Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s Premier League football.
This was the round of games where Tottenham produced a brilliant second half to thrash Aston Villa, Southampton finally got their first win of the season — and Ipswich came so close to theirs — while Chris Wood’s amazing form continued.
We will ask whether the flaws of the contenders will give us a thrilling title race over the coming months, what Ruben Amorim will think after watching Manchester United’s draw against Chelsea and whether Nottingham Forest are the most impressive team in the 2024-25 Premier League so far.
Are we going to get an open title race?
Every year, we hope for a real, proper, exciting title race. One where the identity of the winners is genuinely uncertain, rather than inevitable, and one where more than two clubs are involved. Wouldn’t that be fun? We should have learned by now: ‘This might be the year,’ we think, only for our hopes to be dashed and we are left feeling foolish for even thinking about believing.
But… this might be the year.
Certainly, all of the theoretical contenders are more obviously flawed than in previous seasons.
Manchester City’s defeat to Bournemouth on Saturday had been in the post. Their matchday squad featured only 14 senior outfielders, and some of those — Kyle Walker in particular — are looking creaky. Rodri is out for the rest of the season, John Stones and Ruben Dias at least until after the international break; Kevin De Bruyne hasn’t been right for a while, Phil Foden hasn’t been himself this season and even Erling Haaland was off-colour against Bournemouth.
Muscle-memory tells us that City will soon crank into gear as they usually do but… what if they don’t? Regular observers will tell you that cracks were appearing last season, and they look much wider now.
Arsenal’s performance against Newcastle earlier in the day was almost certainly their worst of the season, maybe of the past three seasons. But, again, it had been coming.
Their inability to create chances without the injured Martin Odegaard has been a problem for a while, but it was stark at St James’ Park. Arsenal have had expected goals (xG) figures of below one in five of their 10 league matches. Over the past three matches, they’ve had a total of five shots on target. By way of comparison, bottom-of-the-table Wolves had six of them just in their draw with Crystal Palace on Saturday evening.
Maybe when Odegaard returns and resumes that thrilling partnership with Bukayo Saka, they will be fine. They will probably only have to get through one more league game without the Norwegian, with his recovery progressing and the November international break coming up, but it’s worrying that when Odegaard is out and Saka has an off day, Arsenal are seemingly unable to create anything of note.
Liverpool are the least obviously flawed. Or, to put it another way, Liverpool have been clearly the best team in the division so far. But there is a sense they are overperforming slightly. They are starting to pick up injuries, most notably to Alisson and Diogo Jota, Andy Robertson’s form has been off and their fixture list has been relatively kind.
Some of this is nit-picking. Some of these problems are short-term and could be fixed by next Sunday night. All three teams could be back to their best in a matter of weeks.
From a neutral perspective though, these flaws are welcome.
It has become accepted wisdom that you’ll need at least 90 points to win the Premier League these days, and much has been made of the fact Arsenal have already dropped 12 of the 24 points worth of wiggle-room that allows after 10 games.
But what if the flaws of the three realistic contenders are such that it won’t be 90 points to win it? It could be much less than that. Would 85 do it? It hasn’t since 2016, but this could be the year.
Will Ruben Amorim make an immediate impact?
Ruben Amorim has got a lot on at the moment.
Moving house is stressful at the best of times, but when you’re moving to another country, to a more high-profile job and you’ve still got a couple of big days to go in your old gig, it’s even more so. That’s before we go into the scale of the task that awaits him.
You assume Amorim was watching Manchester United’s turgid 1-1 draw with Chelsea yesterday afternoon but, to be honest, he probably wouldn’t have learned anything particularly new: United remain a stodgy team with bits of quality sprinkled here and there, but in need of a whole lot of work done on it.
Pundit Roy Keane was right when he said, after being asked on Sky Sports’ broadcast after the game what Amorim’s reaction might have been: “He might wish he signed a longer contract.”
This is a long-term renovation project, which is an extraordinary thing to write about a team that had north of £150million ($194.6m at the current exchange rate) spent on it just this past summer. We are in this limbo period while we await Amorim’s arrival, but if there was one thing United’s performance against Chelsea emphasised it was to ‘keep your immediate expectations modest’.
Perhaps Amorim’s energy, a new formation and a new direction will translate into quick results, but any United fan expecting him to arrive from Sporting Lisbon in the upcoming international break and quickly turn this slightly hodgepodge collection of players into the sort of team he wants will have to learn patience. After over a decade of post-Alex Ferguson disappointment, in one form or another, that patience might be wearing thin, but United’s problems run deeper than just who the manager is.
The issue is also with the players, something that is obvious even to those players themselves. After the game, United’s captain Bruno Fernandes, who scored his first league goal of the season to make it 1-0 against Chelsea, told Sky Sports that he and his team-mates do recognise their role in Erik ten Hag’s dismissal.
“I spoke with him, and I apologised to him, (asked) if there was something I could have done better for him,” Fernandes said about the former manager. “I feel a big responsibility, because I’m normally a player that scores a lot of goals, gives a lot of assists, and they’re not coming.”
Is this season already a write-off for United? It’s their worst start of the Premier League era — with 10 games gone, they’re in 13th place. It might be a benefit to Amorim that he’ll be starting from a low base. United fans can’t expect too much, too soon.
Are Nottingham Forest the most ‘successful’ team?
Nottingham Forest fans watching Tottenham vs Aston Villa, followed by Manchester United vs Chelsea on Sunday, were confronted with an unusual question: how would these two games affect our position in the table?
Forest started the day in third place, thanks to their sweepingly impressive 3-0 win over West Ham on Saturday. Spurs’ defeat of Villa ensured the men from the City Ground would end it at least in the Champions League places, and then the draw at Old Trafford meant they will stay in the top three until at least next Saturday evening.
These are heady days. Three years ago this week, Forest were 18th in the second-tier Championship, and that was a significant improvement on where they had been a few weeks earlier. All that feels like it was an age ago, and the only surviving member from that Forest team is midfielder Ryan Yates.
Far more recent in the memory is the end of last season when, for a time, it looked like Forest might get relegated, even with three of the worst-promoted teams the Premier League has ever seen below them in the table.
From that perspective, it was understandable that so many people had them pegged for relegation before the start of this season, but those who had been watching more closely knew that, despite the results, there was something promising in the Forest squad last term. Callum Hudson-Odoi and Anthony Elanga were excellent on the wings. Chris Wood was scoring goals. Murillo was extraordinarily impressive for a defender with so little experience. Morgan Gibbs-White was at the heart of everything.
A few judicious additions over the summer, plus a full pre-season with last December’s appointment as head coach Nuno Espirito Santo, have turned them into a good team. Nikola Milenkovic, Alex Moreno and Elliot Anderson have been the standout signings, the first two of those helping turn Forest’s defence into the second-most miserly in the division. Wood has scored more league goals by himself than Southampton have as a team. Matz Sels has become their most reliable goalkeeper in three seasons. Ola Aina capped another impressive display with a screamer on Saturday.
With over a quarter of the season gone, has there been a more successful team in the Premier League this season, if we’re judging it against expectations?
Not many expected Liverpool to be top, but they were always going to be there or thereabouts. Bournemouth have beaten Arsenal and now City, but also lost to promoted Leicester. Fulham, Brighton and Brentford have all been very good, but pretty much everyone else is doing as expected, or worse.
The assumption is that Forest’s form will drop off at some point and they will end up in a more modest position, but for now they will enjoy these remarkable days.
COMING UP
- The week begins tonight with the end of Premier League round 10, and the ‘Heathrow flight path’ Clasico, with Brentford travelling from a quite-nice bit of west London to a really-posh bit to face Fulham.
- And then: the Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaampiiiooooooooons. It’s all still a bit of a fixture melange, but there are always going to be some good games in there somewhere. To whit, on Tuesday, it’s Real Madrid-AC Milan and Liverpool host their old friend Xabi Alonso and Bayer Leverkusen, while one of Amorim’s final games as Sporting manager is at home against his new local rivals City.
- Then on Wednesday, the juicy cuts are Inter Milan vs Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain vs Atletico Madrid and a very early/mid-1990s clash between Red Star Belgrade and Barcelona.
- On Thursday, we’ve got the Europa League. Tottenham travel to Istanbul to see their old friend Davinson Sanchez (and also play his current team, Galatasaray), Manchester United host Greece’s PAOK, and Lazio vs Porto could be good fun.
- The same night, there’s the Conference League. Leaders Chelsea play Armenian side Noah in the ‘Names for posh kids in London’ derby, while second-placed Fiorentina go to Cyprus to play APOEL.
- There’s also a full round of Championship fixtures spread across the week: Millwall vs Leeds United on Wednesday could be tasty, while Scott Parker could do with a win at West Bromwich Albion the following night with Burnley fans getting a bit restless about their limp form.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
