Man Utd plumbing new depths among top 10 surprises of the Premier League so far

We’ve been surprised by quite a few things this season. Often it’s because we’ve not really been paying enough attention during the summer and then went “What? Ross Barkley plays for Villa now?”

Often it’s also because we refuse to learn from what has gone before. A lot of these 10 surprising things are on us. Really, we should be surprised that we’re surprised in some cases. But surely nobody thought Crystal Palace were going to be such complete sh*t this time around after the way last season ended?

Spurs being quite so stubbornly stupidly Spurs

Or more specifically Ange being so stubbornly Ange. Quite a few of these are on us, really. Evidence that we never learn and should frankly know better.

But we’re not saying here that we thought Spurs would suddenly be sensible or even good. Just that we truly didn’t think Big Ange Big Postecoglou’s Big Plan for his second season – a season, remember, in which he always wins a thing – was to lean even further into just absolute unadulterated nonsense.

They started as they meant to go on, p*ssing away two points from a position of absurd and absolute dominance at Leicester on the opening night before contriving to lose a game they dominated against a Newcastle side that never got out of second gear.

They played literally the stupidest game possible against Arsenal and then produced what is – for now – their crowning glory at Brighton, sauntering into a 2-0 lead and then throwing it away in a flurry of defensive misunderstandings, slip-ups and catastrophes.

Of course, Spurs being Spurs, that Brighton defeat actually came at the end of the world’s least convincing five-match winning run, including a 2-1 win at Coventry that required two goals in the last five minutes, beating Brentford after going behind inside 25 seconds, a pair of unnecessarily awkward Europa League wins against Qarabag and Ferencvaros, and a United-assisted nonsense at Old Trafford (more on which later).

That is the Spurs way. Nonsense when they win, nonsense when they lose, nonsense when they draw. Just a profoundly unserious football club.

We’ve learned our lesson this time, though. It would be easy to say that a manager coming out after a dominant 2-0 lead becomes a 3-2 defeat and saying he doesn’t believe in the concept of substitutions would be an unmatchable peak (or trough, if you prefer) in the nonsense stakes. You’ll not fool us again, Spurs. We know you’re going to go even higher (lower). We cannot wait for the next instalment.

READ: Premier League winners and losers: Ten Hag joins superb Saka in winners but Newcastle, Postecoglou blasted

Brennan Johnson scoring in six games in a row

We don’t feel so bad about this one. Absolutely nothing about Johnson’s adequate but mildly frustrating first season at Spurs – or indeed his first few games of this campaign – gave any indication of a man about to do anything of this nature. He’d scored five goals in 40-odd Spurs games before his Harry Kane-matching run of six in six.

If you had that on your 2024/25 football bingo card, then fair play to you. And it’s a scoring run, of course, that has all come about after he binned off the social media. It’s almost enough to make us consider giving up on arguing with idiots and explaining jokes to people on Twitter. Almost.

Manchester United being this sh*t

Again, it’s not that we thought they’d be particularly good. Or that they’d made the right decision in keeping Erik Ten Hag. It’s just that we didn’t think they’d be quite this miserably bad.

The thing with Bad United is that there’s a solemn forlornness to it that is really quite heartbreaking. With Bad Spurs, for instance, it’s more light-hearted, isn’t it? There’s a slapstick element to it all. A broad comedy we can all enjoy.

Bad United are just a much, much tougher watch. There is nothing fun about Bad United. There is bleak schadenfreude enjoyment there for all those who grew up in the 90s, sure, but their football isn’t humorously bad, it’s just bad. Joylessly bad. Soullessly bad. Very, very bad. No coincidence that the one actively funny game in United’s drab grey nothing of a season so far was against Spurs.

The manager has, clearly, lost the plot, his brain slowly melting in his shiny head, as is so often the fate managers exposed to such dangerous levels of beleaguerment.

One tries to avoid the This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About trope, but equally there is no point pretending this is a normal football club with normal dreams and aspirations. It is, essentially, not really a football club where one can point to a goalless draw at Crystal Palace as evidence of things looking up and expect to be taken seriously. It is not a football club where you can, as a manager, go to Aston Villa and think “If I can just nick a goalless draw here it’ll keep the wolves from the door for another fortnight”.

Manchester United are 14th after seven games, which is bad, but that’s not even the worst number. Five goals scored – three of them at Southampton which therefore barely count. They’ve reached the stage where they don’t even look like a big team struggling a bit the way, say, Chelsea do when they have one of their runs of unpleasantness. They just look like a bad team playing bad football badly.

And they haven’t even had to play either of the two good teams yet.

Chelsea being this good

We didn’t care for the Pochettino-Maresca managerial change at all and figured that even if it did all turn out fine in the end it would, at best, condemn Chelsea to another slow start while another new – and far less experienced at this level – manager got his head round a nonsensical squad compiled by actual lunatics.

An opening-weekend assignment against Man City also offered ample opportunity for season-defining embarrassment at the very first hurdle. Nothing about any of it augured well for Chelsea when the season got underway.

They duly lost to City, but did so without shame, which may have been more important than anyone realised at the time. It was a 2-0 defeat, sure, but there were signs there. Some glimmer of cohesion, just the hint of a plan. A smidgen of organisation.

And so it’s proved. Chelsea haven’t lost since and, while it’s not been entirely plain sailing with home draws against Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest sources of minor frustration, they’ve also blitzed some fools in grand style and look far better placed currently than either Spurs or United to mount a sustained top-four challenge.

It is really the very least a club of Chelsea’s standing and spending should be doing, of course, but it’s a bar they have been unable to clear for some time now.

Liverpool’s instant frictionless adaptation to Slotball

Hands up here, we thought Liverpool might have one of their iffy seasons. Even if Jurgen Klopp were still manager, the recent pattern would tell you this was scheduled to be one of the fallow seasons they sometimes go through before regrouping and going again, to coin a phrase.

But no, they’ve started like a train. Arne Slot deserves plenty of credit here for the canny way he has sought evolution rather than revolution, tweaking and gently steering Klopp’s heavy metal machine towards something more akin to Slot’s more controlled brand of ball rather than tearing everything down.

This was obviously the right thing to do, but you don’t have to look too far around this league to find managers whose egos simply won’t allow for anything as tawdry as adapting their Philosophy to the situation or players at hand.

Slot faced what is by definition an unusual situation for a new manager. He came into an environment that was working perfectly well. To a squad that was perfectly sound. Nine times out of 10, the very fact there’s a new manager is because something has Gone Wrong. In a lot of ways, that’s much easier. It gives you more scope to change things to your way of thinking, and more time for those changes to stick.

Coming in to a club where things were already working pretty well thank you very much and you have none of that grace period. Slot has coped admirably.

All that said, what we should probably have done is had a proper look at their fixtures at the start of the season and realise that they had the significant advantage of being allowed to start their campaign exclusively against newly promoted teams like Ipswich and hopeless lost-cause stragglers like Wolves or Manchester United.

Who knows what mischief the impish fixture computer had in mind when handing Liverpool a seven-game start that featured not one team from last season’s top seven, but it cannot be ignored how kindly a start it’s been.

They do, though, seem like a team that passes the sniff test. They may not ultimately be title challengers as the current table suggests, but we don’t think it’s all quite as deceptive as that fixture list suggests it could be. They’re a very good team that’s had an easy start rather than an easy start making them look like a very good team. We think.

There are still plenty of reasons for caution, but barring that Nottingham Forest farrago, it’s been smooth as silk so far.

Crystal Palace just going straight back to being rubbish

Look, did we think they would maintain the 19-points-from-the-last-21-available form with which they ended last season? No, we did not. But we absolutely thought they and Oliver Glasner were on to something really quite exciting that was going to remain at least definitely quite good.

We certainly weren’t lumping them in with any group of teams we thought might still be without a win after seven games. We certainly weren’t anticipating Glasner starting to bubble under in the Premier League sack race; once a couple of the obvious lame ducks are gone it’s not inconceivable he could even soon be favourite if things don’t start picking up pretty soon post-interlull.

Yes, the summer was a tough one. Michael Olise hasn’t been adequately replaced and never really could be, while the Marc Guehi saga was vexing and Eberechi Eze has yet to recapture anything like his run-in form after an underwhelming summer with England and rumours about his own possible departure.

Arsenal going toe-to-toe with City a third time

We thought Arsenal would be good again, obviously. We were almost certain they wouldn’t be overtaken by anyone else. But we didn’t really expect them to go fully toe-to-toe with City for a third time.

Purely because such a thing has never been done. We’ve talked about it before, but even the very best Liverpool sides under Klopp at his bright-teethed wide-eyed peak couldn’t maintain the near impossible pace that trying to match City requires into a third campaign.

No such problems for Arsenal, who have cheerfully picked up where they left off in racking up win after win and, crucially, maintaining last season’s new-found ability to stand up to City in direct combat.

Whether it proves enough to actually get them over the line and deliver a title is still up for debate, and they’ve had to dig slightly deeper than might be considered optimal in a couple of penalty-kick home games against Leicester and Southampton, but City haven’t been short of that kind of drama either.

Loads of time for this all to change again, and we all know Pep Guardiola’s sides tend to get stronger and stronger as the season progresses, but right now it does appear slightly more like City scrambling to keep pace with Arsenal than the other way round.

Nottingham Forest’s away form

They’re currently third in the away table, behind only the flawless records of Liverpool and Chelsea.

They’ve gone about it in the most Nottingham Forest way imaginable, still spaffing away points left and right with near reckless abandon, but they have made an undeniably impressive start to the season nevertheless. Home or away, they have trailed in only two games all season, while only the Big Two have lost fewer games than a team that spent last season battling relegation and points deductions.

Securing 80% of your points away from home is definitely strange, though. Both their wins have come on the road, one of them at Anfield, while they’ve also taken points at Brighton and Chelsea.

They still apparently hate their home fans for some reason, failing to take all three points in any of an enormously winnable trio of City Ground clashes with Bournemouth, Wolves or Fulham. But really that all adds to the charm.

And imagine if they do start displaying even a small amount of their away-day competence at home. A good start could easily now get even better with some more enormously winnable games coming up after the international break against Palace, Leicester and West Ham.

Sure, things do inevitably get tougher after that with Newcastle, Arsenal and Man City all on the agenda in November and early December. But even then there are some easy games dotted around against the likes of Ipswich and Manchester United. Mid-table mediocrity appears entirely achievable from here.

It helps when you settle on a decent goalkeeper, of course.

Brentford’s home form

The yin to Forest’s yang, Brentford see Forest’s 80% away points and raise them a 100% home points. Southampton can do the same, for what it’s worth, but one point out of one at home isn’t quite as good as 10 points out of 10, is it?

Brentford’s home record this season is identical to Man City’s and only goal difference separates them from Arsenal after three wins and a draw from four games.

Key to Brentford’s start has been the equally eye-catching and surprising form of Bryan Mbeumo. He’s been obviously decent for some time but not six-goals-in-seven-games decent. He’s one hat-trick away from matching the final Premier League goals total he managed in each of the last two seasons.

Whether or not he gets there in that specifically showy fashion, it would now be quite surprising if he didn’t reach double-figures at all for the first time.

Newcastle’s scoring struggles

Results have probably outdone performances for Newcastle, but 12 points from seven games represents at least a passing grade for their start to the season.

But they’ve really struggled for goals. They scored 85 last season, comfortably more than anyone else outside the top three and only one fewer than Liverpool. It was 11 goals more than free-flowing attack-mad Spurs, for example.

This season, despite having all the same ingredients, they’ve managed only eight goals in those seven games. Anthony Gordon is struggling. Alexander Isak, so deadly towards the end of last season, managed just a single goal in five games before breaking a toe.

This isn’t just a question of failing to take chances, though. Although it is a bit that. Newcastle are underperforming their xG but only by a couple of goals. Their current combined xG of 10.46 ranks only 12th.