even a subject worthy of discussion.
RIP, Diogo and Andre.
19) West Ham (20)
Hmm. For a team that loves a transfer and who very obviously needed to do quite significant squad surgery to deliver a playing staff better suited to Graham Potter’s ways they… have not done a lot. Has to be a worry given how poor they were for vast swathes of last season as they head into a season where they surely cannot rely either on a) Spurs and/or Manchester United remaining historically bad or b) the promoted clubs all being historically bad.
Getting £55m for a player who isn’t quite what Potter wants is useful, but also in multiple ways revealing of where exactly West Ham stand right now. They’ve had to cash in an extremely valuable asset just to be able to start the work required on their squad and worse still had to sell him to Tottenham.
West Ham would, as a general rule, sooner sh*t in their hands and clap than do anything ever that might in any way benefit Tottenham. To have reached a point where they would even consider selling them one of their best players is itself extremely disconcerting.
We always said Potter could only be judged at West Ham after he’d had a proper pre-season to really drill his ideas into his players. If West Ham don’t get a wriggle on, he won’t actually get that proper pre-season. And he will end up judged regardless.
The clock’s ticking for a club that ended last season arguably the most vulnerable of all the Settled Seventeen and has thus far got very little tangible to show for their summer’s work.
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18) Manchester United (18)
The club remains a mess in every way and on every level, and that already threatens to derail another season.
A common refrain – from us as much as anyone else – was that Ruben Amorim was a fool to take over United mid-season when he could and should have waited to take charge in the off-season and be able to properly build and prepare his squad.
We are now coming to realise that in fact it makes no odds when or under what circumstances you take over at English football’s largest basket case.
Precious little of the very obviously necessary squad-building has taken place as we reach mid-July with the start of the season only a month away. Matheus Cunha came in right at the start of the summer, and that is an exciting signing. But Cunha is a mercurial maverick and other assorted cliches. He could definitely thrive at United, but he could also lose the plot entirely under the harsh spotlight that comes with the territory here.
And since then, with United still scraping together coppers from down the back of Sir Jim’s sofa and none of the decks cleared of the various highly-paid members of the unwanted bomb squad, their transfer window is at an impasse.
United face the very real prospect now of starting the new season riddled with every bit as much chaos and uncertainty as they ended the last. Which is a lot of chaos and far too much uncertainty.
With no European distraction they surely won’t be quite as catastrophically bad in the league as they were in 24/25, but the very fact we live on a timeline where that is the kind of glass-half-full, every-cloud sentence you can right about This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About is painfully revealing in itself.
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17) Brentford (16)
Most summers see an overachieving Premier League club stripped to the bone by the Big Six vultures, but this summer appears to be a particularly brutal summer for several such clubs with Brentford looking like being the hardest hit.
Losing Thomas Frank is an enormous blow. We simply don’t know just how vital he was to Brentford’s success at establishing themselves in the top flight because he’s just always been there quietly doing an excellent job in surroundings where he felt enormously comfortable.
We’re about to find out both whether he can flourish at an objectively sillier club, but also whether the estimable Brentford project can work without him.
We’d suggest that would be an easier task had they not also lost Christian Norgaard to Arsenal, with Bryan Mbeumo soon and then very possibly Yoane Wissa and very possibly more besides also following Frank out of the exit door.
It’s a summer of such alarming churn and uncertainty that even the one stab at stability and familiarity – promoting from within by giving Keith Andrews his first managerial role – looks forced.
The desire for some kind of continuity was understandable, but with Frank taking so many of his coaching staff with him to Tottenham we do wonder whether Brentford have got this right and it’s very easy to get The Fear about how their season might pan out.
Handing the reins to a set-piece coach who has never managed at first-team level just feels like a gamble of startling proportions in the circumstances. It’s the sort of person you hand the interim role when you are left with no choice midway through the season, which begs the question who exactly Brentford will hand the interim role when they are left with no choice midway through the season.
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16) Arsenal (17)
The wait for a striker nears its end, but the mood around Arsenal remains febrile. As ever, the challenge with Arsenal is not to be swayed too far in either direction by the gobshitery of their loudest and most ridiculous supporters, but there’s a clear sense of unease.
The #NoToMadueke behaviour was not that of a well football club at peace with itself. For all the absence of self-awareness that so frequently defines the most terminally and noisily online of the club’s fans, Arsenal know, don’t they? They very clearly know that they can’t have another year of moral victories or winning on xG or watching other clubs gleefully celebrate winning assorted pots and pans while they sit gloomily in the corner explaining why that trophy they themselves never won is beneath their attention, actually.
This has to be the season where all the undoubted progress and growth and development of the last three years arrives at something tangible. And that’s obviously going to be very difficult.
One of our very earliest predictions for next season was that Arsenal would win the league if they got the striker situation sorted, and we are going to stubbornly stick to that. We don’t know whether Arsenal actually do have it in them to deliver that title after all this time, but we are very confident that somewhere along the way they will be top of the mood rankings and somewhere along the way they will be bottom. And that’s the real quiz, isn’t it? Well, no.
The problem for Arsenal’s threepeat runners-up is that a glance around suggests a league that is only getting harder to win, not easier. From having only City to worry about – and that was enough, frankly – Arsenal now very obviously have Liverpool to think about and on current evidence very possibly Chelsea as well. And these are all clubs for whom winning trophies remains a far more straightforward habit to maintain than it is for the Gunners.
15) Bournemouth (12)
It’s the nature of life for the Premier League’s overachievers and strivers, but Bournemouth already appear to be among the worst hit this year and there’s still time for it to get worse.
Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez were exceptional members of a high-class back four for Bournemouth last year, and while the hundred million-odd quid the Cherries have banked for the pair is welcome it’s still a desperately hard task to fill two gaps of that size in one summer. Even for a club that’s pretty good at rolling with these punches. And there’s still lingering talk of Illia Zabarnyi heading to Paris as well, talk that their humbling at the hands of Chelsea is unlikely to silence.
But they’ve kept their manager which didn’t feel certain at the start of the summer, and Antoine Semenyo’s new contract amid interest from plenty of big fish is another significant boon. Feels like a big finish to the transfer window might well be needed, though.
14) Burnley (15)
Despite finishing miles ahead of eventual play-off winners Sunderland and right alongside Leeds at the top of last season’s Championship, it does feel slightly like Burnley are the forgotten member of the promoted trio right now.
Leeds are Leeds and Sunderland are doing all sorts of wildly eye-catching transfer business, while Burnley appear to just be going about things more quietly. That might well be entirely prudent, of course, and by September their less flashy antics might well look by far the most sensible of the promoted clubs.
But fundamentally we do not trust Scott Parker to be manager of a Premier League team. We are going to need to see some pretty clear evidence he’s going to be better at it this time around, and until such time as we see that evidence we will have to keep Burnley’s mood down.
That said, they do have the boost that all three promoted teams have this summer: so many seemingly settled established teams being picked to the bone.
13) Sunderland (14)
The loss of Jobe Bellingham is a shame and robs the Premier League of an interesting and unexpected storyline, while offering instead the ‘Will a Bellingham ever actually play in the Premier League?’ quandary, but Sunderland’s summer activity certainly hints at a club that if they are going to go back down are going to do kicking and screaming. No quietly accepting their fate for a club who’ve brought in six players from around Europe.
At the very, very least they should avoid Southampton’s season-long struggle to avoid Derby-based ignominy and that’s a start, isn’t it?
Doesn’t hurt to see a division that suddenly contains a lot more plausible relegation rivals than appeared the case at the time of Sunderland’s shock play-off success.
12) Wolves (8)
It is the time of year when we instinctively and reflexively start to worry about Wolves because they start every season like absolute muck.
And that’s true even in summers where they haven’t sold a couple of their best players as well.
We might have felt a bit different had they carried that winning run they had last spring all the way to the finish line, but once they no longer actually needed any further points they simply stopped getting them in the final four games and while that didn’t matter for 24/25, Wolves are the one team we would particularly worry about carrying that drearier form all the way through the summer with them before depositing it with big trumpy dump in a one-win-in-nine games start to the season.
It is the history of the Wolves.
11) Nottingham Forest (9)
Interesting club, are Forest. By the end of last season there was a distinct whiff of entitlement around the place. Sure, you’ve got a couple of European Cups in the trophy cabinet and that’s undeniably something that can inflate the ol’ ego a bit but while the rest of us were going “Cor look at Forest having a brilliant season” there was definitely a sense of some (by no means all) their fans not quite enjoying it as much as they really should have done because to them this was nothing more than the restoring of the club to its rightful status.
That’s fine, but it does also mean that as well as not fully enjoying the good times you can end up getting more miffed than is healthy about the less good, and while the harrumphing at the sale of Anthony Elanga and still-likely departure of Morgan Gibbs-White is understandable, the general air of “How can this thing that happens to all clubs outside the cosseted elite be happening to us, Nottingham Forest?” doesn’t seem like it’s the sort of thing that can end with anyone feeling good about anything really.
There’s something similar about the extent of apparent behind-the-scenes lobbying Forest have done to get themselves Crystal Palace’s place in the Europa League. Sure, it makes sense to want to be in the Europa League, but the Conference felt like a tournament Forest would have a genuine shot at winning in a way that even the current even-Spurs-can-win-it watered-down Europa League doesn’t.
We do also very much enjoy the idea of contracts having secret release clauses the very activation of which constitutes a breach of said secrecy, but not really sure how well that’s going to actually stand up in practice.
10) Manchester City (19)
We’re as excited as you to find out whether City’s embarrassing early exit from the Club World Cup constitutes the latest stage in the decline of the Guardiola Empire or will, come May, have been fully reimagined as the blessing in disguise that allows them to reclaim their Premier League title as Chelsea wilt on the run-in.
The important thing, of course, is that in and of itself not doing much at the Club World Cup doesn’t really matter. Had that happened on the back of a more customary City season in which the Premier League and probably a cheeky domestic cup had been safely trousered nobody would bat an eyelid.
But another failed shot at silverware on the back of the first genuinely worrying season since Guardiola really got going at City means it does catch the eye slightly more.
Feels like City are a side who could do with making a statement start to the season, and the worry for them is that fast starts are not their great strength. Very good starts and then unimprovably relentlessly opposition-spirit-crushing finishes have been the modus operandi for Pep’s teams.
But last year was one to puncture the idea that City will always come decisively good down the home straight, and once that kind of aura is lost its powerfully hard to restore.
What City have done is continue with the rebuild that began in January and it’s certainly going to be exciting to watch a new-look post-De Bruyne City in action. But we’ve not been this uncertain about them before a ball’s been kicked for several years.
Which is all the evidence we need to know they will be 12 points clear by November and win the league by 20 points in the end while spinning effortlessly upon the very tips of their cocks.
9) Everton (11)
Genuine question: has anyone seen or heard anything at all to do with or about Everton over the last couple of months? We’re genuinely struggling. They just seem to be there in the background, like the whole club is just on the backburner in this empty space between leaving Goodison and arriving at their new stadium, at which point everyone once again notices them.
That’s fine, but it does leave us with not a huge amount to say here really. They’ll probably be fine, won’t they? Yeah, they’ll probably be fine. New stadium looks nice and that. Always exciting until you realise you’ve accidentally set yourselves back 10 years on the pitch to pay for it, but still always exciting.
8) Aston Villa (7)
The entirely unrelated and coincidentally timed sale of their women’s team to themselves appears to have kept PSR wolves from doors for now and allows Villa to continue for now looking to a positive future without having to do anything as unpleasant as sell some players like Newcastle did last year, the damn fools.
That said, they’ve not really actually done anything particularly proactive in the transfer market either. Not even a mutually beneficial signing of a toddler from Everton or anything. Very disappointing, and on a vaguely serious note potentially slightly problematic for a team still right on the limit when it comes to the financial rules and who have waved goodbye to a few loan players who really did become quite important during the second half of last season.
These feel like nervous times for Villa, a club that teeters on the divide between two possible futures. Missing out on the Champions League as agonisingly as they did really might turn out to have been far more significant for Villa than it would have been for anyone else in that situation.
7) Fulham (13)
Feels like it’s been a very, very quiet summer at Fulham thus far. And a quick look around at the teams sharing Premier League mid-table real estate with the Cottagers last season suggests that quiet and boring might be just the ticket this summer.
Sure, we all like seeing lots of new signings come through the door and at some point it would seem like a very good idea for Fulham to join in with that particular endeavour but for the upwardly-mobile middle-class this appears to be a summer where standing still might not actually be the worst net result.
6) Brighton (10)
We’ve all been here before and we’ve all said it before but is Joao Pedro finally the point at which Chelsea sign a player from Brighton and Brighton don’t instantly by some alchemic magic still manage to get better as a result?
Feels like he’s the first player to tread that well-worn path over recent years who feels both a massive gain for Chelsea and a huge hard-to-replace loss for Brighton.
And that’s a bit of a buzzkill, we fear, for a club who already have a little bit of rueing to do about the way last season ended up with them just outside Europe and paying a heavy price for an on-brand mid-season slump.
There’s nothing hugely bollard-grabbing about the business Brighton have done on the incoming side this summer, but that’s fine because that’s always the way with Brighton. They do transfers that only turn out to have always looked brilliant in hindsight, which is very much the right way to go about these things.
5) Crystal Palace (2)
Might eventually be able to channel the current sense of anger and injustice at being booted from the Europa League into another fine season, but for now it is just anger and injustice.
Hard right now to escape the sense that Palace are paying an enormously heavy price for an administrative cock-up while actual multi-club empires are able to circumvent the rules with ease and disdain.
And really how much of a cock-up even was it? Forest were able to take steps to dodge the multi-club bullet before the March deadline because by then it was pretty clear that Europe was a near certainty. Palace had no such certainty.
Nothing can take away from Palace’s joy at finally landing that first piece of major silverware with a famous FA Cup win over Manchester City, but there is a bitter taste now. They’ll just have to go and win the Conference, we guess, while sticking pins in their Evangelos Marinakis dolls.
To which end (the winning the Conference part, not the doll part) they could also really do with not selling all their best players this summer if they can possibly avoid it.
4) Leeds (5)
It’s not so much what Leeds themselves are doing this summer as what’s happening to an awful lot of the teams that they might consider among their potential rivals that creates such cause for optimism.
There is clearly further work needed on the squad before it can be truly said to be one that has a genuine crack at survival, but the potential bottom half of the Premier League in 25/26 looks decidedly weaker now than it did in May.
Leeds also have lovely, lovely kits for their return to the top flight and while some may consider it irrelevant because at the end of the day it is, it can still provide a welcome midsummer boost in those long barren football-less wastelands.
3) Newcastle United (3)
We thought all was broadly well on Tyneside, but then the early Sack Race odds that have Eddie Howe nowhere near as safe as we expected have slightly thrown us for a loop.
What are we missing here? Champions League football. No apparent need to or significant risk of selling any of their many very excellent players – most notably of course Alexander Isak.
Is it just the continued inability to just buy their way to absolutely anything and everything? Feels like that shouldn’t be so surprising now.
We can only really see two reasons for any real lack of cheer at Newcastle right now. One, the fact that the four teams who finished above them last season all look like being stronger next year. And two, adidas have made a complete bollocks of their kit for next season.
But overall, we’d still be feeling pretty chipper if we were Newcastle. All things considered.
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2) Tottenham (1)
To those outside Spurs the sheer sense of cathartic relief that still flows around this club after ending that trophy drought may be hard to fathom.
It’s exhausting being the butt of every joke, and that was Spurs’ lot for years and years and years. They are now free of it, at least for a little bit and there is a clear sense of revelling in it.
The club’s official shop is now selling hoodies and t-shirts with ‘Spursy’ and ‘Lads it’s Tottenham’ on. They are one unconvincing 2-1 Champions League win over Juventus away from adding a range of ‘It is the history of the Tottenham’ merch to the burgeoning collection. Their social media content in the aftermath of victory over Manchester United in Bilbao was the 2025 version of Father Ted’s acceptance speech.
It matters. It matters because it strikes to the very heart of being a fan and how you experience it. Spurs’ renewed status as trophy winners has meant that even the initial noise and anger over the brutal sacking of Ange Postecoglou on charges of delivering a succulent 17th-placed finish while ending that trophy drought has now died down.
Sure, that noise will return soon enough if Thomas Frank finds life harder outside of Brentford’s very specific and very different environment, but there are also plenty of encouraging signs around Spurs’ transfer business this summer as they seek to avoid a repeat of last season’s league fiasco in a season where, for the first time in so, so long, they enter into it without the banter monkey upon their back.
And to make things even better for Spurs, the banter monkey has travelled only a few miles down the road to find his latest host.
1) Chelsea (6)
They do keep getting cross with us for pointing out that the Club World Cup wasn’t real, but they are absolutely right to revel in it. Revel they must and revel they will in being able to call themselves the first halfway legitimately crowned world champions club football has ever had.
The myriad and often nauseating flaws of the tournament itself, on-field and off, that culminated in Donald Trump apparently believing he’d won the title because he’s just so brilliant at everything can vex and agitate the rest of us, but Chelsea can just enjoy it while the rest of us chew it raw.
And, crucially, the thinly veiled criticisms about how they Southgated their way to the final from the markedly easier side of the draw all melt away in the face of the manner in which they swept away PSG, pretty much everyone’s current idea of the actual best team in the world, in the final.
That was a performance and result that would make any fan giddy. It doesn’t matter whether you think that particular tournament matters or not. The possibilities that have suddenly appeared for a Chelsea side that has underperformed for several years now are intoxicating.
They have had an excellent summer in which their transfer business has, dare we say it, even looked like it might have a plan beyond just stockpiling wingers on eight-year contracts. They’ve bought well and are even looking like they might be selling well.
For the first time in a while, they look like a proper team to be taken entirely seriously. One that can and should compete for all the undoubtedly meaningful trophies available to them next season.
It’s worth remembering that Enzo Maresca had them in a title fight for far longer than anyone really expected last season, and there is now the very real prospect that this could be the latest team given the all-important task that is now so vital to English football’s banter drive: beating Arsenal into second place.