We’re working on a theory that the Premier League treats us to a few years of pure chaos every decade or two, if we’re good. What’s important to realise right now is that we are in those good times. Don’t miss them.
Think back to the last period of Premier League chaos. That’s right, it was after Sir Ferg condemned Manchester United to the wilderness, wasn’t it? Before that, they were the team and he was the man who defined the Premier League.
Generally, they won it, for one thing. And when they didn’t win, whoever was winning it was defined in their opposition to Ferguson and his team. Your Wengers, your Mourinhos. Very occasionally the Kenny Dalglishes of this world. Or the framing was around who had been sent insane trying to compete with him. Your Keegans, your Rafas and so forth. Whatever happened, Ferguson was the main character.
That is really the TL;DR version of the first 20 years of the Premier League up to 2013. More recently you’ve had the same thing – albeit for nor quite such an astonishing length of time – with Pep Guardiola and Man City. Generally winning it, and the defining point of opposition for occasional rare challengers like your Klopps and Artetas.
But there was, for a few glorious and chaotic years, an interregnum between the Age of Ferguson and the Guardiola Era. A brief but magical time when nonsense reigned, when Leicester could win the league, where Chelsea across four consecutive seasons could finish first, 10th, first and fifth. A time when Tottenham could finish second after dropping four points all season at home, only to immediately demolish that home.
And it wasn’t just at the very top that things were plain nutty. This was an era that saw Newcastle and Aston Villa relegated, Southampton in the top six, Hull City in Europe, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
The point we’re eventually getting to here is this: we think we’re in another one of those times. Last season was the first in a new spell of chaos and turbulence before another new normal takes hold. Wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them? Here it is. We’re back in them. We are quite literally so, so back.
There were widespread attempts to rationalise Liverpool winning the title unopposed last season as if it were normal and expected. Everyone just nodded along and went, yeah, thought this might happen and also now they will dominate for several years. It’s understandable; we’ve been set up to expect eras of Premier League dominance. But we forgot the gap. There’s always a gap. There’s always some chaos.
Arne Slot’s Liverpool aren’t Fergie’s United or Pep’s City. They are at best Antonio Conte’s Chelsea.
The rest of last season’s league table should have told us something was off. Nottingham Forest being in the Champions League hunt for as long as they were. Tottenham and Manchester United experimenting with levels of communal wretchedness not seen since both dipped briefly into the second tier back in the 1970s. Arsenal being seco… okay, not that one.
Point is, it was a very chaotic league table. And this year’s league table is currently shaping up to be even more ludicrous. Here are 10 things that make f*ck all sense.
Arsenal
Okay, Arsenal being top at this juncture is perfectly sane. They’ve been the second best team in the country for the last three seasons, and all agreed they’d done tidy work to strengthen further in the summer.
But they shouldn’t be this far clear this easily and this early, should they? Real danger here of the same mistake being made with Arsenal this year as with Liverpool last year and just rationalising the sight of an undeniably enormous football club but one that has pointedly not been a serial winner of Premier League titles sauntering off to win one almost entirely unopposed. That everyone will do what they did last year and simply retcon this as what was supposed to happen when almost nobody was actually predicting it in August.
Especially as Arsenal had such a tough start. Having got through that without suffering terminal damage, they now have an unbelievable chance to streak away as others falter.
We’re going to cheerfully ignore the lessons from 2015/16 here and declare that Arsenal are already six points clear of anyone relevant. They’ve got Burnley and Sunderland before the international break, while there are guaranteed to be more dropped points behind them with Liverpool and City playing each other.
And they really do seem to have broken football in quite a fundamental way, because while everyone chunters about their set-piece prowess at the other end they don’t just concede no goals but no shots whatsoever.
David Raya is one of the world’s best goalkeepers and is thus vastly overqualified for the role he performs in this side now.
They’ve only conceded three goals in nine games, less than half as many as anyone else, and now one of the Premier League’s most unbreakable records could come under serious threat.
Tottenham
We don’t understand Tottenham at all. We rarely do. The sheer range of their nonsense is truly extraordinary.
This is a team that looks uncertain at the back yet has the joint-second best defence in the land and looks lumpen and lacking any creativity going forward yet has scored as many goals as anyone.
They sit third in the league despite relegation-level home form. Thirteen of the last 14 Premier League points they’ve won have been away from home, and it would have been 13 out of 13 but for a wildly undeserved equaliser against the worst team in the league.
In five Premier League away games this season, Spurs have as many Premier League points (13) as they’ve collected in their last 18 Premier League home games.
We can sort of accept the idea that Thomas Frank’s understandable corrective to a squad so thoroughly riddled with Angeball was to work first on exorcising that by playing risk-averse football, which perhaps naturally lends itself to being more effective on the road than when required to make more of the running at home. But that is still a truly absurd disparity.
Last season’s astonishing behaviour has left Spurs – and it’s fitting really because it feels very them – as perhaps the most impossible club to give an accurate finishing position for. Feels like anything between about third and 16th as a final position would just barely raise an eyebrow now. They really could do almost anything from here, depending on if and indeed when either their home form or away form tracks towards the other.
Liverpool
We’re not having a go at anyone here, because we fell into the same obvious and understandable trap. When the defending champions win their first five games of the season after spending hundreds of millions of pounds on shiny new players, it is extremely rational to think they might be on their way to winning it again. Nothing foolish about that.
But what Liverpool’s first five games of this season in fact did was serve as a reminder to us all that the traditional Hallmark of Champions™ awarded to teams for finding ways to win in unlikely circumstances when not playing particularly well is that it can’t really be the primary or indeed only way of winning matches. To truly earn the Hallmark of Champions™ for winning when not playing well, you do also sometimes need to just win quite easily by simply playing quite well.
Liverpool did not do that in those first five deceptive and misleading games. The idea that there might be some consequences to this down the line did nag away, but that was more of a ‘might drop a couple of points at Selhurst Park, tricky place to go is Selhurst Park these days’ kind of consequence. Not a ‘losing four games in a row and forgetting absolutely everything that made you good in the first place’ kind of consequence.
There was something alchemic and magical last year about the way Arne Slot’s brand of serene, controlled football combined with Jurgen Klopp’s heavy metal squad to deliver something that truly was the best of both and greater than the sum of its parts. But it turns out it really might have just been entirely down to Trent Alexander-Arnold, with the attempts to turn Dominik Szoboszlai into a right-back playmaker possibly the most revealing thing about Liverpool’s season to date.
It’s either that, or the constant way Virgil van Dijk looks to his left at Milos Kerkez with transparently naked disgust, a feature of Liverpool games we have become low-key obsessed with in recent weeks.
READ: Arne Slot, Mohamed Salah among seven likely Liverpool casualties of post-crisis rebuild at Anfield
Sunderland
As Winners and Losers noted, Sunderland have now already transcended the ‘promoted team’ qualifier for their achievements this season. To lump them in with the dregs and the dreck that have popped up to the Premier League and disappeared immediately after creating barely a ripple is to put an artificial ceiling on what they can achieve from the absurd position in which they have put themselves.
Never mind the fact they’ve got more points than Southampton got in the whole of last season; they’ve got more points than Leicester did at this stage of 2015/16. We’re not saying they’re about to win the league or anything, we’re just saying that after nine games of that season Leicester were five points adrift of a table-topping team that appeared to be notably better than everyone else. That’s all we’re saying.
Bournemouth
Haven’t lost since the opening night of the season and, we would humbly contend, would not now lose that match were it instead scheduled to be played this weekend.
Since defeat at Anfield – and Bournemouth were minutes away from a draw there, remember – it’s five wins and three draws for a side that lost £200m of defensive quality in the summer.
They have conceded just seven goals in that eight-match unbeaten run, keeping four clean sheets in the process.
This is a team that went into the season in potential You Fear For Them territory given who they’d lost. Andoni Iraola is working actual miracles down on the south coast, and it’s only the fact that every single one of his Bournemouth seasons appears to require by law a baffling eight-match winless run that stops us subscribing eagerly to their Doing A Leicester newsletter.
Brentford
Even more squarely in You Fear For Them territory were Brentford because You Really Did. Sure, Bournemouth had lost at least three seemingly irreplaceable players, but at least they still had their seemingly irreplaceable manager.
Brentford didn’t even have that, what with Thomas Frank jumping ship to Spurs along with half the backroom staff. Brentford then took the spectacular gamble of promoting one of those left behind, Keith Andrews, to the big chair for his first managerial job. Sack Race knives were sharpened.
And yet here they are, absolutely and completely fine having already beaten both Manchester United and Liverpool under their rookie manager and barely missing Yoane Wissa, Bryan Mbeumo or Christian Norgaard at all. They sit level on points with the brilliant and over-achieving Crystal Palace with their elite Big Six-attracting manager.
Wolves
Okay, it’s hard to argue this is fully nonsense because starting Premier League seasons like this is very much the history of the Wolves, as is the upcoming managerial change that will take place sometime in or around next month’s international break. Fair enough, this is what they do, and they generally end up fine in the end.
But the sheer scale of the manner in which they have Wolvesed is nevertheless extraordinary. Only six months ago they were winning six Premier League games in a row, a streak not even runaway champions Liverpool could better last season.
Since that six-match run, which to be clear really wasn’t all that very long ago, Wolves have played a further 13 Premier League games and won absolutely none of them, losing 10.
Nottingham Forest
Where to even start with this lot? Already on their third manager of the season, having lurched comically from one extreme to the other and back again in terms of approach and currently an impossible-to-watch-but-impossible-to-look-away real-time experiment in how to entirely piss away every piece of hard-won progress made over the course of three years.
As a basic rule of thumb, it is never a good thing for a football club when it’s October and you’re already idly wondering who their fourth full-time permanent manager of the season might be.
Based on the developing pattern of Forest’s approach to these matters, our money’s on Ossie Ardiles.
West Ham
The best thing we’ve seen or heard about the Premier League this season was a tweet about West Ham, likening Jarrod Bowen to the human star in a Muppets movie.
Now the thing with being the human star in a Muppets movies is that there are two ways you can make it work. You can do the Michael Caine, and act is if your Muppet co-stars are in fact human. Or you can take the Tim Curry approach and act is if you yourself are in fact a Muppet.
The problem with being the human star in a Muppets football team is that nothing can make it work. Although Bowen definitely feels more of a Caine than a Curry, stoically continuing to do his very best to perform like a serious top-level Premier League footballer despite all the clownery going on around him.
Now we’ve mainly written about Muppets rather than West Ham here, and there’s a very simple reason for that, which is that writing about West Ham is simply too depressing.
The Promoted Clubs
We’ve covered Sunderland elsewhere, their particular excellence having come up as a play-off winner who had finished miles behind centurions Leeds and Burnley in the regular season thoroughly meriting its own place, but there must be space made here to acknowledge the trio as a collective.
Sunderland are soaring, but Leeds and Burnley have been thoroughly competitive and all three currently sit outside the bottom three. In less than a quarter of a season, the three of them between them have over three-quarters of the total points collected by the last three promoted teams.
Significant in itself for those teams, but let’s not overlook the knock-on effect.
Competent promoted teams act as a kind of chaos multiplier, especially after the last couple of years where their absence has allowed complacency to seep into clubs that simply shouldn’t have felt so confident and comfortable in their Premier League status.
The promoted teams are undoubtedly a factor in the sheer scale of the nonsense engulfing Forest and West Ham, neither of whom would be quite so jittery as they are if at least one or two of the promoted clubs was bumblef*cking around on three or four points as well.
That same dread is beginning to mount at Wolves, and could soon take a firm grip at Fulham or frankly anyone in the bottom half who suddenly finds themselves losing a few games in a row.
While the final finishing positions of United and Spurs last season were undeniably hilarious, especially when combined with their runs to the Europa League final, the fact they were able in the first place to sack off the league campaign as they did was also disappointing.
Neither was ever in any real danger of relegation last season and they knew it. The sheer extent with which Spurs in particular just gave up on the league entirely was wild, not so much prioritising their European campaign as ignoring domestic engagements altogether, but the ineptitude of the bottom three meant it was not just possible but actively sensible.
Nobody is going to get that luxury this year. Which can only mean more chaos.
