Arsenal, Sunderland, Bruno Fernandes and Ezri Konsa are sitting pretty, but West Ham and Wolves are in abysmal states and Liverpool need more help.
Here are your Premier League winners and losers starting with the…
Premier League winners
Sunderland
The time has come to stop viewing Sunderland through the prism of a newly promoted team. It underlines their immediately acclimatised brilliance to compare their results and performances to those who have come up from the Championship in recent years, but also does them a massive disservice and puts a natural ceiling on what they can achieve.
This is, for all intents and purposes, a ready-made and proven Premier League side. They have remarkable depth – only four clubs have used more players so far – and can win games in a variety of ways.
If they don’t catch you from a corner or a counter, Granit Xhaka will find an alternative route through or Wilson Isidor will exploit the space in behind.
Regis Le Bris is fully subscribed to the power of long throws and set-pieces, but Sunderland have also scored more goals in open play than Arsenal and Newcastle, with just Arsenal, Brighton, Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs boasting more different scorers. They have won matches with 54% and 32% possession.
No club has gained more points from losing positions than a Sunderland side which has dropped none when winning. Sure, they have already passed the tallies of the last two teams to come up and finish bottom, but the Black Cats also have more points than Leicester did at this stage in 2015/16.
They probably won’t win their seventh English top-flight title this season, but that qualifier being necessary for Sunderland about four years after they were in the midst of a losing run against Charlton, Rotherham and Sheffield Wednesday in League One, when Le Bris was managing a French club’s B team and waiting for his first post at a senior level, is astonishing.
Arsenal
It would have been a phenomenal weekend had they not even played, with Liverpool and Manchester City both falling to obstacles of a similar size and difficulty to facing Crystal Palace at home.
Mikel Arteta told his players he “valued more this victory than any other victory this season because we knew the difficulty of it”. Palace are an obdurate opponent but at the end of an eight-day stretch in which they also faced Fulham away and Atletico Madrid at home, it was a substantial test of their mental strength and credentials.
Arsenal did not concede a single goal in those games. Their majesty is built not on set-piece mastery but unmatched defensive excellence. They have kept five consecutive clean sheets and faced at least 13 fewer shots than any other team.
Had Arsenal automatically conceded every shot on target they had allowed this season they would still be in the top half of the table with 13 points, while occupying a seeded Champions League knockout phase place. David Raya is more libero than goalkeeper at this point.
Only four clubs in the entire history of the Premier League have conceded fewer than three goals after nine games – and that Chelsea 2005/06 side is not actually among them. A ludicrous record is in genuine jeopardy.
Brentford
Perhaps Arsenal won’t replace Mikel Arteta with Nicolas Jover, and Aston Villa might not promote Austin MacPhee to Unai Emery’s seat in the dugout. But the appointment of Keith Andrews as Brentford manager ahead of the season of the long throws seems like remarkable prescience.
That is not to denigrate an entirely deserved win over the champions. As with Arsenal, the Brentford set-piece approach only works when underpinned by energy, bravery and clarity. It is designed to complement their quality rather than define it.
Brentford are intelligent with their pressing, incisive when counter-attacking and committed in defence. Those are the foundations, not Michael Kayode launching it into the box.
As Andy Robertson said, “you can’t come to Brentford away and just expect to play them off the park because they’re always going to be ready to fight”. But they can absolutely play too. You might say they are as adept at floating like a butterfly as they are stinging like the Bees if you were so inclined.
Bruno Fernandes
For the first time since he joined, Manchester United scored four times in a Premier League game without Fernandes getting a goal or an assist.
Ruben Amorim was right and he will be thrilled.
Bournemouth
It does feel like they’re doing Chelsea’s bit, just comfortably better.
Bournemouth have the American owner, the multi-club system from which they are able to pluck the best talents, the focus on youth and the embrace of a player trading model which sees millions spent and recouped each year when it functions properly.
But Bournemouth also have an exceptional coach to bring everything together, and a unity which seems to run all the way through the chain of command.
Their only Premier League defeat this season was basically a case of poor timing; had they faced Liverpool at any other time beyond that opening weekend, Bournemouth might well have won.
And the way in which Andoni Iraola has drilled these players to the extent that they are essentially interchangeable is ridiculous. Veljko Milosavljevic can already be trusted to deputise at 18 and Eli Junior Kroupi has stepped up incredibly well in place of Evanilson at 19.
Martin Dubravka
A stunning win for Burnley and Scott Parker, but what an absolutely breath-taking last-minute save to secure it. James Trafford could never.
Ezri Konsa
That late shift of his body to block a Phil Foden through ball into Erling Haaland was sublime. It felt like a replay of the sort of goal Manchester City have scored habitually over the years, doctored to show how it could theoretically be prevented.
It is impossible to do justice to the levels of concentration and fitness required to pull that off in the 86th minute of a match Konsa dominated before and after too. He and Amadou Onana were fantastic.
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Leeds and their lucky home charm
Ao Tanaka admitted he was “not good enough at the moment” having only recently recovered from an injury, although he did also say every Premier League game is “difficult” as “the opponents are so good” after facing Nuno’s West Ham so he might not be the most reliable narrator.
Perhaps only Ange Postecoglou’s Nottingham Forest and Vitor Pereira’s Wolves have been easier assignment in this season’s top flight, and Leeds were lucky enough to face and beat the latter too.
Only five clubs have picked up more points against sides currently in the bottom half; winning these six-pointers is a handy knack for Daniel Farke’s side to develop.
And the remarkably potent combination of Tanaka and Elland Road could be key. The Japan international made his 20th home start for Leeds and the Whites have won 18 of those games, with draws against West Brom and Swansea in March the only exceptions.
Tanaka might not be able to match the physicality of his teammates, but his more technical side can give Leeds a dimension they sometimes lack.
Newcastle
For the first time since April 13, a run stretching back 17 matches, Newcastle have won a Premier League game in which they also conceded. Each of their last five victories had been to nil but this was overdue proof they can just about strike a balance between defence and attack.
With clean sheets on the agenda, the Rafa Benitez ‘short blanket’ analogy again comes to mind. He frequently spoke of the inherent difficulty in finding an equilibrium between keeping the ball out of one net and scoring in the other. “If you cover your head, you have your feet cold, but if you cover your feet, you have your head cold,” he would say at a time when managing a club owned by Mike Ashley meant he was fortunate to have the choice between the two.
This version of Newcastle is far closer to that than the We’ll Score One More Than You energy of Kevin Keegan, with seemingly only Liverpool able to evoke the free-scoring spirit of The Entertainers. But Eddie Howe will delight in seeing his side finally learn how to convert a score draw into a win.
Spurs
There is no bigger swing between a Premier League team’s PPG home and away this season. Spurs will need to bring their form in north London more in line with that everywhere else at some point but it is handy to develop a knack for winning every other week.
And Guglielmo Vicario has already matched his Premier League clean sheet tally from last season. What a club.
Premier League losers
West Ham and Nuno Espirito Santo
The face swaps are imminent. West Ham and Nuno might have felt like a perfect marriage born out of opportunism but in less than a month both have been given cause to regret their decisions.
Nuno has accepted the keys to a broken home. West Ham are a complete mess, a picture of complacency and hubris being steered aimlessly by individuals who seemed to believe they were somehow above or insulated from this sort of crisis.
If this ship cannot be turned around or prevented from inevitably capsizing, it will be difficult to think of a more disastrous line of managerial succession than Moyes-Lopetegui-Potter-Nuno. The middle two have since taken up international coaching roles, so harrowing was their last club experience.
And of course West Ham now apparently plan to solve their myriad problems with a busy and ambitious January transfer window, as if their head of recruitment wasn’t sacked earlier this month and they didn’t spend well over £100m in the summer on players the majority of whom apparently cannot be trusted to start.
Nuno dropped Mateus Fernandes – who came on to score – while once again almost completely ignoring Soungoutou Magassa until it was entirely too late.
After making three half-time substitutions in the last game, Nuno changed his formation in the 25th minute having already conceded twice at Elland Road. He seemed to crack the code in his first match but the manager has taken some bizarre steps backwards since.
Nuno insisted his recent changes in team selection and systems did not constitute “experiments” but there are few other explanations for picking inverted full-backs on the wrong side, naming a midfield of Tomas Soucek and Andy Irving or continuing to deploy Lucas Paqueta as a false nine.
Games against Brentford and Leeds had to be circled as opportunities for West Ham to build momentum in a quick five-day burst but instead it has destroyed whatever hope and expectation the club seemed to have, and rendered Nuno a shambles of confused ideas and poor career choices.
READ MORE: Nuno sack and West Ham relegation would make double history after ‘f***ing stupid’ decision
Wolves
It feels terminal and irreversible at this stage, with the slow death of Wolves as a Premier League club to be stretched out over seven more agonising months.
The manager and captain for the day likely went over to irate fans at full time to try and ease tensions but it seemed to only exacerbate the split between the club and its supporters.
How can Vitor Pereira understand “frustrations” which overlap multiple seasons when he has not been here for a full year yet? Can Jorgen Strand Larsen really empathise with the plight of a club he tried to leave in the summer?
Wolves have mustered two points in nine games and already lost to all three promoted clubs. But this is not the result of a single bad summer; it is the culmination of a controlled and sustained downgrade of the squad through annual asset-stripping.
Only for so long could they get away with habitually selling their best players and replacing them with rank unknowns at a fraction of the price. Wolves have been sleepwalking into this relegation for a couple of years but must now live through the rest of this nightmare.
And if anyone of a Wolves persuasion wants to take any encouragement from John Textor’s interest in buying out Fosun, have a quick talk with Crystal Palace fans first.
Fulham
It is a stunning reflection of 18th-placed Nottingham Forest that the manager they so covet is in 17th and the one they sacked is 19th.
Marco Silva might be leading a relegation sleepwalk he and Fulham are not equipped for. The Cottagers have never been so low in the Premier League table during his reign and four consecutive defeats equals their longest losing run since promoted three years ago.
The visit of Wolves to Craven Cottage on Saturday is magnitudinal and potentially season-defining.
Silva could do with rediscovering his touch when it comes to making goalscoring substitutions, but at least one selection from the start against Newcastle was sub-optimal in hindsight.
Emile Smith Rowe will be consigned to the bench again after being taken off at half-time of his first Premier League start this season. Calvin Bassey perhaps ought to be after marking his return to the XI in place of Jorge Cuenca by conceding possession for both goals. Not ideal.
Liverpool
The first team in English top-flight history to win their opening five matches of a season before losing their next four.
“It is definitely that teams have a certain playing style against us. It is a very good strategy to play. We have not found an answer yet,” is a remarkable thing for the manager of the reigning champions to say.
Chelsea
Just a thoroughly unreliable institution, incapable of properly building on a galvanising victory over the champions or a consummate thrashing of European royalty.
It must be maddening for Chelsea but then this sort of result is always possible with such an inexperienced group of players being guided by a coach still relatively unseasoned at this level.
That second Sunderland goal should not happen, and doesn’t with any sort of leadership or responsibility being taken in defence. An opposition centre-forward cannot set up camp in the penalty area for five seconds from a long ball and wait for reinforcements while holding one defender at literal arm’s length as another watches.
Between that, the concession of a goal from a long throw and the glee with which Isidor explained how he carried out the full Steed Malbranque on Claude Makelele treatment against Moises Caicedo to shut the hosts down at Stamford Bridge, there was yet more evidence that this is still a Chelsea side far closer to the start of a project than the end.
Manchester City
Pep Guardiola has been warning of an overreliance on Erling Haaland. When the opposition isolates and nullifies him so masterfully there should be a raft of players desperate to step up and take responsibility.
Instead, Manchester City have lost both of the Premier League games Haaland hasn’t scored in to nil this season. That won’t be nearly close enough to compete for the title this season.
Brighton
The wait for consecutive wins goes on. Who wants to live in a world which doesn’t feature Brighton ransacking Old Trafford on an annual basis?
Fabian Hurzeler’s side are stranded at the bottom of one particularly damning table and it is difficult not to see their stuttering start as a quite considerable step back from previous seasons.
The Carlos Baleba situation in particular might have reached the point of necessary intervention. With Manchester United focusing on Premier League-proven talent again in the transfer market this was a glorious opportunity for the £100m target to follow in the footsteps of Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha by impressing against his prospective future employers.
What instead transpired was a deleted social media post and yet another early substitution after being booked. Any audition that results in being shown up by Casemiro and taken off for James Milner in 2025 has not gone well.
Oliver Glasner
An incredible coach but presumably a terrible poker player. Glasner has one massive tell: if he is breathing he will dig out the Crystal Palace hierarchy for leaving it too late to make signings.
In fairness, it must be especially frustrating considering he specifically warned against it in public and Palace are locked in a midweek-to-weekend European grind which makes adaptation difficult for players.
Palace have perhaps not coincidentally lost both of the Premier League games they have played immediately after Conference League matches.
But Glasner does also need to shoulder some responsibility here. Seven players have started every Palace game – no club has more – and played basically every minute. And most of those have barely been given a Conference League rest either. The manager either has to rotate more or accept some understandably tired performances.
Sean Dyche
A Dyche team conceding directly from a corner is proof that there is no such thing as loyalty in this relentlessly cruel, unforgiving world.
