Premier League winners and losers: Manchester United, cursed Emery, Wilson, Arsenal and more… | OneFootball

Arsenal are in both the Premier League winners and losers columns, with Manchester United and Everton’s DNA shining and Unai Emery apparently cursed.

Pep Guardiola also has a quite hilarious blind spot to go with his head-covering bald spot.

About half the managers in the Premier League feel like they’re on the brink of walking, being sacked or both. It’s great fun.

Premier League winners

Arsenal

Pulled a further point clear of their two main rivals in the Premier League title race. You’re still thinking about the bad news, aren’t you?

Manchester United

For all the noise, all the talk of Manchester United having perennially needed at least 427 transfer windows to sort out their problems at any point since 2013, all the club’s former players absolving themselves of any blame for helping feed into and often create a hysteric, toxic and often unworkable environment, there are always reminders dotted along the way that these professional footballers can, in the right set of circumstances, be really quite good.

There is a Cup Final element to it, given myriad miserable iterations of Manchester United over the past decade have delivered and performed against Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs under varying degrees of doomed managers.

It is better to properly appraise Michael Carrick against the five teams placed 10th and below who Manchester United face next month, rather than his opening salvo of a home Manchester derby followed by Arsenal at the Emirates.

But this was proof that a great deal of their on-pitch issues were painfully avoidable and redeemable by the mere advent of appointing a coach who isn’t personally affronted by the idea of placing square pegs in similar-shaped holes.

Carrick profiled the players properly and Manchester United benefited from it. The football only left Casemiro when he was asked to patrol the entire middle of the pitch alone, Kobbie Mainoo is disciplined enough to play in a midfield two and Bruno Fernandes might be better deployed higher up the pitch than in a deep-lying pivot.

It was common sense as much as it was DNA, but it was impressive nonetheless.

Michael Carrick

In four games in charge of Manchester United, Carrick has beaten the managers of the Premier League’s current top three, as well as the England head coach.

Granted, on this particular weekend such a record against Mikel Arteta, Pep Guardiola and Unai Emery doesn’t actually sound all that impressive. Manchester United being the only team in the top five to win on a weekend can’t have happened all that often since the Podcasters of ’92 have been around.

Callum Wilson

It is very West Ham to spend £46.1m on new forwards signed at the behest of a manager whose position has often seemed untenable recently, only for the free agent who might well be released as a direct consequence of that investment to score the winner against their bitter rivals.

“Callum is a very experienced man,” Nuno said last week. “He’s been in the game for so much time and he knows that his position has changed. So we were honest to each other. Yes, your position has changed but he’s still a player from the club and we still maybe need him.”

That “maybe” was doing an awful lot of heavy lifting even before the Spurs win. Their second top scorer this season might not have joined from Gil Vicente or Lazio as Nuno’s man but only a fool would ignore the part he clearly still had to play in West Ham’s campaign. He is not six goals away from joining the Premier League 100 Club by accident.

It might be that the 33-year-old is granted his wish for more regular playing time with the termination of his contract this month – West Ham would be stupid to sanction that but they are West Ham – yet Wilson can hold his head high in any event at having given his all.

Sunderland

It remains one of this Premier League season’s defining statistics, kept intact by a battling victory at home to Crystal Palace: the only team other than Arsenal to follow up every league defeat with a win in their very next game is Sunderland.

And while the Gunners have had only two opportunities to bounce back from zero points with all three, Regis Le Bris’ scrappers have been beaten five times before immediately picking themselves up and dusting themselves on each occasion.

It is a trait which goes remarkably well with sitting second in the table for most points won from losing positions to underline the brilliance of probably the most durable team in the country.

Brian Brobbey

For £17.3m, Sunderland have received five goal contributions from Brobbey, including:

1) The assist to a 93rd-minute winner at Stamford Bridge. 2) A 94th-minute equaliser at home to Arsenal. 3) A 69th-minute winner against Bournemouth. 4) An 80th-minute equaliser in a draw with Spurs. 5) A 71st-minute winner against Crystal Palace.

That is a ludicrous level of impact from someone who has started about one third of his club’s games.

Everton

“It’s in the DNA at Everton; we can dig wins out,” said David Moyes of a club that has ransacked the City Ground, Old Trafford with 10 men for 80 minutes, and now the fortress of home dominance that was Villa Park this season.

And who better to explain Everton’s “perfect plan” than the man who struck the post within 11 seconds? As Merlin Rohl said, the midfield “did a great job of keeping close to the players who want the ball all the time”. It helped the Toffees “frustrate” the home crowd and they benefited from not being “the team that needs to push and needs to play forward”.

Since Moyes was appointed last January, no team has won more Premier League away games than Everton, and only Arsenal (37) have accrued more points (34). Those 10 Toffees wins on the road have come in 20 matches; Everton’s previous 10 away victories were stretched over 66 games all the way back to August 2021 and the days of Rafa Benitez.

One of their managers in that time literally mocked Everton as an opponent for forgetting “how to win a game away from home”. Moyes has refreshed the memory.

Leeds

The kindest assessment was that Leeds had taken a calculated gamble. The harsher and certainly more preeminent judgement across the more vocal element of a fanbase predisposed to disappointment and retroactive finger-pointing was that a relegation-adjacent manager had not been supplied with the requisite firepower to keep the Championship in the rear view.

Leeds did at one stage in the summer seem to have improved through recruitment in every position before realising late on they had slightly forgotten the attack.

Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Lukas Nmecha cost nothing in transfer fees between them, but plenty in wages and the presumed overtime the Leeds medical department was expected to work to keep them fit.

It has paid off handsomely so far. Nmecha alone has scored in a pair of 1-0 wins, while Calvert-Lewin can lay direct claim to many of the points won since Daniel Farke woke up and smelled the coffee in December.

Leeds are the only club with two new signings on five Premier League goals or more so far this season, and both were free agents. The risk has reaped fine reward.

Sean Dyche

As far as Dyche quotes go, “it can’t all be the beautiful side, you’ve got the do the basics well” is an absolute belter. Although having said that, 0-0 continues to trail a 3-0 win and 2-0 defeat as the most common Nottingham Forest scorelines of this Entertainers tribute reign.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the City Ground became besotted with those players again after 90 minutes characterised by the same grit, determination and organisation which carried them into the Europa League.

It was also the fourth goalless draw Dyche has coached against Mikel Arteta in 11 meetings with three different teams. The man knows his basic onions.

Bashir Humphreys

Burnley have hedged their Chelsea-based bets slightly recently, with three permanent signings from the Blues last summer alone. But Humphreys will almost certainly be sent back for a fee thoroughly eclipsing the sort the Clarets received for James Trafford a few months ago, which remains a club record.

Chelsea being Chelsea, they might chuck £80m in the general direction of Turf Moor next week.

It may be that Burnley and Scott Parker are still slightly too limited to suggest that if Humphreys had been available all season the complexion of their campaign would have been far brighter. But he probably would have at least shattered the unknown record for most goalline clearances ever by the end of September.

Wolves

The contract extension handed out to Vitor Pereira after eight winless games, including four defeats to start the new season, will go down as one of the most damaging, defining decisions made by any Premier League club in 2025/26.

Rob Edwards would not exactly have Wolves safely in mid-table – he cannot point to having to clear up the mess he inherited as the sole or even biggest reason for losing his first seven games – but they would not be as far adrift nor fretful about Derby’s results almost two decades ago either had he been in charge for longer.

A four-match unbeaten streak has injected life and belief into a club that was hurtling towards not just relegation but implosion. Edwards has also coached as many clean sheets as Ruben Amorim this campaign in nine fewer games.

He has stemmed the bleed, stabilised the patient and started their rehabilitation ahead of next season.

Liam Rosenior

In English, “jammy”, if you split the two words it’s “jam” and “my”: I’ll jam my fingers into my eyes if Rosenior lasts the year with Chelsea playing like that and being out-shot 15 to six at home to Brentford.

The game might still be going if Rosenior was permitted to stop it each time he saw something he didn’t like, even just from Alejandro Garnacho. But a win and a clean sheet in his first game was a bar as low as it was necessary to clear.

Premier League losers

Spurs

The lowest-placed team in the Premier League table to lose. They really are in a relegation battle and Thomas Frank surely cannot stay.

Manchester City

Doesn’t feel like there’s a particular need to expand on Pep Guardiola’s take that “the better team won”.

It is telling that in the aftermath of a Manchester City defeat he didn’t performatively collar anyone on the pitch to furiously tell them how good they are, nor was there a single passive-aggressive “so good” in any of the post-match interviews.

His side was soundly beaten and he knew it, with injuries only providing a slight caveat for a deeply concerning performance at either end.

And Guardiola likely realised he was outcoached too. Perhaps he has also discerned his greatest weakness in the process, the one true, enduring Kryptonite to arguably the sport’s finest ever manager: the caretaker.

In the Premier League alone Guardiola has now been beaten by Carrick while drawing with Calum McFarlane (Chelsea), Simon Rusk (Southampton) and Steve Agnew (Middlesbrough). Future quiz question compilers are welcome.

Aston Villa

A detrimental result followed by an eye-catching post-match interview which betrayed frustrations with issues behind the scenes and shifted the blame away from the coaching?

Might not be the best time to consider the previous winners of the Premier League Manager of the Month award this season before Unai Emery was crowned in December. In reverse chronological order we have: Enzo Maresca, Ruben Amorim, Oliver Glasner and Arne Slot.

Oh lord.

Even before that it was Vitor Pereira in April and Nuno Espirito Santo in March. The curse is real, and the emphasis Emery put on describing Villa as “not contenders to be in the top five” suggested he knows as much.

Losing out to Spurs in a transfer battle and feeling compelled to sell one of your better forward options – then him scoring on his debut for his new club – without a replacement would, to be fair, send most heads careering towards space.

Liverpool

Arsenal

With no ground lost and indeed some actually gained on Manchester City and Aston Villa over the last week and a half, it could have been worse. But Arsenal know it really might have been a whole lot better too, with opportunities squandered across a couple of frustrating goalless draws.

In isolation, toiling to a point against Liverpool and being held on a trip to Dycheland is fine enough across the course of a league season. In consecutive games, it does start to vaguely resemble a stutter which Arsenal cannot afford to let develop into an actual problem.

An upcoming fixture list of Manchester United, Leeds, Sunderland, Brentford, Spurs, Chelsea and Brighton, with Champions League games and a Carabao Cup semi-final second leg littered in between, means Arsenal must discover their attacking edge again soon. And drop Viktor Gyokeres obviously.

Crystal Palace

I’m not saying it’s your fault, although you could have done more. Especially in the summer transfer window.

Newcastle

Wolves had seven points from 21 games and their manager had lost 31 of his 48 career Premier League games before the weekend.

Yet as Edwards said, “Newcastle have got very good players but overall the game went how we expected it to.”

That is: Newcastle would dominate the ball while creating precious little of note as the unimaginative visitors who only ever change the personnel in a flawed system, rather than the system itself.

It is damning that they can be so easily read by a team which, until recently, was being discussed as one of the Premier League’s worst ever.

As a flourish, Wolves might well have predicted the triple substitution around the hour mark – the only time Eddie Howe called on his bench – the wait the 86th minute for Newcastle’s only two shots on target, or Nick Woltemade’s mere 13 touches.

Keith Andrews

That’s three defeats in all his professional meetings with Liam Rosenior now: as a player in 2011, as a coach in 2026, and in the infamous mid-2010s Lego battle as mandated on the UEFA Pro Licence course.

Fair play for devising a gameplan which really ought to have delivered victory at Stamford Bridge, but how foolish of Andrews to overlook the ultimate variable that is Kevin Schade’s ridiculousness.

Fulham

What’s bleaker: Ryan Sessegnon having 14 touches and completing three passes in 64 minutes; Issa Diop replacing Harry Wilson at a goal down in the 88th minute; or watching a midfield of Sasa Lukic and Sander Berge try to create something?