Mood rankings: Misery loves company with Leeds one of only four clubs declared ‘happy’ | OneFootball

Every time we update the mood rankings we are reminded of a near universal truth: the default state of the football fan is misery, with the occasional split-second of happiness that makes it all worthwhile.

Not every fan, not every club, and not all the time. But at any given time, most fans of most clubs? Not that happy with it all tbh.

The Daily Telegraph recently concluded that only four Premier League fanbases are currently happy, and it’s hard to argue. Sunderland, Leeds, Villa and Brentford are the four, and even in those places it’s only a broad consensus rather than unanimous and undiluted joy; if you don’t believe us, approach a Villa fan and say the words ‘Sky Six’ or ‘Red Cartel’.

Point of order: the current giddiness at Manchester United is an erratic and volatile mood swing and not (yet) actual happiness.

Anyway. Here are the latest dooms and glooms and occasional tiny rays of sunlight. December’s positions in brackets, with the full reasonings here.

20) Tottenham (20)

In a way, you have to admire it. Having turned their 2024/25 season into an absurd and inexplicably successful high-wire act in which absolutely everything relied on winning the Europa League, they’ve doubled down in 25/26 and tried the same thing but this time with the Champions League, and while playing some of the most eye-bleedingly unwatchable football ever inflicted on supporters.

There’s even the added jeopardy this season that tumbling grimly towards the relegation zone might end up with them tumbling directly into it. Spurs are free-climbing and thus free-falling this year without last season’s safety net of having three of the very worst Premier League teams ever always there below them ready to cushion the fall.

Thomas Frank has become a walking embodiment of beleaguered as the sheer extent to which he is horrifyingly out of his depth gets more and more exposed with each passing game (in which he refuses to attempt any kind of passing game). He continues to imagine positives can be taken from defeats against West Ham or Bournemouth or draws against Burnley as if he were still at Brentford. He really seems unable or unwilling to accept the rules of engagement have changed.

He’s also developed the infuriating accountability-dodging habit of pointing out that Spurs finished 17th last season as if this were the benchmark rather than the specific aberration he was brought in to ensure never, ever happened again, a disastrous domestic campaign so unthinkably and unrepeatably bad that it quite understandably got the previous manager the sack despite ending this club’s desperate yearning for silverware after 17 long and banter-addled years.

There has also been a decisive shift from fans over the last couple of games. Spurs games have, obviously, been riddled with boos and jeers all season. It has been, not unreasonably, pointed out that aiming this stuff at the players is unhelpful. Tensions between some players and match-going fans have been palpable.

That’s slightly shifted in recent weeks, and not in a good way for the manager. The fans are making it far clearer where precisely their anger is aimed. It is now being laser-targeted at a manager who surely cannot possibly survive a February that contains league matches against both Manchester clubs, Newcastle and Arsenal; a month that seems certain to leave them even closer to the bottom three and calamity than they already are.

19) Crystal Palace (7)

Crystal Palace have become quite the philosophical poser, which we’re sure will be of huge comfort to their fans as they watch everything that had been built over the last 18 months come crashing down around their feet.

But the inevitable question posed by Palace’s story in recent years is still a good one, and not as easily answered as might initially seem the case.

And the question is this. Should Palace’s astonishing rise and fall over the last two years ends, as now seems alarmingly possible, with relegation is that better or worse than the previous decade spent trudging along finishing 12th every year (or near enough) and getting 47 points (or near enough)?

Instinctively, you feel the drama of the last two years must be better. Look at those shots of fans at Wembley on FA Cup final day. That was the best day in Palace’s history, a day many couldn’t know they would ever live to see. Any price would be worth paying.

But the price has proved spectacularly high. We all know by now that the smaller teams aren’t allowed nice things – certainly not for long anyway.

Yet the sheer speed and scale of what has been taken away from Palace is still enough to make anyone’s head spin. It’s only eight months since Wembley, and Palace have lost or imminently will lose their best player, their best goalscorer, their captain, their manager, their Europa League place, their hopes, their dreams, their future.

Jean-Philippe Mateta might even leave for Nottingham Forest, of all clubs. Adam Wharton will be the next to look at possible exit ramps.

It’s a bit f*cking much, isn’t it? Especially when all you get in return is a used Brennan Johnson and a go at the Conference League.

We are very much now at the time of the season where it’s the teams falling like a stone into relegation trouble that you fear for most, much more than those who’ve been moulded by the darkness all season.

Especially when those teams – your Nottingham Forests, your Leeds Uniteds, and now even the West Hams of this world – are starting to show signs of life.

There are few such signs at Palace, who are now without a win of any kind in any competition against anyone since beating Shelbourne in the Conference League back in December 11.

The 11 games since then have included drawing at home to Finland’s KuPS, who needed that point to scrape into the top 24 of UEFA’s third-tier competition, becoming the first top-flight team ever knocked out of the FA Cup by one from the sixth tier and, most embarrassing and damaging of all, losing to Dr Tottenham in what now turns out to have been a really quite important relegation six-pointer.

For it is Spurs, whose infamous generosity has been accepted by so many others in recent weeks, who join Palace as being the team spinning desperately out of control towards disaster. But even at their current levels of ridiculousness, there still feels like more Spurs can do to pull out of the tailspin. They just, for reasons we haven’t yet quite fathomed, don’t really want to do any of them.

Palace’s growing crisis feels even more existential. This is a club now gripped by paralysis, where even if it acts, then what? Spurs are being severely punished for failure; if they sort themselves out they can still be fine. Palace are being severely punished for success. That’s a far harder puzzle to solve.

It really wasn’t that long ago that we still thought even the loss of Oliver Glasner, which was always inevitable somewhere pretty soon down the line, need not be a catastrophe if handled right. It no longer feels like that’s the case.

Even if Palace get the next appointment spot on, that manager can’t build on what Glasner achieved because everything Glasner has achieved is already being ripped down before he even officially departs.

And that departure also now seems certain to come before its appointed time in the summer, with Glasner now cutting an increasingly frustrated and dejected figure.

Dragging things out surely can’t be doing either him or Palace any good, but right now it just seems hard to imagine what will.

18) Burnley (19)

Funny old effort from Burnley this season, really. They’ve not disgraced themselves but the sheer lack of attention they’re getting for having no league wins since October shows a) how low the bar now is for promoted teams and also b) just how bad, for how long Wolves were.

The thing with Burnley is that they are far more competitive in individual games than they are across the season as a whole. There appears almost no chance they stay up, but they also just never get humiliated. They’ve only lost by more than two goals twice all season and not at all since September.

And while they don’t ever win matches they have in recent weeks taken to drawing quite a lot of them, and against high-profile teams. Their last three games have all been against Big Six opposition, and they haven’t lost a single one.

Now sure, the quality of those Big Six sides ranges from mediocre to actual fellow relegation candidates, but the point stands. Things have never felt so bleak and forlorn that it’s looked like Scott Parker was about to get the chop. There appears an acceptance that he’s doing as well as anyone could and is still the very ideal sort of chap to try and get them back up again next year.

And it’s hard to argue with any of that. Even when they were losing seven games in a row in the run-up to Christmas, it was never nightmarish. Four of those defeats were by a single goal, and of the three two-goal defeats one was against Arsenal, which is fair enough, another against a Chelsea side who only made the points safe in the 88th minute and the third a daft 3-1 at Brentford in a game that had been goalless at 80 minutes.

If they’re going to do anything beyond continuing on the current vaguely dignified yet nevertheless fate-accepting path to relegation, then it does feel like the time is now. Their next three games are against Sunderland, West Ham and Crystal Palace and you’d think they really are going to have to give some thought to actually winning at least one or two of those.

17) Wolves (20)

It will never be great when your situation ‘improves’ to eight points from 23 games. But improve it has, and at the very least that little spurt of six points from four games including an actual, real-life Premier League win means Derby’s all-time 11-point nadir should be negotiated with time to spare.

Rob Edwards has come in and done a decent job in absurdly grim circumstances but the anger and despair at the way an established Premier League club has been brought so very low by boardroom mismanagement on an epic scale remains real and righteous.

It’s a grim mess with the grimmer reality that the real work comes in the summer and next season. The recent efforts on the field offer some hope, but the struggles of last season’s relegated clubs to get straight back up and the fact Wolves’ last relegation from the Premier League saw them tumble straight down to League One before fighting their way back are a reminder that this can all absolutely get worse before it gets better. If, indeed, get better it does.

16) West Ham (17)

Few clearer examples of just how much misery there is around the Premier League at this time than the fact West Ham somehow managed to remain outside our bottom three last time out and do so again now.

Slightly misleading, of course, because for quite a long spell between the two updates they would definitely have been lower than they land in either; a ranking list directly after the 3-0 defeat at Wolves might somehow have seen them defy mathematics altogether and slip below 20th.

But two wins in a row have, as two wins in a row are wont to do, improved things ever so slightly. West Ham will never not enjoy a late win over Tottenham, and it does feel like one of the most significant results anywhere in the league this season.

It offered renewed hope to a club where it appeared to have faded and died, and parlaying that into an even more impressive win against Sunderland the following weekend has at least kept the Hammers in the mix – as well as dragging other clubs back into their grief hole. Tottenham obviously, but also Palace, are more miserable than they were (which was already quite miserable) as a direct consequence of West Ham being ever so slightly less so.

Which again seems to emphasise the point that miserable is the default position of the football fan; one set of fans being a bit less miserable than before has, if anything, increased the league’s overall misery quota.

Or it might all just be because it’s January, and f*ck January to be honest.

15) Liverpool (12)

Caveats and mitigation exist, but it’s just a remarkably poor season, really. From title winners in May to transfer-window winners in August to scrapping desperately and by no means yet certainly for a Champions League spot in January.

With history’s most fraudulent unbeaten run over after a late defeat at Bournemouth, Liverpool find themselves once more outside the top five and with absolutely no real cause for complaint.

They are simply nowhere near the levels of last season despite spending vast sums in the summer. Arne Slot already looks like he’s on the way out, and this time the timing for Xabi Alonso to come in looks absolutely perfect.

But that means another fresh start for Liverpool and, while his club-legend status and obvious quality means it will be one that starts with bountiful optimism it’s still a wild state of affairs on the back of a title win and summer spend that was supposed to herald the coming of a new era of dominance.

14) Newcastle United (16)

Earlier in the season it was Aston Villa annoying us because we couldn’t work out if they were good or sh*t and now it is Newcastle.

Villa, to their enormous credit, have had the decency to provide a definitive answer and that’s all we ask.

Every time we think we’re just about ready to declare for Newcastle one way or the other, they throw us for a loop again.

Going into the November international break on the back of defeats at West Ham and Brentford had us ready to declare crisis. Then they beat Man City and spangled Everton and we thought ‘okay, maybe they’re not bad actually’.

Then they didn’t even managed to beat Spurs and lost at Sunderland and a pre-Carrick Man United when that was still a mortifying thing to happen to anyone. Fine, they are bad, we thought. Good to know.

Then they won their next three games in a row, and winning three games in a row in this league is enough to drag almost anyone into a halfway acceptable league position. ‘Okay,’ we thought, ‘maybe they’re good after all’.

Then they drew at Wolves and lost meekly to Villa who, as we’ve said, have stopped p*ssing us all about in this manner.

They’re now ninth in the league, but that means nothing because in a couple of weeks they could be sixth or 14th given how volatile the mid-table gang are.

We should in theory have some kind of better idea after the next month or so, in which Newcastle face Liverpool and Brentford and Tottenham and Man City. But you know what? Bet we don’t.

So whatever their own fans think of it all, one thing we can say for certain is that Newcastle are p*ssing us off this season. And that’s what really matters.

13) Nottingham Forest (6)

Seven points from their last three games have significantly improved their survival chances even if there was some FA Cup unpleasantness along the way.

A curious season for Forest still has a wide array of possible outcomes, from ‘complete disaster’ to ‘European glory’ via – and this one is much the most likely – ‘wasted opportunity’. They might go down but probably won’t. They might win the Europa League but probably won’t.

They probably will end up in the bottom six and thinking they’ve fumbled the chance to do something rather more lasting and substantial with last season’s apparent breakthrough.

We will all have a clearer idea in a few weeks’ time after they’ve played relegation rivals Palace, Leeds and Wolves as well as the Europa League play-offs.

12) Brighton (10)

Pop quiz, no cheating. How many of Brighton’s last 10 Premier League games have they won? Wrong. Wrong again. It’s one. One game. Against Burnley. At home.

We genuinely have no idea how that’s true given whenever we’ve watched them they seem to be broadly and predictably competent. But true it is. At the start of that run they were fifth, which is fine because literally everyone apart from Wolves has had a go at being fifth this season.

But back then they were only two points behind Villa and now they are 12th and – this is the crucial bit – they’ve achieved this without anyone really noticing. And, perhaps even more impressively, without any particularly tangible change in their football.

The fact that right in the middle of this run they also went and beat Man United really quite impressively in the FA Cup is also good.

11) Bournemouth (15)

They’re at it again, aren’t they? Absolute scamps. After a couple of months of Champions League form, Andoni Iraola’s incorrigibly streaky gang of imps then did a couple of months of relegation form.

They just can’t help themselves. This is what they’ve been like ever since Andoni Iraola rocked up and pinched Gary O’Neil’s birthright and there is no sign of it stopping. They’ve now taken seven points from their last three games against Spurs, Brighton and Liverpool, and will no doubt win five of their next six games before failing to win any of the next eight after that.

It’s a great bit, honestly, but while the absolute commitment to it is exemplary and admirable, we do wonder if it’s just becoming a bit cliché. Just talking about Bournemouth being streaky has certainly become passe, but unavoidably so. Bournemouth being Bournemouthy has become as much a feature of Premier League life as Spurs being Spursy. No point fighting it, we suppose.

We remain intrigued to see how much of this is a Bournemouth thing and how much an Iraola thing, and await their and his next move with interest given the wide array of big Barclays jobs likely to be up for grabs this summer.

10) Fulham (9)

Mid-table here, mid-table there, mid-table everywhere. Have the chance to do the funniest thing possible at Old Trafford this weekend.

9) Arsenal (5)

There’s an extremely strong chance it works out wonderfully well in the end and a very strong chance it does even more than that. There’s a small but very real chance this ends up being Arsenal’s greatest ever season, with domestic and European glory and Spurs crying all the way to the Championship. The quadruple is on; quintuple if you include that Spurs relegation bit.

So why don’t Arsenal fans seem to be having any fun? We’re not going to go as far as miserable here, but they are definitely sh*tting pre-emptive bricks about what happens if things don’t all work out in the end.

We know and they know – and they know we know – that if they don’t win the league this year they are going to get absolutely slaughtered. There will be almost no feasible defence this time to the cruel bottle-job taunts that will rain down upon them from all directions. The fear is palpable, entirely understandable, but also in danger of becoming rather self-fulfilling. The nervousness at the Emirates for the visit of Manchester United on Sunday was positively bleeding out of the screen even for those of us watching on TV. No wonder it was felt by the players actually there trying not to think of the B word.

Given the position in which Arsenal and everyone else now find themselves, there really are only two possible ways for this season to end. Either Arsenal fans will be absolutely unbearable towards everyone else, or everyone else will be absolutely unbearable towards Arsenal fans. And in both scenarios righteously so, and for a really quite extended period of time.

Arsenal fans still hope and expect the former, but the fear of the latter is real and growing.

8) Manchester City (3)

Funny thing about Man City this season: they an also win the quadruple. Doesn’t feel like it, though, does it? And not just because nobody ever wins the quadruple – not the proper one anyway.

Yet City are currently (if narrowly) the bookies’ favourites ahead of Arsenal in both the Carabao and FA Cup. They are second in the league scenting blood in the water, and the Champions League’s absolute refusal to be interesting means that even another stuttering campaign there cannot eliminate them before the knockouts.

So… it’s all going pretty well. But we repeat: it simply doesn’t feel like it. There is a growing understanding that while the precise timing of Pep Guardiola’s departure remains unconfirmed the day is certainly approaching, and that brings inevitable uncertainty.

Especially as this is simply not the most convincing Man City side, especially with Erling Haaland in one of those weird mid-season funks he gets when he just stops scoring until someone performs the necessary system updates.

It’s now just one goal (a penalty as well, if you’re the sort of person that bothers) in nine for the big man, including a 45-minute blank in a 10-1 FA Cup win over Exeter.

They may still be in touch with Arsenal at the top of the Premier League, but it’s not been via their trademark unstoppable run because that petered out over a month ago now.

Since winning eight straight games in November and December it’s been three wins (one of them the aforementioned sorting out of Exeter) in their last eight games heading into a Champions League game against Galatasaray they must win to avoid the play-offs and then a trip to catastrophe-addicted Tottenham that even at the best of times would carry far less certainty for City than it would any broadly equivalent side.

7) Everton (4)

Home form has started to go the way one always fears home form might at a new stadium, with no win at the Hill Dickinson since giving Nottingham Forest what for back in early December.

But the away form has stepped up with a couple of fine away wins in the midlands on their two most recent away days keeping them safely in the mid-table pack and well clear of any of the unpleasantness other teams are allowing themselves to be sucked into down below them.

It’s not quite been as fun a season as we’d hoped it might be for Everton, but it’s fine. They aren’t going to have to chew their fingernails down to the quick, and that’s something not to be sniffed at. We’re very much at the time of the season where for a great many clubs having nothing real to play for is actually a lot less stressful than having everything to play for.

6) Chelsea (13)

No longer a football club, not really, and it’s a damning indictment on everyone else that they’re still able to do quite well at actual football despite this. Imagine what they might do if they were confident enough in their approach to, say, hire or retain a manager who might answer back occasionally. Or sign a player over 23 years old because he improves the playing squad rather than the balance sheet.

Given how far down the list of priorities the creation of a functional, rounded football squad is at Chelsea and how no manager ever lasts more than 18 months, it’s pretty extraordinary that they’re able to compete at all.

And then you remember just how much money they’ve spent on their player-trading business and then slap yourself around the face and head for saying their ability to compete on the pitch is extraordinary.

But it kind of is, though. Absurd club and still, in so many ways, far more of an all-that’s-wrong-with-the-modern-game outfit than Man City. Say what you like about City and their methods – or even Chelsea in the Abramovich days – but at least they’ve always also tried to build the best possible football team under the best possible manager.

It feels like a ridiculously low bar because it is. Yet it is one BlueCo Chelsea have never cleared, will never clear, and show no real interest in clearing.

5) Manchester United (8)

In truly unprecedented scenes, a shambolic and spluttering Manchester United have sacked a fool of a coach who knew neither the club nor Our League, appointed a beloved former player as interim manager, won a couple of games rather impressively, and are thus possessed with the absolute certainty they are once again about to dominate English football for a good couple of decades.

Okay, much of the exaggeration here is ours, and there is simply no denying that both the performances and victories United have achieved under Michael Carrick’s watchful if still for now temporary eye have been enormously impressive.

There need be no caveats applied to anyone who turns up at any misfiring football club and immediately masterminds wins over Manchester City and Arsenal.

That some relatively simple and really quite obvious quick fixes (pick Harry Maguire, pick Kobbie Mainoo, choose a formation that suits the players you have available) have been so transformative says a lot more about the previous manager than the current one, but it’s still undeniably and uncomplicatedly impressive.

We can all also, of course, enjoy the sight of some (and it was only some) Arsenal fans lashing out on social media about Man United responding to their win at the Emirates like they’d won the Champions League.

We’re sorry, Arsenal fans, that sounds like celebration policing. You hate that.

So while we’re not about to deny any Man United fan their elation at what’s gone off in the last couple of weeks, we still worry for them. It just feels like they’ve set off down another familiar path that leads them right back where they started.

Carrick is going to be given the permanent job after a few more wins – having sorted out the best two teams in the country the upcoming and infamously light fixture list is inevitably more straightforward – and we all know what will happen after that.

So United, by all means enjoy it, but enjoy it by being f*cking disciplined. Let’s at the very least try and save the street parties and title talk until after yer man has been able to get himself down the barbers.

4) Brentford (14)

Surprised ourselves to find we’d got them as low as 14th last time out, but turns out they’d just taken one point from their last three league games and got knocked out the Carabao in a run that even included the utter indignity of becoming (and still remaining) only the second Premier League team to contrive to lose to Spurs at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium under Thomas Frank.

Which was a double blow for Brentford specifically, of course. Immediately after we dropped them down the mood rankings a place or six they went off and won five of their next six games in all competitions and briefly even popped up in the top five, as pretty much everyone other than Wolves appears to have done at some point this season.

The only team they didn’t beat in that run? Thomas Bloody Frank’s Silly Spurs again, which is a mild pisser but no more than that, all told. Brentford under Keith Andrews remain, even after a couple of defeats to drop them back into the mid-table gang, conspicuously better than Tottenham under Thomas Frank, and if you can’t enjoy that then you don’t have blood in your veins.

3) Leeds United (11)

Some low-level huffing and puffing after a 1-1 draw away at Everton serve as yet another reminder that almost no glass is ever quite as half-full as it might be, but we’re still putting Leeds firmly among the small group of clubs whose current general mood can be summed up as ‘Broadly Very Happy, Thank You Very Much’.

Fifteen points from their last 10 Premier League games have lifted them clear of the relegation zone and now within touching distance of those tumbling out the back of the mid-table clog. No reason at all to think Leeds won’t be fully paid-up members of that mid-table clog within the next week or three.

We do understand the slight frustration, as well. For all that the 15-point return from those 10 games (after managing only 11 from the first 13) has changed the whole dynamic of Leeds’ season it does also feel like the very, very least their vastly improved performances across those games have deserved.

But even that is, in its own frustrating way, a positive. Leeds are playing very decent and effective football that has got them out of immediate relegation peril, and all without any sense yet that they’ve peaked or are merely on some unsustainable run of good fortune or freakish results.

They have achieved, over what is now a pretty lengthy period of time, very decent, solid mid-table Premier League results because they have played like a very decent, solid mid-table Premier League team.

2) Aston Villa (1)

In many ways, Villa are the clearest example of all that the default setting of the football fan is pessimism and misery. They are second in the table, level on points with Manchester City and only four points behind an Arsenal side that has spent the entire season looking like it’s about to decisively run away with the league and then not quite doing that.

With Europa League glory still looking an entirely plausible outcome as well, it is by any sane measure an astonishing effort from Unai Emery and the lads. And we’re not saying Villa fans aren’t happy. They are happy. Obviously, they’re happy.

But… gah, we might be wrong here but we just don’t think they’re as happy as they should be. We don’t think they’re enjoying it all as much as they should do. We’re just hearing far too much bleating about Sky Sixes and Red Cartels and not being allowed to just spend even more money they don’t actually have chasing their dreams.

It’s not unfair that clubs with more money are allowed to spend (and in most cases it’s actually ‘waste’ anyway, so don’t worry) more money than clubs who have less money. If anything, that’s fairer than the alternative.

Anyway, hopefully winning the league will cheer them up a bit.

1) Sunderland (2)

Things have dropped off a bit since the highs of the derby win over Newcastle that arrived just before the last mood update and inevitably had Sunderland riding at their absolute highest.

But even that dropping-off can be framed however you want to do it; one win in seven games since Newcastle is also only two defeats in seven games since Newcastle.

They’re still comfily flitting about in mid-table without a relegation care in the world, they’re still the best promoted side we’ve seen in quite some time and they are, since Sunday, the proud and last remaining owners of an unbeaten home record in this season’s Premier League.

We’re going to say with some confidence that even the most bullish Sunderland fan wasn’t predicting that back in August.

We reckon there are maybe four Premier League fanbases genuinely happy with life at this time, and we’re really starting to think that Sunderland, as the team with least to stress about over the months ahead, might for now be the most content of the lot.

For most of the fans who are currently happy there remains the fear that this season could still go horribly wrong. That doesn’t really apply to Sunderland, even if they do eventually lose a home game.