A stunning weekend for Manchester United and their manager, with victory in El Crisico plunging his opposite number at Liverpool into a deep and salty funk.
Arsenal were big winners both from the Anfield silliness and their own pointedly unsilly approach to the game at Fulham, while Man City are now the Gunners’ biggest title rivals again.
Elsewhere, Tottenham’s home form remains an absurdity, Sunderland grow ever giddier by the weekend, Leeds find themselves right back in the soup and then there’s Nottingham Forest. Bloody hell, lads.
Premier League winners
Ruben Amorim
It was a huge win for Manchester United, but a bigger one for Ruben Amorim specifically. For the first time since the very earliest days of his United reign, back in the far-off dim and distant days of late 2024 where his biggest problem was Ed Sheeran gatecrashing post-match interviews for some reason, Amorim has one precious gift: time.
For the first time all season he is not among the most conspicuously under-pressure managers, and not solely because all the other under-pressure managers have been sacked.
Given the public backing he received during the darkest moments, this statement win is one that gives him plenty of cover.
And even the league table now looks so much less appalling. It was easy, and fun, to joke about previous Man United corner-turning victories lifting them all the way to, say, 10th. But while they do remain in mid-table, that mid-table has become incredibly congested thanks to the weekend’s results at Anfield and elsewhere.
Ninth place is still historically bad for Manchester United in the Premier League, but three points behind second place sounds a lot better.
Manchester United
We are not about to go declaring a corner has been turned, because Manchester United have turned approximately 873 corners over the last 12 years under several different managers and always ended up back where they started. Or worse.
But what a win. What a statement. What a header from Harry Maguire. And while finding themselves top of the table for results against top-half sides can be slightly misleading at this early stage of the season, it’s definitely a significant development for United.
The wins against Chelsea and now Liverpool have shifted things significantly, because before that pair of wins there was a deeper misery to United’s miserable record under Amorim in that the few wins they were able to muster involved feeding on the Premier League’s very smallest beasts.
Their miserable 24/25 return of 42 points actually masked just how bad they really were, with 16 of those points coming from six games against the three relegated teams who were, collectively, the worst group of relegated clubs in Premier League history.
The fact United have won four games already this season is encouraging enough, given that low, low floor. But the fact two have come against Big Six opposition, along with a home win over Sunderland that seems far more compelling than those previous successes against promoted teams, and even the encouraging opening-day performance against Arsenal does hint that something might actually be changing for United.
There are going to be more bumps in the road, they are far from perfect and, while they were impressive yesterday, it still felt very much like a game that owed more to Liverpool’s total and widespread headloss than particular excellence on United’s part, there are still suddenly so many more reasons to be cheerful. And for now, that will absolutely do.
That guy off of the internet who can’t get a haircut until United win five games in a row
Brighton, Nottingham Forest, Tottenham. Game on.
Arsenal
Arguably the biggest winners from the Anfield shenanigans, because the scale of the contrast between their controlled, repeatable, sustainable and, yes, wonderfully p*ss-boiling methods and Liverpool’s chaos means that this really does look like a stunning opportunity now for a team that has spent three years being very good indeed yet still ultimately the butt of all the jokes.
This last laugh is going to be very loud indeed, and we will all just have to accept they and we deserve it.
There is already a clear reduction in the kind of sloppiness that has held Arsenal back in the last couple of seasons, a greater resilience to getting themselves bogged down in nonsense. That feels like a particularly useful knack in a season where everyone else appears to be absolutely riddled with nonsense.
For the clearest illustration of the difference between Arsenal this season and last, the results comparison is compelling. They have won their last three games – at Newcastle, at home to West Ham, and now at Fulham. They took one point from the same three fixtures last season.
Aston Villa
A bit like Manchester United in some ways, their win at Spurs felt like it owed at least as much to the weirdness of their opponents as their own endeavour, but it was still a hugely significant 2-1 away win that hints at brighter things to come.
Spurs’ sh*tness was kind of the yin to Liverpool’s yang. Or the other way round, we don’t know. Essentially, Liverpool were guilty of being just far too wild and chaotic and Spurs were guilty of barely even engaging in the game at all after taking an early lead.
Villa, like United, won’t give a shiny sh*te about how bad their opponents were and will instead delight in the upturn in their own fortunes.
Their two goals at Spurs were both beautiful pieces of work and only a curmudgeon like, well, us would insist on pointing out they were enormously assisted by Spurs simply not really bothering to engage with any part of the process in either of those attacks by a Villa team that created little else but also didn’t need to.
After failing to win any of their first six games in all competitions as the hangover from the disappointment at how last season ended lingered on, they have now won five in a row with an extremely presentable chance to make that six when they travel to Go Ahead Eagles in the Europa League on Thursday.
It’s Manchester City and Liverpool after that, but for every reason those are now fixtures Villa can once again relish rather than dread.
Manchester City
Clear second favourites for the Premier League wouldn’t have represented an improvement on recent norms at many moments during Pep Guardiola’s Etihad reign, but it clearly does at this one.
After last year’s Liverpool interruption it does very much look like we’re going to get another Arsenal-City title battle, if indeed we’re going to get a title battle at all.
Erling Haaland
There is now a clear three-strong group of the world’s current best goalscorers, with Erling Haaland joining Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane in an elite trio of players where right now it’s not just the boggling number of goals they’re scoring but just how far clear they all already are of any domestic challenger within their own domain that they have come to so dominate so quickly.
Haaland’s two goals this weekend take him to 11 Premier League goals, while Kane has 12 in the Bundesliga and Mbappe 10 in La Liga.
Those are all crazy numbers at this early stage of those seasons, but more striking still is the fact that no other player in any of those divisions has scored more than six.
Brighton
With Fulham struggling a bit, it has fallen on Brighton to once more lead the way in showing the world the correct way to go about your mid-tabling.
They have now beaten three of last season’s top five in Man City, Chelsea and Newcastle while remaining stubbornly, stoically and heroically 10th in the table.
Burnley
A hugely important win over Leeds that means the final matchday eight table will contain none of the promoted teams in its bottom three in a huge and welcome shift from recent seasons. Even if West Ham beat Brentford on Monday Night Football, a victory of sufficient scale to lift them above the Clarets would in turn send Brentford below them.
The next step for Burnley is proving they can also beat those teams that were already in the Premier League and not just those who arrived with them having added success against Leeds to an earlier win over Sunderland. But that’s a thought for another day right now. That day specifically being on Sunday, when they face Wolves in another massive early six-pointer.
Sunderland
Giddy times indeed as a fourth win of the season takes them beyond the points total Southampton managed in the whole of last season and leaves them a point behind Liverpool, level with Chelsea and Spurs, one ahead of Man United and above all else five points clear of Newcastle.
They have given themselves a wonderful buffer ahead of a tough run of games – they face both Chelsea and Arsenal before the international break – and right now you couldn’t in any case rule them out in any game.
It’s already a remarkable example of an unexpected promotion done right.
Ange Postecoglou
A truly magnificent destroy-and-exit. A reported pay-off of £7m surely eases the pain of becoming the shortest-serving full-time Premier League manager ever after 39 days of confusion and despair at Forest.
And he won’t have to deal with Mr Marinakis any more. A win-win outcome for a manager who has once again proved himself one of the game’s serial winners, mate.
Chelsea
For a while we weren’t sure they were going to be able to take advantage of the huge gift that a Premier League game against Ange Postecoglou’s Nottingham Forest represented, but they got there in the end.
Sure, there was still time for them to do something unbelievably stupid of their own even while 3-0 up against the stupidest club in the league, thanks to Malo Gusto’s late red card, but that merely confirms our suspicions that the 25/26 Premier League will go down in history as the season of the stupid. And we’re all in favour of that.
Plus we always like to see all the ‘ten-man’ headlines that follow a game like this one, where said ten-manning was of literally zero consequence or relevance to the outcome.
Crystal Palace and Bournemouth
Two very good sides punching way above their weight with two very good managers playing out the most entertaining game of the Premier League season so far. Bournemouth will obviously and rightly be annoyed not to have pocketed all three points having twice appeared to have done enough to do so, but the wider learnings from this game were still hugely positive for both sides.
Opportunity really does knock awful loud for both of them when you glance around and take in the current shenanigans of some much bigger and better resourced clubs.
Jean-Philippe Mateta
Only Erling Haaland has more Premier League goals in 2025.
Sean Dyche
We are so back.
Premier League Losers
Liverpool
What the bloody hell was that? The mini crisis is now a very real actual-sized crisis, and Liverpool did it to themselves.
Presented with the chance to make a mockery of all that talk with a home game against the Premier League’s most banter-heavy outfit, Liverpool instead produced a performance of something approaching pure panic.
It began with Virgil van Dijk’s disastrous series of misfortunes in the run-up to the opening goal after barely a minute had elapsed, and really got no better from there.
Having failed to take a few chances to get back on terms before half-time, in the second Liverpool simply rattled themselves into oblivion. They spent the last half-hour chasing a goal as if only seconds remained.
Sure, that’s precisely the time at which a lot of goals have arrived in Liverpool games, but this was a performance to remind us all that a lot of those goals are now coming against the champions.
With half an hour in which to recover a one-goal deficit against a team fighting a crisis of its own and with a penchant for letting in goals themselves, Liverpool simply pressed the panic button. It really was an astonishing sight.
With so, so long left in the game they had already resorted to a 4-2-4 in which Florian Wirtz was nominally one of the central midfielders. This was not the behaviour of a team where all is well.
Liverpool we love you, but you are not serious title challengers.
Arne Slot
For the first time in his Liverpool career, a meaningful amount of pressure is being applied and his response is deeply troubling.
That suddenly very bald indeed head is now entirely covered in tinfoil, and we put it to you that this quote…
‘We’ve seen Sesko play the last three, four, five or six times, but they go to Liverpool they change the line-up.
‘That’s not the first where we’ve faced a team and they’ve done that.’
…is the most Klopp-esque salty loser quote we’ve ever seen that isn’t in fact from Klopp himself.
Does… does he think it’s actually some kind of cheating for opposition teams to rotate or adapt their tactics against Liverpool?
And what’s really worrying here is that Slot said it before the match.
Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah
While Liverpool’s failure was a collective one in which nobody – not even in the end Cody Gakpo after that late missed header – really escaped blame, it was impossible not to notice the conspicuous bed-sh*tting taking place from two players who have done more than any other to deliver Liverpool’s most recent successes.
They were both absolutely rotten in the worst possible fixture at the worst possible time. And the unavoidable reality is that both are at an age where it is entirely legitimate to wonder if the visible decline is the start of something terminal rather than just a routine fluctuation in form.
Tottenham’s home form
A meek and mild home defeat to Aston Villa for a club that really does seem to have lost its purpose after ending the trophy drought that was all anyone had talked about for years and years and years.
‘What now?’ Seems to be the question, and the answer a collective shrug. The apathy is most starkly visible at home, where Spurs have now taken just four points from four games – as opposed to an excellent 10 from four away games – to extend an extraordinary and miserable run.
Since thrashing Sunday’s opponents 4-1 at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium 11 months ago, Tottenham’s Premier League home form reads P18 W3 D4 L11. That’s just 13 points and wins against only Manchester United, Southampton and Burnley from very nearly an entire season’s worth of home games.
We may not know exactly what success looks like for Spurs this season in their latest campaign of transition and rebuilding, but we’re certain it cannot possibly involve home form that continues to look as ridiculous as that.
Their next three games across three competitions are all away from home, so Thomas Frank does at least have a bit of time to try and figure it out. But…
Thomas Frank
‘When we played Bournemouth it was a horrendous performance. Post-match is the biggest learning. I watched the match back it didn’t get better. I promise you that. I learnt from that. I didn’t get that right.’
Since Frank made that, well, frank admission, Spurs’ home games have seen them scrape a draw they didn’t deserve against winless Wolves, and go down timidly to an Aston Villa side who hadn’t won away from home.
Any time you want to show those learnings, Thomas, we’re ready and waiting.
Nottingham Forest
An absolute disaster of a mess. If you’re sacking the manager three minutes after a defeat to Chelsea, the obvious question begged is why you didn’t do it a fortnight earlier at the start of the international break when there was time to breathe.
But that’s not even really it. What’s really it is that in a few short months Forest have gone from a club aiming high after a seemingly transformative season to a situation now where appointing Sean Dyche is a correct and necessary course correction because this is now a very real and very difficult and almost entirely self-inflicted relegation fight.
Leeds
A chance to put real distance between themselves and the bottom three while plunging a direct rival into deep, deep trouble was passed up with a performance troublingly devoid of almost any redeeming quality.
A huge few weeks now for Leeds, who surely have to come up with something better than this in upcoming six-pointers against West Ham and Forest to avoid spending the November interlull inside the bottom three.
Newcastle
A stuttering season that simply refuses to launch, with the fact Newcastle haven’t yet registered the same result in consecutive league games highlighting the near total lack of momentum.
Their eight Premier League games this season now read, starting with Saturday’s defeat at Brighton: LWLDWDLD.
It’s not yet a crisis, certainly not compared to plenty of others currently ongoing, but they could also find themselves just two points above the bottom three after tonight’s game and that’s uncomfortably silly.
Fulham
We suspect that no mid-table team’s season can or should be defined by away defeats at Bournemouth and Villa or a narrow home defeat to Arsenal.
But when all three of those defeats happen in succession, it does start to look a little bit troublesome.
The weekend’s game against Newcastle is now a battle between two teams seeking to avoid getting dragged uncomfortably close to the undignified unpleasantness of a relegation tussle.