Man Utd still bottom as Arsenal and Everton tumble in the latest Premier League mood rankings

Only been a month since we last updated these. An awful lot has changed in that month. If you want a rough idea how much, Newcastle were above Manchester City.

December’s now wildly inaccurate positions in brackets here and you can read the full overtaken-by-events justifications for those here.

20) Manchester United (20)

Deeply fortunate to escape with a home draw against Spurs having been given the runaround by Oliver Skipp and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg. ‘But the injuries’ doesn’t really cut it against a team missing at least four of its first-choice front six, does it? Significant for being only their second draw of a league campaign in which, as a general rule, their defeats have felt more convincing and significant than the seats-of-their pants victories. As we’ve noted before, the alarming thing for United isn’t that they’re seventh and a distant eight points off the top five – it’s that this position flatters the arse off them.

The grim reality of Erik Ten Hag’s United is that it’s far, far easier to imagine a world in which their performances yield worse results than it is to imagine them being any better. United, exemplified perfectly at Anfield and in that Spurs game, have eked as much as they possibly could from these first 21 games and even that has been really quite alarmingly sh*t.

They are a team locked in perpetual crisis, where every step forward is followed by two back, where every corner turned leads them down another cul-de-sac. Spangle Everton 3-0? Grand, let’s follow that with a ludicrous 3-3 draw against Galatasaray and meek surrender at Newcastle. Beat Chelsea with a season’s-best performance? Lose successive home games 3-0 to Bournemouth and 1-0 to an already qualified Bayern side that could barely be bothered. Battle and scrap with every straining sinew for a point at Anfield? Lose at West Ham. Comeback for the ages against Villa? Lose at Nottingham Forest.

Still, at least after the Spurs game United can now proudly claim to have scored as many Premier League goals this season as Luton.

19) Everton (3)

Sake. A month ago, Everton was a place fuelled by self-righteous anger and it felt good. The perceived injustice of the Premier League’s 10-point penalty had propelled them on a four-match winning run that had wiped out the deficit with a couple of points on top.

They’ve subsequently taken fewer points from the next four games despite those games not having a 10-point penalty involved. There might well be one for the next four games, though, with Everton facing the very real prospect now of a second punishment within the same season. Maybe it will spark another defiant run of wins before, the deficit taken care of, the wind goes out of the sails again. It’s not really a sustainable strategy, is it? Only getting points after the Premier League have taken them away?

The timing of the latest charges also makes the January transfer window a complete mess for the Toffees, who have Manchester United sniffing around Jarrad Branthwaite. The poor sod.

What the FFP is going on with Man City, Chelsea, Everton and Nottingham Forest?

18) Nottingham Forest (18)

Forest fans generally seem to all be on roughly the same page: deeply sad to see Steve Cooper go, but reluctantly agreeing that it was probably necessary. An act of kindness, even. The good news is that results have picked up nicely under Nuno Espirito Santo, with a deeply unfortunate opening defeat to Bournemouth followed by eye-catching wins over Newcastle and Manchester United. The bad news is that those points and possibly more could be about to get taken away from them, because it turns out it wasn’t possible after all for a newly-promoted club to sign 873 players in 18 months and remain within the spending rules.

Sounds mad, we know, but there you are. The p*ss-boiler for Forest is that so many of those deals were already a total waste of time and money even before they had the potential to knock the club into even deeper doo-doo. Not just a mess, but an avoidable one.

17) Sheffield United (14)

That Boxing Day home defeat to Luton in a game they led with 15 minutes to go was a massive, massive kick in the balls. The defeat that followed at Manchester City is neither here nor there but there are legitimate questions about how much and even if at all things are really any better under Chris Wilder than they were under Paul Heckingbottom. The Blades are also the only team who derive no tangible benefit from the Everton and Nottingham Forest situations on the basis that simple maths tells us Everton and Nottingham Forest are only two clubs and for it to have any meaningful impact on United’s prospects they would really need to be three clubs.

16) Burnley (19)

Burnley have quietly moved away from the progressive football principles that got them promoted and then saw them pummelled into oblivion over the opening months of the season.

As Steady noted in Winners and Losers this week: The Clarets have had less than 40% possession in five of their last six games, a defeat to Everton in which they trailed 2-0 after 25 minutes and were thus chasing for over an hour the outlier. In their first 15 fixtures they fell below that 40% mark just twice, and on seven occasions had more of the ball than the opposition.

So now the football is worse, and it’s still only brought them five points from those six games, and one of those points was a catastrophic failure to beat Luton at home. They have a legitimate grievance with VAR’s role in that one, but their own failure to take care of business is hurting them. Still climbers because five points from six games represents improvement from the lowest of bases, and Everton and Nottingham Forest might be about to help them out massively.

15) Crystal Palace (17)

Signed off 2023 with a win, at least. It was sorely needed after eight games without one had sent them tumbling into pretty significant relegation bother. As noted in the manager rankings last week, we remain annoyed at Palace for sinking into the warm, familiar, lower-mid-table embrace of Roy Hodgson when for a while they really did threaten to be something far more interesting.

Currently halfway through a three-week Barclays break spent going through the motions of an FA Cup tie with Everton that neither really wants all that much and that thus inevitably went to a replay that both wanted even less. It all still feels pretty moribund, but that win over Brentford to end December was important, and Palace are one of a handful of clubs to inevitably climb a place or two after the Everton and Forest revelations.

14) Brentford (16)

Have collapsed from aspirational upper-mid-table strivers to relegation battlers without anyone particularly noticing. Everton and Forest may be about to bail them right out of the soup but they are currently by some margin the worst team in the division and placing an awful lot of faith in Ivan Toney a) staying with the club and b) having almost no rustiness when he returns from his eight-month ban.

Taking not one single point from a run of games against Sheffield United, Aston Villa, Wolves and Crystal Palace is not the work of a serious Premier League club, and from the very moment of their promotion Brentford have always appeared to be at the very least a serious Premier League club.

Also, Toney’s return notwithstanding, a very real prospect of things getting worse before they get better. Next up is a six-pointer against a Nottingham Forest side that will have noted the way Everton used Premier League charges as motivational fuel and after that it’s the simple task of back-to-back games against Tottenham and Manchester City. The nature and timing of any punishments for Forest and Everton are obviously a factor, but Brentford could find themselves in the bottom three alarmingly fast.

13) Newcastle (9)

It’s fair to say Eddie Howe will have had better Tuesday mornings. Joelinton ruled out for the season and then the big one: Jose Mourinho finally sacked by Roma and free to commit full time to looming over the beleaguered Newcastle boss. It’s also currently massively, unnecessarily cold and we can only assume even more so in Newcastle.

This really should be the end for Mourinho as a top-tier coach. No elite European club, or one with aspirations in that direction, should touch him now. The logical next steps for the erstwhile Special One would now appear to be international football or the Saudi coin. But that’s not what we want to happen. We want Newcastle to sack Eddie Howe and replace him with Mourinho. What’s better still, is that we do think there is a genuine possibility they might do this.

One of the key reasons why Mourinho to Newcastle is so appealing a move – as long as you don’t support Newcastle – is that Newcastle are currently in an illogical and indefensible funk about the rules meaning they’re not allowed to simply buy the league. There are myriad valid concerns about money and ownership structures and competitiveness in football and all the rest of it, but Newcastle’s is no noble crusade to level the playing field. They want to level their competitors.

Just as rants about officials from Arteta or Klopp or whoever are never about the greater good but always self-interest, so too Newcastle’s current supposedly altruistic quest for fairness/being allowed to spend as much as they want on the players they want and crush all opposition at their feet.

Now, Eddie Howe in the year 2024 is very clearly a better and more viable football coach than Jose Mourinho. His methods are more conducive to long-term progress, more agreeable to current players and more likely to succeed in a game that has changed enormously since Mourinho was last a consistently successful boss.

But is Eddie Howe a better frontman for a crusade of illogical, incoherent, unsupportable whingeing about the sheer unfairness of something outside his control that is preventing him securing the world domination he craves and deserves? Not even a contest, is it.

Four straight league defeats is not in any way the position you want to find yourself in when Jose Mourinho becomes available and starts scouring the landscape for a new fanbase to gaslight and belittle. Newcastle fans should thus be very worried indeed, and the mood ranking must reflect these concerns.

12) Chelsea (15)

You wouldn’t want to say Chelsea and Mauricio Pochettino have cracked it after three straight one-goal Premier League wins over Palace, Luton and Fulham – especially when you chuck the Carabao effort against Middlesbrough into that equation – but it’s still a welcome run for a club that probably remains fortunate not to face a harsher glare for a season that appears possessed almost entirely by chaos.

It’s still hard to see exactly what Chelsea are trying to do beyond buying all the players and showing how clever they are in doing so, with little to no identifiable philosophy to the team beyond placing an absurd degree of responsibility on the shoulders of Cole Palmer. Rightly or wrongly, it feels more by luck than design on Chelsea’s part that he’s been able to shoulder it. When your transfer business is as wildly chaotic as Chelsea’s, how much credit does the blind squirrel get for occasionally locating a nut?

Remain below United in the Crisis Club standings, and will now be delighted to see Newcastle also above them on that measure. They’re very, very lucky that these two shambling seasons they’ve endured have always featured at least one or two other big clubs mucking about like idiots as well.

READ: Mauricio Pochettino at Chelsea is just a great big nothing: No identity, no influence, nothing

11) Fulham (11)

On a nasty little run of league results that could do with arresting pretty soon before it becomes any kind of actual problem for a team with a busier January than most thanks to progress in both cup competitions. Still very much in their Carabao semi-final against Liverpool if they can turn in a second-leg display at the Cottage that’s anything like the recent league performance against Arsenal. You’d also very much fancy their chances in a home FA Cup fourth-round tie with Newcastle. Shouldn’t be in any relegation bother, but slightly niggles that it’s not quite entirely out of the question to really allow those cup runs to be enjoyed to the fullest.

10) Brighton (7)

A goalless draw against West Ham was a real shock to the system for a team that prides itself on scoring and conceding in basically every game. Especially on the back of the fabulously on-brand (for both teams) 4-2 win over Spurs in which Brighton led at one stage 4-0 but ended the game in something approaching genuine panic.

The league season, while perfectly adequate, isn’t going quite as well as it did last year, and it feels a little bit like Brighton are currently just in a slightly flat period waiting for the return of the dopamine hit provided by those giddily novel European nights. Their last seven league games have produced two wins, three draws and two defeats. It’s neither notably good nor alarmingly bad. It’s a holding pattern.

9) Arsenal (2)

Not the best month. Top of the table on Christmas Day, fourth in the table by New Year’s Day, out of the FA Cup a week later. And now City are flying again. Losing three consecutive games is a damning enough statistic, but the fact Arsenal have scored just a single goal in those three games from 61 attempts really does strike at the heart of it all.

It’s no secret that they desperately need a striker, but this run of defeats that appear on the face of it unfortunate when you look at the underlying numbers on xG and the like has in fact been in the post for quite some time. Arsenal have been scoring far fewer open-play goals than their main rivals all season long.

Of course, nothing is f***ed. They’ve got a very decent draw in the Champions League last 16 and absolutely have the quality to go deep in that competition. And they’re still only five points off the pace in a title race where it would be reasonable to expect at least some drop-off from a Liverpool side competing on four rather than two fronts. It’s a frustrating gap because it should be far smaller – or non-existent, frankly – but not an insurmountable one. Yet. Arsenal do need a change in fortunes soon.

READ: Big Chances created: Man Utd way down after huge drop-off, Arsenal’s creative woes clear

8) Luton (13)

Have put themselves in with a genuine shot of survival even without the Everton and Forest business, and you have to say that’s magnificent. With who knows what about to happen to those two, Luton are right in the mix. Their overall season is starting to reflect their approach to individual games: stay there or thereabouts and see what can be snaffled in the end.

A pair of 3-1 defeats at Brentford and Villa remain the only Luton games settled either way by more than a single goal since August. May very well still go down, but they’re going down fighting and giving absolutely everyone they meet a game they won’t forget. An admirable team having an admirable go. Loads to like about it.

7) Wolves (12)

The FA Cup replay win over Brentford at Molineux on Tuesday night offers tantalising hope for Wolves. If they can negotiate the short trip to West Brom in the fourth round, and they really ought to, then they do start to look very much like the sort of side that ought to be taking the cup very seriously but never actually do. Arsenal are already out. Either Spurs or Man City won’t be in round five. Someone could get a nice little route through the draw, and Wolves are perfectly placed to jump on that should it turn out to be them.

Three straight league wins have them in mid-table alongside your Chelseas and Newcastles but a push for Europe seems unlikely. What they absolutely don’t have to worry about is relegation, which means this season is already a huge success given where and how it started.

Significant beneficiaries of what’s gone on with Everton and Forest, because Wolves serve as a reminder of the spending rules’ purpose and why they do have to be implemented. Wolves sailed close to the wind and lost a very good manager in Julen Lopetegui over the ensuing need to get their house in order. Why should they be punished for that by allowing others’ spending to go unchecked?

6) Bournemouth (8)

Pretty unlucky to lose at Spurs given the chances they had to equalise before the second goal, but even so if you’re a side outside the elite with seven wins in 10 Premier League games and the only blots on that copybook are defeats at Spurs and City plus a draw against Aston Villa then things are going swimmingly. The mini winter break is welcome, but also probably a bit annoying when you have three weeks to wait for another league game after a frustrating one like the one they had at Spurs. Especially as that game, when it finally arrives, is against Liverpool. But these are all such minor quibbles it seems remiss to dwell upon them at all.

We mentioned it with Wolves, but Bournemouth are a slightly more enterprising side than Wolves, in even better current form, and equally cosily wrapped in their mid-table blanket. With Swansea at home in the fourth round, Bournemouth fans should absolutely definitely be eyeing up a nice FA Cup run to feed the soul.

5) West Ham (6)

They’re in the top six of the Premier League and last 16 of the Europa League. It would be a nonsense to claim things are going anything but well. That said, going out of the FA Cup to Bristol City after going 1-0 up at home in the initial clash is an undeniable buzz kill. This West Ham side has already shown its aptitude for cup competitions on the continent in the last couple of years, and spurning the prospect of a home fourth-round clash with Forest or Blackpool looks like an opportunity missed to make some waves at home. Again, though: it’s January and West Ham retain two viable routes to Champions League football next season. That’s really very good indeed.

4) Aston Villa (1)

Just a few ever so slightly worrying cracks starting to appear since those statement back-to-back wins over Man City and Arsenal in early December. It’s nothing too disastrous – two wins, two draws, one defeat and progress in the FA Cup – and they’re still, you know, third in the league. But all five league games since the City-Arsenal effort have been alarming in one way or another. The second-half capitulation at Old Trafford most obviously, but a home draw against Sheffield United isn’t really the one either. The late wins against Brentford and Burnley are either examples of great character or hard work made of beating horribly out-of-form sides depending on how you want to spin it, while a goalless draw at an Everton side on a run of three straight defeats also grates slightly.

It’s almost churlish to focus on these in many cases barely-there negatives given the overwhelmingly positive direction of travel since Unai Emery took over, but it’s definitely not quite as good now as it was a few weeks ago. A late-January chance to gain revenge for the opening day defeat at Newcastle could get the mood back to where it was a month ago, mind.

3) Tottenham (4)

The vibes are still vibing. For a 2-2 draw at Old Trafford to be frustratingly disappointing is telling in itself – for both Spurs and United, frankly – but that it was a disappointing end result achieved by a side without Son Heung-min, James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski, Pape Matar Sarr and Yves Bissouma is really something.

Ange Postecoglou has achieved some ludicrous things at Spurs already, but what really catches the eye is games like that United one. Forced yet again to dig deep into his squad, he still found players willing to at least attempt to play his football his way. Neither Oliver Skipp nor Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg are natural Angeballers, but such is the mood around this team that they’ll come in and give it a go.

More impressive even than what he’s done to a previously moribund team that lost its best ever player just before the season is what he’s done to Daniel Levy. Two January signings before the first Premier League game of the month? Addressing the two most conspicuous holes in the squad? Further links suggesting a midfield plug might also be on the way?

It’s one thing getting a team with four full-backs to look half-decent, but getting Spurs doing smart business early in January is essentially witchcraft.

There is a very real sense of something quite special and serendipitous coming together here – even the ban that forced Fabio Paratici out of his official job and into an advisory one has worked out well for Spurs. As the Radu Dragusin deal shows, the supply-line of Juventus rejects remains open, but now Fabio doesn’t get to pick the manager which means Spurs have Ange instead of Antonio Conte or Luis Enrique.

Spurs went a really very long time without doing any good business in the transfer market or making the right managerial appointment. In the last two years they’ve brought Kulusevski, Rodrigo Bentancur, Yves Bissouma, Pape Sarr, James Maddison, Destiny Udogie, Micky van de Ven and Pedro Porro into the squad without breaking the bank, appointed a manager everyone loves and now even Richarlison is playing well. The bum’s rush is surely just around the corner, but this really is a very exciting time for a club that was, six months ago, marooned in misery.

2) Liverpool (5)

A puzzling team in many ways, because on one hand it’s entirely fitting and normal to see a Jurgen Klopp Liverpool team right up there challenging for everything, but on the other this one isn’t quite as good as the other ones he’s had in this kind of position at this kind of point in the season.

As we’ve said elsewhere, in a way this might be the team of which he can be most proud, specifically because it’s one that had a hurried midfield rebuild and isn’t quite as lethal up front or solid at the back as his very best Liverpool sides. What they are is tough as all hell. They have lost only one domestic match all season, and there are enormous amounts of mitigation around that.

The return of De Bruyne and the ominously familiar sight of City starting to purr puts a dampener on things but the facts are that Liverpool are top of the league, favourites for the Carabao, favourites for the Europa and nicely placed in the FA Cup with a home draw against lower-league opponents after a very funny smash-and-grabby win at Arsenal. You’ve got to be quite happy with all that, haven’t you?

1) Manchester City (10)

Kevin De Bruyne is back and all is right with the world. Could have done without an extra trip to their least favourite stadium in the world, but with De Bruyne back that FA Cup game at Spurs becomes an opportunity rather than a burden. That City are now three wins in to what quite literally everyone now just assumes is going to be a 15-game winning run that secures the title really does say a great deal about them and especially about De Bruyne. His game-changing effort off the bench at Newcastle was if anything, Clive, almost too perfect a reminder of just what he offers. Bit too obvious, wasn’t it?

Anyway, they’re going to win the league again. And very possibly the Champions League again. Maybe the FA Cup too if they can somehow find a way at long, long last to not get beaten at Spurs. It is getting a bit silly now, lads. Whatever the coming weeks and months may hold, though, one thing is certain: it is very, very funny that only four weeks ago we had them below Newcastle.