It is somehow two-and-a-half months since we last updated the Premier League mood rankings and a great deal has changed. Except at 20th. Nothing has changed or will change there. Not for the better, anyway.
Elsewhere, though, you’ve got contrasting but familiar feelings starting to stir at Manchester City and Arsenal, you’ve got Sunderland and Leeds having a lovely old time. Liverpool and Chelsea not having a lovely old time. Manchester United having a confusing time.
And, as is now seemingly required by law, Fulham just having a time.
January’s rankings are in brackets, with the full visionary insight/laughable misses available to be enjoyed/mocked here.
20) Tottenham (20)
Worth revisiting January’s thoughts here, because a) it highlights just how staggeringly bad things already were by that point and b) everything has got much, much, much worse since then.
Back in January we were still talking about the idea of a Spurs relegation with a kind of ‘But surely they couldn’t actually?’ wide-eyed wonder.
There’s even the added jeopardy this season that tumbling grimly towards the relegation zone might end up with them tumbling directly into it.
Might? Might? Two-and-a-half months, one-and-a-half managers and none-and-a-half wins later it’s now a cold-eyed certainty. Spurs absolutely are in the relegation zone, where they will surely remain.
They’ve been so bad for so long – they’ve now won just 11 of their last 54 Premier League matches since December 2024 – that we do kind of wonder whether, if anything, people are no longer actually startled enough about what an astonishing situation this is. If anything for me, Clive, they’ve almost relegated themselves too well.
We’ve railed for years about how the Big Six are insulated from failure, about how there really is only so far they can fall and fail no matter how bad or mismanaged they are. Spurs are about to blow all that out of the water and the reaction for now is still mainly just ‘LOL good banter, this’.
Perhaps it will change when it’s actually confirmed. Perhaps there is a sense outside of still thinking or assuming they’ll somehow escape despite themselves because life is just that unfair.
Even the bookies – and thus by association punters – while finally at the weekend accepting Spurs are now favourites to go, can’t quite bring themselves to accept just how overwhelmingly probable it now is. They are still, with most firms, just about odds-on to survive, which might very well be the worst bet we’ve ever seen in the history of bets until you realise that Spurs are also evens to win at Wolves in a couple of weeks’ time.
Should go without saying that Spurs, right now, are not evens to win any game of football against anyone.
What also goes without saying is that almost no Spurs fans think their chances are anywhere close to 50:50. Most would put it somewhere nearer 0:100. Both are wrong, but we’d suggest the doom-mongering one-eyed fans are wrong only on a technicality and are far, far closer to the actual number on this occasion than the gimlet-eyed, emotionless bookmaker algorithms.
Almost no Spurs fan now expects survival. Many no longer believe it is even possible. Many have resorted to finding what crumbs of joy they can from living vicariously through Arsenal’s jittery panicky collapse that will, at worst, see them finish second in the Premier League.
We noticed a significant shift in mindset when Spurs weren’t even playing. On Monday night, when Leeds secured their own survival with victory at Man United, the Online Spurs Fans barely looked up. For months now every Forest, West Ham and Leeds game has obviously been an event for Spurs fans as well, as Spurs games have been for fans of those clubs. No longer.
The phlegm-flecked fury at the sight of Brian Brobbey’s third yellow-card offence of Sunday afternoon putting their captain out for the last rites appears to have been the last true raging against the dying of the light.
Spurs fans themselves have now seemingly moved on from drawing up plans for how they might somehow miraculously survive this season to trying instead to work out what happens in the summer and beyond as a Championship club, and Leeds tearing Man United apart barely interrupted those discussions.
Our suspicion is that this is just the eye of the storm. A fugue state brought on by the extreme stress of it all, and that fresh agony will hit home once it’s all finally mathematically confirmed – especially if it happens against Chelsea or via the West Ham-Arsenal game. But it does seem at least slightly encouraging somehow to see them for now in an acceptance stage of their grief.
It’s all still spectacularly and unimaginably bad, obviously, but at this stage ‘Can we maybe hold on to Archie Gray, do you reckon? Or Kevin Danso, perhaps?’ are surely far healthier delusions than any ‘If we can just beat Brighton…’ prognostications.
Spurs can’t just beat Brighton. Or Wolves. Or anyone else. The fans at least have reached that state of enlightenment even if it does still feel like everyone else is still slightly playing catch-up.
HINT: if you’re still talking at all about a ‘relegation battle’ then you haven’t grasped the situation. There is, yet again, no Premier League relegation battle to speak of because there are, yet again, three catastrophically bad teams who are much, much worse than everyone else.
19) Burnley (18)
Obviously going down, as they have obviously been doing for months, and it is quite embarrassing that they haven’t really been able to make any meaningful dent in what is still a 10-point gap to Spurs, who haven’t won a game since the Christmas decorations were still up.
But they’ve also obviously been at the acceptance stage of this for far longer than Spurs, and are in any case far more used to this. They know Scott Parker will probably get them back up for another go because it’s what he does and what they do. Except now it comes with added rants about the robots and the AI he genuinely seems to think are in charge of VAR like Burnley are less a football club losing football matches than a dystopian sci-fi allegory for our troubled times.
18) Wolves (17)
Also down, also obviously, but no longer quite have the air about them of a ‘tumble straight to League One’ clusterf*ck under Rob Edwards and that was always about the best he could be realistically expected to achieve when he came in.
Decent chance they don’t finish last now, even if it does seem like they really will now have to swallow the mortifying embarrassment of finishing below Spurs. We’re getting in early with the wild prediction that neither Burnley nor Wolves do that next season.
17) Arsenal (9)
We genuinely toyed with the idea of putting them 19th. It would obviously be absurd to put them 20th and yet we didn’t dismiss that out of hand either. Spurs are at least for now in a kind of numbed acceptance stage of their own grief having gone through the more viscerally unpleasant parts.
Arsenal’s anguish is at its most unbearably raw right now; they can see a familiar story unfolding in a season they and everyone else had dared to assume would be different. They are not taking it well, and fair enough.
The mad thing, really, is that absolutely nothing is f*cked. It could – should, even – still be absolutely fine. Sure, they won’t win the quadruple but that was never a realistic target because it never is. No English clubs ever win that, so don’t worry about it. And if you’re not going to win it because nobody ever does, then very obviously the bits you’d sacrifice would be the domestic cups.
Arsenal are still odds-on favourites to win the Premier League and second favourites in the Champions League.
It just right now doesn’t quite feel like it. Tonight against Sporting should be fine, but then it’s all eyes on the Etihad. A Mood Rankings next week could absolutely see Arsenal in 19th without question. It could also see them a clear and undisputed number one.
That is the beauty of football, and of being a football fan and why the entirely subjective and arbitrary swings of the Mood Rankings are one of our very favourite things to chronicle. It’s also just very, very Arsenal.
As is always the case in all things English football, absolutely nowhere else is everything as heightened, as febrile, or as revealing than it is at Arsenal. Whether it’s celebrating, bottling, scoring goals from set-pieces, playing quite dull football or the simple chemical response to triumph or despair, nowhere does it seem to hit harder or mean more than at the Emirates.
READ: Arsenal bottlemageddon schadenfreude is inevitable, absolutely fine and nothing new
16) Liverpool (15)
Is it bad when the only clubs more miserable than you are either getting relegated or in the midst of their annual existential crisis about what the f*ck the meaning of it all actually is?
We would have to lean towards the answer being yes, yes it is.
It really has been a dreadful season for Liverpool. Given where they were, what they and we all expected of them, what they expected of themselves, and the cruel, deceptive nature of that five-game winning start.
Hindsight is always 20:20 and the signs were there even then that all was not as it seemed. They had relied far too heavily and clearly unsustainably on late nonsense to actually win games. But back then it all just still fight quite mentality monsterish rather than the seat-of-the-pants dumb luck and statistical quirk it has proved to be.
Since then what late drama there has been in Liverpool games has generally gone against them. Even Spurs, a team that folds itself in two at the first sign of anything approaching a setback, managed a late equaliser at Anfield. Real, actual Spurs.
And that’s not even Liverpool’s most dispiriting result of recent times. No real shame in going out to PSG in the Champions League quarter-finals, but the manner of it was just so not Liverpool rhythms, unable even to lay a glove on the champions across two bloodless legs in which Arne Slot’s utter inability to impact proceedings in any way surely spells the end of his chances of a third season at Anfield.
Because this year’s Premier League is so bad, whoever the Liverpool is next season will probably get another go at the Champions League because – damningly for everyone else, frankly – they are still going to finish fifth. It is the barest minimum imaginable of an achievement for this campaign, and one that owes far more to Chelsea appointing a LinkedIn meme generator to oversee the football sideline of their player-trading company than any great success on Liverpool’s part.
After winning the league and then spending close to half-a-billion quid on reinforcements, it’s been an enormous drop-off. Trent Alexander-Arnold has already gone. We already know this is Mo Salah’s farewell season. Andy Robertson will leave too. Virgil van Dijk has never looked creakier, increasingly bearing the look of a man who is – to borrow one of Big Ron’s most magnificent and happily unproblematic commentary lines – playing from amnesia.
This was a season that was supposed to herald the start of something glorious for Liverpool. It has been the end instead.
15) Newcastle (14)
Far from the only ones enormously grateful for the existence of Tottenham Hotspur Banter Club this season but, with the possible exception of whoever ends up 17th, the most significant.
Were it not for Spurs, Newcastle’s own desperately poor season would be attracting far more attention. And as Spurs’ fate grows ever more certain, so the glare of the spotlight starts to shift north.
Eddie Howe is in serious trouble. Really does look like he won’t survive the summer, and it has always felt to us like what happened directly after Howe would, for better or worse, come to reveal precisely what Newcastle fans had sold their souls for.
Bad enough anyway to prostrate yourself as they did when the Saudis arrived, but imagine if they really did do all that not for a Chelsea or Man City style era of trophy-laden glory but for one Carabao and the chance to get obliterated by Barcelona in the last 16 of the Champions League.
That would be bad, wouldn’t it. This season has been bad, with a bottom-half finish now probable for a team that sits as close to Leeds as it does to the top six.
And whoever is in charge at the end of the summer is also likely to find themselves dealing with a squad that has lost at least one absolutely vital component, something Howe has so desperately struggled with this season.
14) Chelsea (6)
We’ve given up on Chelsea, honestly. We’d come to terms with them not being a football club. But now they barely even have a football manager.
Certainly not one remotely qualified for the position to which he’s been parachuted as a reliable company man who, for all the apparent absence of self-awareness evident in everything he does, is at least able to understand how unbelievably fortunate he is to have landed where he’s landed and is not about to rock this incredibly cushy boat.
Bully for him, and a quieter life for BlueCo, but where does it leave Chelsea? Missing out on the Champions League in a season when Man United, Liverpool, Newcastle and Tottenham have all been conspicuously sh*t for large parts of the season does now appear to be the answer.
We’re just ageing men. We’re just innocent men.
13) Manchester United (5)
We did put United as high as we possibly dared back in January. But did also say this:
Point of order: the current giddiness at Manchester United is an erratic and volatile mood swing and not (yet) actual happiness.
Fair to say things have calmed down from the giddiest early days under Michael Carrick. They’re not bad, exactly, but definitely less euphoric. And now also less certain.
Football remains at heart a funny old game, because Carrick has still delivered the only tangible thing he possibly could have delivered. United will be in the Champions League next season, and that was not a remotely obvious thing to be able to say when Carrick took charge.
But he’s gone about it all wrong, hasn’t he? The damn fool went on a mad winning run early in his tenure. One that both raised expectations to impossible levels and turned that stretch target into a foregone conclusion. Reverse his run of Premier League results from WWWWDWWLWDL to LDWLWWDWWWW and he’d be a shoo-in for the permanent job.
The drop-off has been inevitable, but also not really that precipitous. United have still taken 10 points from their last six Premier League games. But it does now feel a bit, well, sh*t, doesn’t it?
The nature of those defeats is part of it. Both have come against bottom-half opposition and both have been wretched: sucker-punched by 10-man Newcastle at St James’ and then this week decisively outplayed by Leeds of all teams at Old Trafford.
The big worry about the Leeds game is how only one team appeared able to get themselves up for such a game, and that this team was not Manchester United.
That damns Carrick, who not for the first time had the look of a passenger watching a disaster unfold in front of him rather than a driver able to affect and influence things.
What United need and crave is certainty and they once again have none of it. Yes, this season has been dramatically and monumentally superior to last season’s horrors. We shouldn’t forget how we all laughed at United’s self-assessed pre-season target being a top-six finish.
But that certainty remains elusive. The obvious danger when Carrick was named interim manager was that he would pull a Solskjaer and make his case for the permanent job overwhelming and unanswerable.
What he’s actually done might be even worse. He’s made his case whelming and answerable. United are at yet another fork in the road and it’s no longer at all obvious which way they should go.
12) Bournemouth (11)
Certainly lower than if we’d done this 24 hours earlier. A day ago this would all have been whimsy about another season of absurd streaks where Bournemouth are great or awful, wide added praise for changing things up within that framework by having a run of five straight draws.
There would have been chortles at them once again beating Arsenal and plunging the Gunners into despair.
Some speculation about which way their final six games might go. Would it be five wins and a draw to secure European football, or five defeats and a draw for a vaguely disappointing 14th-place finish in a congested mid-table? There would have been a minor chortle at how those were the only two possibilities because Bournemouth, but above all because Andoni Iraola.
But now the day Bournemouth fans knew would come but hoped could be delayed for at least another year has arrived. Iraola will leave at the end of the season, and with him goes all certainty.
What if he takes those Champions League-form runs with him? What if Bournemouth are left with only the relegation-form runs?
Sure, it might be the opposite. Or it might just be that under a new manager Bournemouth stop being a streaky team altogether and end up precisely where Iraola gets them but via more conventional methods.
But it’s the not knowing that kills you.
11) Fulham (10)
We do still worry that at some point quite soon and very possibly this summer Fulham and Marco Silva will do the stupidest thing and part ways. We’re not sure of much in this life but if we could declare ourselves confidently sure of one thing it is that Fulham, Silva and whoever his next club may be will all regret it when it happens.
For now, though, Fulham remain where Fulham should be and where Fulham must be. Cosy and snug in mid-table – both in the real world and more importantly the wider Mood Rankings Universe – under Silva’s watchful, reliable gaze. ‘Snice.
10) Nottingham Forest (13)
A possible European trophy to go with now-near-certain survival? Not a bad season, is it?
Maybe four managers is in fact the correct number of managers after all. Mr Marinakis, we take it all back.
9) West Ham (16)
West Ham being miserable has been an absolute staple of the Mood Rankings this year. Often the most miserable of everyone, certainly in late 2025 and early 2026 before the full extent of quite what was happening to and at Tottenham was clear.
And while it wouldn’t quite be true to say joy unconfined has replaced that mood of despair and desperation, there is definitely a new-found lightness around the London Stadium.
The owners are still viewed with suspicion, the stadium remains abysmally unfit for purpose, and the results inconsistent.
But inconsistent results are plenty good enough now that three teams are producing such consistently bad ones.
The Hammers aren’t yet quite safe, but a couple more results for them and a couple more results for Spurs and it’s in the books.
That, too, is another source of West Ham joy, of course. Not just their own now near certain survival but at whose expense it will come. The fact it could all be confirmed in a game against Arsenal adds yet another layer of deliciousness, even if the prospect of that day offering a total party atmosphere as the Gunners celebrate winning the title has receded a touch.
West Ham have reaped the rewards of being willing to gamble in January. They moved early and decisively for players who could make a difference. They didn’t get a 100 per cent hit rate out of it, but they got what they needed and then some.
It deserves credit. There are clubs who would have accepted what seemed at that point a certain fate. There are those who would have done nothing, blind to the crisis unfolding all around them and then doing an in-house interview patting themselves on the back for not panicking in the face of dire form and an entire team’s worth of long-term injuries.
‘January is difficult’ is true, but also too easy an excuse for inaction. West Ham could have taken that option. They could have dispensed with Nuno Espirito Santo, who could in truth have had few complaints had they done so.
But West Ham backed him. Properly, fully. With action as well as words. The rewards have been staggering, transforming not just this season but West Ham’s prospects more generally.
Once the formalities of survival are confirmed – which really could now only be a few short weeks away – Hammers can start to look forward with something approaching genuine optimism about what comes next. Optimism is not something that has been in ready supply here over recent years, as David Moyes sucked the joy out of the place and his successors fulfilled the direst ‘careful what you wish for’ warnings.
At the start of the year, West Ham were four points adrift of Nottingham Forest, and seven adrift of Leeds. They were only two points better off than Burnley. Spurs were an irrelevant 11 points off in the distance.
Based on this year’s results alone, after the reinforcements arrived, they sit comfortably in mid-table. They are level on points in 2026 with Chelsea. Only two behind Liverpool having played a game fewer. They sit within three points of a Champions League place.
It’s not to say that any of this automatically transfers to a new season, but also who’s to say it doesn’t? West Ham would not be the first team to turn an unlikely storming run to safety with an unlikely storming run to start the following season.
More than anything else, though, is the simple fact that these are now the conversations and ideas for West Ham fans to consider after a season spent largely fearing the worst and somehow experiencing even worse.
8) Everton (7)
Been easy to barely notice Everton for much of this season. Which, for their first season in a brand new stadium on the back of a few very hairy years down near the bottom, would have been absolutely fine. Safe and sound in the top half? That would very much do.
Yet there is now the prospect of very much more than that. If the Merseyside Derby goes the way it definitely could at the weekend, it will stop being quite so easy to barely notice Everton this season.
At that point they would be two points behind Liverpool and looking at a run-in that, okay, features Man City in potentially full-flowering title-run-in pomp but other than that a load of old sh*te, frankly.
European football and possibly even Champions League football – and at Liverpool’s expense – under the lights at the Hill Dickinson next season? Isn’t it? Hmm? Marvellous.
7) Brentford (4)
Currently on a curious little run in which they’ve remained in a European spot despite not winning a Premier League game since February by also not losing a Premier League game since February.
It does say an awful lot about the rest of the league that what is now four draws in a row has barely changed Brentford’s already and still astonishing position at all.
The next month and a bit will tell us whether this is a resolute run that helps get them into Europe or a missed opportunity that sees them finish outside.
Crucially, though, those are now the only two possible outcomes and both remain utterly extraordinary for a team almost everyone expected to struggle desperately after their summer losses.
6) Brighton (12)
They’ve gone full Bournemouth and that is entirely what we want from our mid-table Bs. Always a great bunch of lads, are Brighton, and this season’s crop is no different.
We all know the drill by now. Well-run, aren’t they? Model club. Welbz. All that good stuff.
All fine, but we’re mainly here to celebrate them taking 22 points from their first 13 games, then winning only one – against Burnley at home – of the next 13, and now winning five of their last six with the only defeat being a narrow one against a pre-bottling Arsenal and with three glorious chances coming up to send further misery the way of big-club catastrophes Tottenham, Chelsea and Newcastle up next.
That’s how you do it.
5) Crystal Palace (19)
That January rating looks staggeringly low now, but worth remembering that at the time Palace were eight games into a nine-game winless streak that threatened to end Oliver Glasner’s reign even earlier and drag them fully into the relegation mire.
It even included a defeat against Tottenham in a game that now has a good chance of remaining Spurs’ last Premier League win for quite some time.
Mainly that’s embarrassing for Spurs, sure, but still not a bit of trivia you want to be associated with as a semi-serious football club.
Generally, though, things are clearly much less grim than that now. Four wins in the last seven have ended all unpleasant relegation considerations for this season at least.
But it’s that last five words there that explain a still lingering sense of melancholy.
Last season was the greatest in their history. This one might end up their second best and contain a first ever continental trophy to sit next to their first ever major domestic one. That is all magnificent.
But if there was ever a season to highlight the ‘know your place’ realities of smaller Premier League clubs it’s been this one.
Since winning the FA Cup last May they’ve lost their best attacker, their best defender, their Europa League place and, at the end of this season, the manager who has made unprecedented success possible.
Of course it wouldn’t be better if the FA Cup win had never happened. Of course the very possible winning of a European trophy would be another momentous and joyous occasion. But it also feels very much like the end of something never to be repeated.
There is just no sense here of Palace being able to use any of it as a springboard to lasting success. It’s just a tantalising glimpse of the good life before going back to the 50-point grind.
In the timeless words of James, if I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor.
4) Aston Villa (2)
Neither Liverpool nor Chelsea appear remotely capable of pouncing on Aston Villa’s stuttering league form, which leaves this season one where it is only the scale of the success yet to measure.
The disappointment at slipping out of the title race has long since faded with the acknowledgement and acceptance they were never supposed to be there in the first place.
They will be in the Champions League next season, and may even qualify for it twice – once via the league and once via winning the Europa League. They have one foot in the semi-finals and unlike certain other recent winners of that competition will, if they do get over the line, manage to do so without completely destroying at least two entire domestic seasons to do it. Which does seem sensible of them.
Nagging frustrations remain bubbling away at the unfairness of the closed shop to which Villa are desperately trying to gain permanent entry, and much clearly hinges on Unai Emery’s immediate future in a summer where at least one large player sale appears inevitable.
But it’s been a wonderfully and unexpectedly good season in a year when for so many of the Premier League’s larger beasts it’s been the opposite. Their fall in the absolute rankings here also says more about a shift in other teams’ vibe than anything about Villa’s own.
3) Manchester City (8)
It must just be tremendously exciting, mustn’t it? Being the team doing the chasing at this point of the season and hitting that moment when suddenly all things seem possible and you truly start to think ‘It’s happening.’
For Man City, that should really be ‘It’s happening again.’ This is what they do. Pep Guardiola puts it down to the fact the sun only comes out in Manchester from April onwards, but whatever the reason something happens to him and City after the final international break of the season.
It doesn’t always work. It’s not always required. But the Man City April flow state is one of the most reliable harbingers of spring we have in this country. When the clocks go forward, so do City.
Last season they’d already bollocksed things up far too badly when the clocks went back for the spring… spring to have any impact. Liverpool and indeed Arsenal were off into the distance by that point. Still, though. Their post-March-interlull record in the Premier League read P9 W7 D2.
And that is just entirely standard for City. After easing to victory at Chelsea to take full advantage of Arsenal’s stumble against Bournemouth, City’s record after the final international break across the last five seasons now stands at P40 W33 D6 L1. That’s 105 points at a PPG of 2.63.
Even the one defeat is of no consequence; it came at Brentford, on the final day of the 22/23 season when, with the Premier League leg of their treble already safely in the bag Guardiola rested most of his starting XI for the upcoming FA Cup and Champions League finals.
City’s momentum at this specific stage of the season is measurable and consistent. And this season the timing of it all just looks like it might be absolutely perfect.
If you aren’t getting giddy about it as a City fan then you don’t have blood in your veins. This transitional, work-in-progress City side really might be about to do something that no other club in the history of English football has done and claim the domestic treble.
It would be the second time Guardiola has done it, and surely even sweeter than the first given this would be done with a new-look team that we’d all been happy to write off on multiple occasions.
The Carabao is already secured. City are prohibitive odds-on to sort out Southampton and then either Chelsea or Leeds in the FA Cup.
And if they beat Arsenal at the Etihad on Sunday then for the first time this season they will be Premier League favourites too as Arsenal forlornly contemplate bottlepocalypse and that guy with his sealed water bottle goes double viral along with what we’ve just realised with something approaching horror will be several thousand copycats at the Etihad this weekend, up to and including at least one Gallagher brother. And you all know which one.
There’s also a delicious ‘styles make fights’ element to all this. Guardiola and Arteta share a lot of the same ideas about what makes a great football team, but there’s no doubt that this season they are on divergent paths. Arteta has leant ever harder and more stubbornly into an ‘effectiveness over entertainment’ approach that is absolutely fine right up until it stops being effective.
Arsenal are not the only team ever to prioritise and weaponise the opportunities presented by set-pieces, but they are an extreme case. Especially among elite clubs with the resources they have at their disposal.
City’s Guardiola never quite looked like Arteta’s Arsenal. But they did also become quite boring for an extended perod of time. The specifics of the approach were different, but the mechanical, robotic rigidity of the plan was the same. City would City teams to death in much the same way Arsenal have – until these last few weeks – Arsenaled teams to death this season.
That’s no longer true. Guardiola, so obviously and visibly stressed out last season, has slightly let his hair down. Yes, we know, but you know what we mean.
This iteration of City is far freer, far more capable of expressing itself and above all given the licence to do so.
One wonders what Jack Grealish in his pomp might have done with the licence now afforded to, say, Jeremy Doku. But such laments are for another time. Never mind what it might have meant for the Clamours of our yesterdays, just enjoy what it means for our todays.
For a long time when they simply hoovered up Premier League titles, City had something close to a perfect team. But perfection can be quite boring. This City team is not perfect and it is not boring. This City team has a joker genius at its beating heart in Rayan Cherki and Doku and Antoine Semenyo dancing joyously around him.
And it still looks like a relentless, trophy-stalking Arsenal-engulfing machine. What times these are.
2) Leeds United (3)
Would inevitably have slipped from January’s highs on the back of a vaguely frustrating run of form in which Leeds seemed unable to fully untangle themselves from the relegation weeds despite appearing visibly and significantly superior to the teams they were grappling with.
The drying up of goals threatened to make things far more uneasy over the final weeks of the season than appeared necessary. While the general feeling of ‘They’ll be fine’ never entirely went away it was definitely starting to reacquire its question mark.
But you know what will shuttle you straight back up any Mood Rankings list? A brilliant and thoroughly deserved victory at Old Trafford. That’s the good stuff for most clubs in fairness, but perhaps none more so than Leeds.
They were brilliant against Man United, apart from a brief wobble caused by their own understandable over-excited giddiness when United went down to 10 men and Leeds briefly let the game open right up instead of shutting it right down.
They held on, though, and now the main task of their season is done. They are safe. They could quite probably lose all their remaining games and still stay up, given Spurs are six points adrift and haven’t managed that many all year.
And they won’t lose all their remaining games. Right now you could look at their run-in and their recent results and make a compelling case that they won’t lose any of their remaining games. That would be one reasonable stretch target for a season that is already a success.
But the other more tantalising one, and the only thing that makes you think okay maybe they might lose one or two here and there, is because they now have the chance to rest a few key players in what are now grander-scheme-unimportant Premier League games to focus on the FA Cup semi-final.
This is, if you are a Leeds fan, a simply sensational collection of words.
1) Sunderland (1)
What more is there to say that hasn’t already been said about one of the most astonishing seasons any newly promoted team has delivered in years and years?
Have beaten Newcastle home and away. Have Brobbeyed Spurs ever closer to the yawning abyss. Have loved every single second of a season so unimaginably good that failure to qualify for Europe would now leave a vague twinge of disappointment given how close they now sit to seventh place.
Given where Sunderland were when they got promoted, given how far adrift they were of both Leeds and Burnley over last season as a whole, and given how entirely ineptly every promoted team had tumbled back whence they came in the two previous seasons, it’s an astonishing situation that ‘missing out on Europe’ is what would now pass for disappointment.
The fact they now have more points across the last two seasons than a Burnley side that finished 24 points clear of them in last season’s Championship is another absurd little landmark for Sunderland in a season full of them.
Another one ticked off with that win over Spurs was overhauling the entire home points tally of all three promoted clubs last season. Silly.