Between the defeatist messaging of Unai Emery and the record-breaking misery of Oliver Glasner, the Man Utd manager race is thinning out.
But the story of the weekend was Arsenal taking a gargantuan step towards the Premier League title after a Manchester City slip.
And there was movement at the bottom too, even just in everyone who played from 14th down drawing.
Arsenal
It changed nothing in terms of the result and their points advantage but the Max Dowman goal did feel like A Moment in Arsenal’s title charge – a brief point in which the likely outcome felt inevitable and a fear-stricken club allowed itself a few minutes to believe without fear of bottlejob-based mockery.
The mission remains unaccomplished but Arsenal are a step closer thanks to a prodigious 16-year-old and someone whose absurdly effective improvisation should put off any prospective intruder.
Man Utd
If they do, as now seems likely with momentum heavily in their favour, pull through in the race for Champions League qualification, then Man Utd will have their success in these six-pointers to thank.
They are top of a table comprised of Premier League results from games between themselves, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea – and in fact also still lead if Arsenal and Manchester City are thrown into that equation.
Michael Carrick has been responsible for wins over the sides in 1st, 2nd and 4th since his appointment to lift Man Utd into 3rd, with no little help from the wonderful Bruno Fernandes.
With Chelsea and Liverpool still to come in their final eight games, Man Utd have engineered a situation they really ought to capitalise on from here.
West Ham
On the one hand, West Ham’s improvement under Nuno Espirito Santo can be easily distilled into a few simple tactical tweaks.
On the other, sometimes you just need former Arsenal defenders to eat goal-bound Erling Haaland shots.
Richarlison
Take it from one of the world’s foremost Richarlison experts:
‘A combination of Anfield Richarlison, World Cup-year Richarlison and relegation-scrap Richarlison is a heady brew of Richarlisons indeed.’
Never change, you entirely daft man.
Newcastle
It is still difficult to get a proper handle on Eddie Howe and Newcastle, but consecutive wins over Man Utd and Chelsea has framed things in a far more positive light heading into a momentous five days.
A Champions League last-16 second-leg trip to the Nou Camp with the tie finely poised at 1-1 is one of few fixtures which would take precedence over a Tyne-Wear derby in which Newcastle will hope to avenge a defeat from earlier in the season.
But a pair of brilliant wins has swung this Ross-and-Rachel European qualification season once more. Will they? Won’t they? Newcastle are six points behind Chelsea and just one more off the pace of Liverpool, with neither in particularly convincing form.
Howe has finally shown an ability to win without Bruno Guimaraes while shoring up the defence. His praise of their “resilience” and “athleticism” felt pertinent; both will be needed against Barca, with no small dose of fortune too.
Leeds
A first red card in the league since Boxing Day 2023, combined with a penalty miss five minutes prior, might have caused previous iterations of Leeds to capitulate with an entire half still to play away from home.
The same goes for Daniel Farke sides. Gabriel Gudmundsson’s bizarre sending-off was only actually the third instance of a player being sent off under the German in the Premier League; the first was in January 2020 when Norwich held on for a 1-0 win over 10-man Bournemouth after losing Ben Godfrey in the 76th minute.
In July of that year Emi Buendia was shown a red card for the Canaries in the 35th minute of a game against Burnley. By the end of that half, Josip Drmic had also been sent off before Chris Wood opened the scoring for the victorious Clarets.
Farke called his players “naive, inexperienced, stupid and not professional” after that game, praising their “experienced, established, smart Premier League” opponents.
Almost six years later, Leeds “proved why I would trust my boys with my life” in similar circumstances.
Scott Parker
Still running the “fine margins” gimmick in mid-March of a season in which his team has not been anything other than really quite relegated for months, and have now broken a club record for the most consecutive home games without a win in a single season.
It takes skill to pull off while also seemingly at no stage being at risk of the sack.
Brighton and Sunderland
The absolute right result from a fixture in which the hosts have ten wins, ten draws and nine defeats and the visitors have nine wins, ten draws and ten defeats is a victory for the latter.
Premier League losers
Unai Emery
The weekend started with Emery being touted as “the perfect coach” for Man Utd, and ended with him declaring “the result was as I expected” after a 3-1 defeat at Old Trafford.
It echoed the sort of defeatist sentiment Aston Villa must have felt they had left behind; going into a meeting with Man Utd expecting to lose is a brand of Steve Bruce thinking Emery really should not indulge in.
Almost immediately, some disgruntled supporters drew a parallel with Steven Gerrard saying Chelsea “should be coming to Villa Park and wiping the floor with us” five days before he was sacked and replaced with the elite mindset of Emery.
The same fate will not befall the Spaniard but a first run of three consecutive Premier League defeats since February 2023, including successive losses to Champions League qualification rivals, does point to another costly late-season Emery spiral.
They have already lost more Premier League games in this half of the campaign compared to the first, and while this isn’t the worst season to count on Liverpool and Chelsea tripping over their own shoelaces, Villa will probably need to produce something themselves within the next eight matches to achieve their objectives.
“We are recovering confidence and working again on our structure,” said Emery after his sixth straight defeat at Old Trafford, his previous three visits all ending in draws.
In the context of that personal record, Villa’s midfield injuries and an improving Man Utd, you can see why he turned up to this apparent audition with such pessimism – but also how that might have transmitted to the players too.
Manchester City’s “incredible” pair
Pep Guardiola still has “an incredible striker and keeper” at Manchester City, but their imperfections cost them a) against West Ham, and b) what little remained of their title hopes.
Gianluigi Donnarumma failed to deal with the only corner they faced all game, while Haaland was stifled by, according to Guardiola, “200 million” defenders and a fair few holding midfielders.
Whether the role of Manchester City centre-forward really is “the most difficult position on the planet” or not, it is time for Haaland to be removed from it for a while.
Liam Rosenior
It’s the mess with the huddle, or rather the Chelsea players’ desire to “be around the ball, to respect the ball”.
But it’s also the tactical jumble in which Chelsea “press in a different way to most teams” and thus leave themselves susceptible to a simple run off the shoulder and basic pass through the middle of their defence.
“It’s a new way of pressing,” and it doesn’t feel like a particularly good one for a club drowning in performative gimmicks and incessant wheel reinvention.
Liverpool
They have scored and conceded the most goals of any Premier League club after the 75th minute of games this season. That both of those tallies are now at 17 captures the innate instability of Liverpool and that ‘fraud’ Arne Slot.
Dominik Szoboszlai claimed not to have heard the boos at Anfield but did notice “that after 80 minutes people start to go home,” which “doesn’t help us at all”.
He implored them to “stick with us”, but more fool them for walking out on the best guarantee of goals the Premier League has to offer in 2026: the final 15 minutes of a Liverpool match.
Habib Diarra
After his match-winning penalty which really ought to have been saved against Leeds, the hope was that Diarra would be inspired to kick on and come into his role as the most expensive signing in Sunderland history.
Instead he lay prostrate as Brighton scored the only goal of the game at the Stadium of Light.
It was a push from Lewis Dunk but Diarra’s decision to remain incapacitated long after the moment had passed was a stunning commitment to the bit, the sort of diligence Sunderland supporters might expect to benefit from in a far more constructive way.
But Diarra created no chances and made no tackles while losing possession at least twice as often as any other player for either side.
The foul throw while Sunderland were chasing the game summed proceedings up neatly. You somehow expect more for £30m.
Bournemouth
Only Arsenal and Man Utd (both 11) have put together longer unbeaten streaks in the Premier League this season than Bournemouth, whose ten-game run has followed on seamlessly from an 11-match winless sequence just Wolves (19) and Burnley (16) can beat.
Bournemouth’s longest consecutive run of any particular result tells an interesting story. They have drawn four straight games, with three their best winning streak and two their most successive losses.
These stalemates are to Andoni Iraola’s immense frustration. “We are in a good position still but it could have been much better,” he said after offering “almost the same review as the last three weeks” and explaining how profligacy was “costing us a lot of points”.
Bournemouth have drawn at least three more games than any other Premier League team this season – and at least five more than the nine sides above them. Convert just one of those into a victory and they would be eighth; another puts them seventh and within three points of sixth.
It obviously doesn’t quite work like that, but it underlines how frustratingly close but equally far Bournemouth are from the next level.
Jordan Pickford
The ultimately inconsequential tip around the post from an offside Bukayo Saka was arguably better than the save of the season produced in the win over Newcastle.
But 88 minutes of excellence was undone by two errors which Arsenal punished ruthlessly. The flap at a Max Dowman cross and decision to come up for a corner undermined an impressive Everton performance at the Emirates.
It cost Everton a draw, although Pickford does remain about 427 points and a few relegations in credit.
Crystal Palace
Leeds becoming the only team on record to have a player sent off in the first half and not concede a single shot on target in the same Premier League game is remarkably damning of the uninspired, mundane side they did not struggle to shut out.
It will be as interesting to see who Crystal Palace appoint next season, but arguably more intriguing to watch where Oliver Glasner lands. The way he wedded himself so painfully to a three-at-the-back formation even with a man advantage at home for 45 minutes against a team lower in the table has extinguished any remaining embers of deluded hope that Man Utd will come calling.
Nottingham Forest
A point is decent going just to maintain the pace of their relegation rivals, but drawing at home to Fulham does feel like slightly more of a missed opportunity than holding Liverpool or Manchester City.
Forest need inspiration in front of goal from somewhere. In the 14 Premier League games since beating Spurs 3-0, only Morgan Gibbs-White has scored more than once. He cannot shoulder the twin burdens of chance conversion and creation.
It is a problem four managers have failed to solve this season, with a goalless draw summing the issue up neatly. Forest have a respectable seven clean sheets – the same as Brentford – while eight Premier League sides have conceded more or as many goals. But only Wolves have scored fewer and that wastefulness could send them down.
Fulham
Good job they made all those changes to get knocked out of the FA Cup by Championship opposition.
The pretence that it allowed Fulham to focus on European qualification was fun, albeit entirely undermined by that Southampton defeat being sandwiched by games against the teams in 17th and 18th from which the Cottagers derived a single point.
Fulham are third in a table against current bottom-half opposition; this was an inopportune time to give to the poor they generally take from.
