Premier League winners and losers: Raya, Amad, Brighton, Slot, Sunderland, Andersen… | OneFootball

David Raya belongs among the elite, Unai Emery is risking it all again and Manchester United have an anti-Garnacho problem in Amad.

A seismic weekend of Barclays leads to plenty of quite clear Premier League winners and losers, which is particularly handy for this column.

Have a glance at the Premier League table and then return to chew the fat, won’t you?

David Raya

There are only so many times we can use that same Mikel Arteta quote about how “we need those performances in the key moments” from players. But Raya has embodied it better than anyone at Arsenal all season.

His third consecutive Golden Glove has been secured with at least 18 clean sheets. Peter Schmeichel never kept more in a 38-game season, nor did David de Gea or Joe Hart.

Only seven keepers in Premier League history have: Petr Cech (24), Alisson (21), Edwin van der Sar (21), Ederson (20), Pepe Reina (20), David Seaman (19) and Nigel Martyn (19). If Raya carries on in this form, only Cech, Alisson and Van der Sar will be ahead of him and there might not be a stronger Player of the Season case around.

Jeremy Doku

Calum McFarlane

Has held every Premier League title-winning manager of the past five seasons to a draw this campaign despite having the same number of coaching badges as Will Still.

Bournemouth’s Mr. Dependable

With all due respect to the specifically non-playing Fraser Forster, only two members of this absurdly overachieving Bournemouth squad were older than 28 at the start of this season. And those wise heads had contrasting fortunes against Fulham.

Ryan Christie was dismissed after 41 minutes for a really quite silly tackle which jeopardised their European prospects.

But Adam Smith encapsulated the “soul” of a team 16 games unbeaten, the Bournemouth captain and all-time highest Premier League appearance maker thrown in at a deep, sudden and controversial end.

“Probably he didn’t expect until yesterday to play, and then you have to play, you have to start, you have to cover Chukwueze, you have to cover Kevin, and he survived all the game,” said Andoni Iraola of a player who was “massive defensively” as Bournemouth kept their 11th clean sheet – a new Premier League season club record.

“Survived” was the operative term; Smith was hanging on against Kevin by the end. But his perseverance summed up these obdurate Cherries.

The 35-year-old might welcome ten days’ rest before facing this version of Jeremy Doku.

Brighton

With his first goal of the season, Lewis Dunk became the 19th different Brighton player to score in the Premier League in 2025/26.

That variation and share of the attacking burden puts the Seagulls on course to retain their crown from last season, and gives them two games to equal or break the record of 20 held by Manchester United in 2012/13 and Newcastle in 2023/24.

It is time for Carlos Baleba to pitch in. Get Olivier Boscagli up front as an auxiliary centre-forward. Can Solly March take penalties? Might Bart Verbruggen be sent up for every corner from here on out?

It could be argued that there are bigger things on Fabian Hurzeler’s agenda after extending his contract than diversifying his pool of goalscorers; Brighton are firmly in the hunt for a Champions League place and top a Premier League form table since James Milner broke the appearance record and stopped being a massive sideshow.

Sunderland

A 1-1 stalemate and goalless draw is a decent response to conceding nine goals in their previous two games, even if Wolves and an unbothered, under-strength Manchester United provided hilariously gentle opposition.

It might also prompt some uncomfortable conversations about Dan Ballard, considering Sunderland are unbeaten in the seven games he has missed, keeping clean sheets in four of them.

They have taken at least a point off every current top-half team, with only Arsenal and Manchester City keeping more home clean sheets, and will end the season with just Fulham having done the double over them.

It has been a mightily successful campaign by pretty much any reasonable metric.

Nottingham Forest

If there is to be a silver lining to the dark cloud of an injury crisis and curtailed European adventure, it might be the forceful and wonderfully belated discovery of some handy new faces at the City Ground this season.

The Newcastle draw marked the sixth, fifth and second starts of the Premier League season respectively for Dilane Bakwa, Jair Cunha and Luca Netz, all of whom showed more than enough to avoid the probable Evangelos Marinakis squad culling and should only really improve with a solid pre-season.

James McAtee falls into that bracket too after providing his first Premier League assist for the club in his brief cameo.

Forest could benefit from a little less of the usual churn this summer, especially if the players they probably forgot they bought continue to quietly impress.

Mike Jackson

There are imperfections related to sample size, but the bare fact is that Jackson is the greatest Burnley manager in Premier League history based purely on PPG.

His 12 points from 10 games (1.20) across two caretaker reigns beats Sean Dyche (1.10), Owen Coyle (1.00), Vincent Kompany (0.63), Scott Parker (0.59) and Brian Laws (0.56).

Those coaches, in order, are currently in charge of: a new Instagram account; Jamshedpur; Bayern Munich; the fine margins at home; and whatever Brian Laws is in charge of at the age of 64, 13 years after his last post in management.

Real Madrid, the Indian Super League or unemployment beckons for Jackson.

Ismaila Sarr

Since last June, Sarr has scored 25 goals for club and country, helped Senegal win AFCON spiritually and still potentially technically, and guided Crystal Palace to a European final and the comfort of the Premier League’s mid table.

The most goals a Palace player has ever scored in all competitions of a Premier League season is 21, when Andy Johnson sustained himself on a diet of penalties in the mid-2000s. Sarr is on 20 and only a fool would bet against him stopping there.

Premier League losers

Wolves

The players “have got to go”. Rob Edwards might too after suffering a fate even Derby 07/08 managed to avoid.

Amad

Yet another mediocre performance, followed by further sub-optimal ageing of some tired Arsenal sh*tposting from a few months back, made this another weekend to forget for Amad.

Not even the adoration of a Sunderland support which benefited from the Ivorian’s greatest season could elicit a return to form as Amad’s crushing post-AFCON slump continued.

Since returning from a tournament in which he scored three goals and assisted one, Amad has registered none of either in almost 1,000 minutes under Michael Carrick.

He should not be consigned to the Joshua Zirkzee summer scrapheap just yet and this is very much the spiritual antithesis of the Alejandro Garnacho dilemma in that Amad is a talented young forward who has been promised the world and is suffering from a crisis of confidence rather than an abundance of it.

But regardless of who takes the wheel at the end of this season, Amad and anyone else on the fringes of Bruno Fernandes’ attack know that Manchester United cannot afford to suffer passengers for long.

Arne Slot

A top tip for any prospective Liverpool manager: aim to never be mentioned in the same breath as Roy Hodgson.

And don’t drop points to teams managed by five sacked managers in Enzo Maresca, Ruben Amorim, Sean Dyche, Scott Parker and Igor Tudor, nor two ostensible caretakers in successive weeks. It really harshes the buzz.

Joachim Andersen

The perpetrator of the tackle which, by Marco Silva’s calculations, “completely changed the dynamic of the game”.

Before the Christie sending-off, Fulham had five shots to two and 56 per cent possession. They might have reasonably expected to capitalise on that supremacy with a one-man advantage at home.

Then, not content with clipping the crossbar from the subsequent free-kick, Andersen contrived to get himself entirely needlessly sent off to ensure a seamless handing back of the initiative to Bournemouth in what “became more like a game of basketball” despite that early control.

“When you’re in front and there is a red card for the other team, you have to be more careful and mature,” Silva said afterwards. Alternatively, jump two-footed into Adrien Truffert to thwart a completely harmless attack 30 yards out.

One might ordinarily expect “careful and mature” from a 29-year-old vice-captain with almost 200 Premier League appearances who was signed for £30m. But then Andersen did concede the late penalty to Southampton in the FA Cup which cost Fulham the other biggest game of their season so it does all check out.

The 27 points lost from winning positions isn’t great. The 20 goals conceded from the 76th minute onwards is arguably even more damning, even if both league-worst numbers ultimately point to a fundamental deficiency in fitness levels, concentration, game management or all three.

Conceding an 88th-minute equaliser scored by the player they sold at a knockdown price in a PSR panic to keep someone who is now agitating to leave is, in fairness, an exceptional allegory for this infuriating Newcastle season and era.

Unai Emery

It felt a slightly flawed comparison as Aston Villa flirted with defeat in the Europa League semi-final while letting their Premier League standards slide ever further.

But in bypassing Nottingham Forest to reach a continental final before dropping points for a third successive game – the second time in a row to a team in the bottom four – Villa have set up another spectacular Emery-based collapse.

Arsenal lost four, drew one and won just two of their final seven Premier League games in 2018/19, sacrificing one route to Champions League qualification before surrendering the other by losing to Chelsea in the Europa final.

Villa have lost three, drawn three and won just two of their last seven Premier League games, risking one Champions League path and placing an unpleasant number of eggs in the basket labelled ‘Freiburg’.

They are the favourites to win that final, but matches against Liverpool and Manchester City mean rotation and rest will be difficult to execute in the build up and it all makes for a remarkably precarious gambit when Bournemouth and Brighton are lurking.

Everton

Michael Keane and James Tarkowski were first used together in the same Championship defence in April 2016. How weird that the same pairing does not prove particularly effective in the Premier League in May 2026.

Igor Thiago

Still the Premier League’s preeminent Saturday 3pm merchant. Igor Thiago has scored 11 goals in 14 games played during the traditional blackout this season, and 11 in the 22 that have kicked off at any other time for Brentford.

West Ham