Premier League winners and losers: Aston Villa, Daniel Farke, Liverpool, Arsenal’s depth | OneFootball

We absolutely love a bonus midweek round of Premier League action. Just a marvellous couple of evenings, it really is.

You can watch the first half of, say, Newcastle v Spurs, and then switch over to watch Fulham launching a ludicrous comeback against City only to switch back in time to watch Newcastle and Spurs play out an absurd conclusion of their own.

And then you get even more of that good stuff the very next night! Wonderful.

But as with any round of Premier League action there must be the winners and the losers, and the drawers who we shoehorn arbitrarily into one of those first two categories because the word ‘drawers’ is irredeemably ugly in this context and looks like it’s about cupboards and such.

Premier League Winners

Aston Villa

Having failed to win any of their first five Premier League games of the season, Unai Emery’s side have now won eight of their last nine to saunter through the mass of mid-table mediocrity, into the Champions League places and now to the very fringes of the title race.

Sure, they’re being helped along by the fact that, with the exception of Arsenal, everyone is a bit rubbish in some way or another this year. But that situation has been there for other teams to exploit, and they simply haven’t.

Spurs, Liverpool, Man United, Newcastle and now even perhaps Chelsea have become consumed by that mid-table fug and seem utterly incapable of doing anything like Villa have done to ease themselves clear of it.

The goals have started to flow now for a team who started the season looking like they might never actually score another goal ever again, and even after the three they conceded in a wild win at Brighton on Wednesday night it is still only Arsenal and Crystal Palace who boast a better defensive record than the Villans.

Coming back from 2-0 down to win shows the belief Villa now possess, and sets up a huge game on Saturday lunchtime.

There’s never really a particularly a good time to play Arsenal, but we would strongly contend that this might just be the least bad. Villa’s own form is stunning, especially at Villa Park, while Arsenal’s injury problems mounted further in victory over Brentford, they’ve stumbled on the last couple of away days, and Mikel Arteta is already talking darkly about the sheer unfairness of the Gunners being the first team in football history to be asked to play two games of football per week.

If Villa can rumble on and win that one as well then suddenly, without telling anyone, they’ll have moved within three points of the Premier League leaders approaching the halfway stage of the season.

Ollie Watkins

Scored the equalising goal against Fulham way back in September that sparked Villa’s astonishing run of Premier League form, but hadn’t found the net again until his second and third goals of the season sparked another comeback.

Midweek Barclays

Just something magical about a midweek round of Barclays, isn’t there? Not really knowing who you’re playing? Possibly even forgetting you’ve got a game at all until about 6pm on the night? Isn’t it? Hmm? Marvellous.

Leeds

Feels like a real turning point. Leeds had, in truth, probably not been quite as bad as a run of three points from seven games suggested. But it was still a run of three points from seven games.

With the defeat at Manchester City followed by games against Chelsea and Liverpool it was all too easy to see how it descended into a full drain-circling death spiral.

But the second half at Manchester City shifted perceptions a bit. Leeds came agonisingly close to a point but the half-time switch to 3-5-2 that discombobulated City so very much was still very much something to take home from the Etihad.

And while Daniel Farke tweaked his personnel there was no shift from his new 3-5-f*cking-2, or perhaps even more importantly the aggression that had so rattled City at the Etihad.

Leeds roared out of the blocks, and were all over a Chelsea side who paid a heavy price for making so many changes in the absence of Moises Caicedo.

Daniel Farke

We’ll be honest, after the Villa defeat with Man City, Chelsea and Liverpool to come next, we gave Farke almost no chance of still being Leeds manager for the visit of Brentford on December 14.

Now he’s a tactical genius. Listen, fair play.

Arsenal

Another home win in another round of games where all their supposed rivals showed off assorted flaws and foibles to reaffirm Arsenal’s title bona fides. It is absolutely Arsenal’s title to lose, even with the kicker that inevitably comes in the Losers bit later.

Ben White

Man of the match on his first Premier League appearance since the opening weekend. A timely reminder of just how eye-popping Arsenal’s squad depth remains at the precise point they are in gravest need of it.

Sunderland being disappointed to come away with Anfield with only one point instead of three was not on any of our 2025/26 Premier League Bingo Cards. But very little that Sunderland have done this season has been on our 2025/26 Premier League Bingo Cards.

Had surely already secured ‘wonderful addition to Our League’ status with so many previous ‘breath of fresh air’ efforts, but all doubt is now gone.

Typical City

The only one of the original four Premier League title contenders (with apologies to Aston Villa) this season to take maximum points from these two quick-fire rounds of matches, so why does it seem like they’re further away than ever from actually making a go of it?

Just all a bit too Typical City, isn’t it? Or perhaps more accurately, all a bit too August/September Liverpool. The blowing of leads. The relying on late goals. The clinging on desperately against Fulham in a game you led 5-1 after 10 minutes of the second half.

Just doesn’t scream ‘sustained title challenge’ does it? Just all too chaotic and stressful. But they are still very much there. And while ‘Sunderland at home’ is absolutely no gimme now (see above), it’s also not the worst fixture to have on the itinerary for a weekend when Arsenal have to go to Aston Villa.

Erling Haaland

Not our favourite century of the week, but 100 Premier League goals in 111 games is an absolute madness. He’s not even halfway through his fourth season of Barclays and already only 33 men sit above him on the all-time goals list.

He needs 23 more goals to crack the top 20, and it is not remotely outlandish to say that is in range this season.

Phil Foden

As many Premier League goals in his last two games as in the previous 22. And City ended up needing every single one of those four goals as well.

Nottingham Forest

The ugly, unremarkable and almost instantly forgotten 1-0 wins against terrible teams can often be the most important.

Forest putting a bad one against Brighton behind them to get their Dyche-inspired resurgence back on track felt significant given the signs of life being shown right now by Fulham and Leeds in particular.

Wolves are adrift. You fear for Burnley’s ability to avoid joining them, you really do. Nobody wants to be the third team left behind at this stage.

Crystal Palace

The ugly, unremarkable and almost instantly forgotten 1-0 wins against terrible teams can often be the most important.

Palace were nowhere near any kind of crisis, obviously – this win took them back into the Premier League top five after all. But anything short of a win at Burnley after a pair of slack defeats in the Conference and Premier League having led 1-0 at half-time would have been irritating.

Cristian Romero

For good and ill, Romero has always been a player who bristles and shimmers with Main Character Energy.

At Newcastle, he channelled it for good to burgle a point from another pretty moribund Spurs performance and buy Thomas Frank some leeway ahead of a seismic meeting with his former side.

That Spurs managed only two shots on target at Newcastle continues an increasingly troubling recent trend; that those efforts on target were both from a centre-back and were a diving header and overhead kick (just about) is just powerfully silly.

That Romero is already the second Spurs centre-back to score a Premier League brace this season definitely tells us something, but we’re really not sure what.

Premier League Losers

Chelsea

Just a deeply frustrating (non-)performance from a team that appeared to have highlighted its rugged, no-nonsense title credentials with such a hard-fought point against the leaders three days earlier.

Enzo Maresca

Impossible to shake the Tinkerman jibes after that. Perfectly reasonable to make changes as we approach the infamously busy festive period, but doing that much fiddling in the absence of a suspended Moises Caicedo felt like trying to be too clever by half.

Florian Wirtz

Injury-time Newcastle

The Premier League table would look very different had Newcastle not conceded such costly injury-time goals at home to Liverpool, Arsenal and now Tottenham. But they did, so it doesn’t.

Aaron Ramsdale

We’re almost scared to watch a slow-motion replay of Romero’s second equaliser at St James’ Park lest the resulting slowness of both the shot and Ramsdale’s forlorn dive to try and save it cause time itself to reverse.

Wolves

They’ll always have those back-to-back draws against Spurs and Brighton.

Burnley

It feels harsh because only very occasionally have they looked conspicuously out of their depth since their return to the Premier League but the reality now is that five straight defeats and seven in their last nine have them in grave danger of being cast adrift with Wolves.

The gap to safety is already four points ahead of a daunting weekend trip to Newcastle.

Fulham

Nearly the biggest Premier League comeback ever. But nearly the biggest Premier League comeback ever isn’t the biggest Premier League comeback ever, though.

Arsenal’s centre-back stocks

Already without William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes, Mikel Arteta could have done without the sight of Cristhian Mosquera hobbling off before half-time, or the late calf problem that hit the extremely busy and entirely vital Declan Rice.

Arteta’s sighing complaints about the fixture schedule and rest periods are as valid as ever, but he is not the only manager in that particular boat and it’s simply nothing new or unexpected. With Rice in particular, Arteta might wonder whether opportunities have been there earlier in the campaign to give him a bit of rest rather than starting all but two of Arsenal’s 19 Premier and Champions League games to date.