Premier League mood rankings as Liverpool drop a full 15 places! | OneFootball

The November international break is the very ideal kind of time for a bit of the ol’ mood rankings.

We didn’t do it in October, because that was officially CRISIS WEEK with rankings in accordance with that state of affairs.

So the numbers in brackets here go all the way back to September, which is clearly ancient history and laughably irrelevant.

Without wishing to give away too many spoilers, suffice to say Liverpool are no longer second this time around.

20) Wolves (19)

It’s bad when you’re ranking the latest long winless start to the season which has seen you have to bin off the manager you’ve just given a brand new contract against your club’s other long winless starts to the season which have seen them have to bin off the manager you’ve just given a brand new contract.

It’s really bad when doing so brings the inevitable conclusion that this is the worst and bleakest yet.

The quality of the playing squad has been significantly denuded and it does look like pulling out of this particular tailspin might be beyond them.

Rob Edwards doesn’t have a straightforward start to life at his new, crisis-riddled club either.

In his first month at the helm he’s got Crystal Palace and Aston Villa before a six-pointer against Forest, and then Manchester United and Arsenal. Very best of luck to you, fella.

19) Newcastle United (20)

In football, as in comedy and indeed life itself, timing is everything. And this season Newcastle’s timing is absolutely terrible.

It started in the summer, with a mess that was not particularly of their own making but a mess nonetheless. The late-summer explosion of Alexander Isak Saga was terrible timing.

There is no good time for that kind of shenanigans, but your man Macbeth had it right: If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.

Shakespeare scholars remain divided on whether the daft Scottish over-thinker had protracted transfer sagas specifically in mind there, but there’s no doubting that once the outcome of the Isak caper was clearly not going to go Newcastle’s way, it would have been far less painful had it all played out earlier in the summer. Had Newcastle had time to put a proper plan in place.

We’ve all had our fun at the saltiness pouring out of Bayern Munich’s unhappiness at Newcastle paying such crazy money for Nick Woltemade, because Bayern believe they have a divine right to hoover up all good German players should they wish to do so. But they did have a little bit of a point. It was a wild amount of money spent in a wild fashion.

He isn’t really the right profile of striker for Newcastle’s football, but his purchase was one of pure desperation. A transfer about optics as much as it was about football. Newcastle had to look like they were doing something to address the cavernous hole being left in their gameplan, even if what they did wasn’t really a great idea.

It is to Woltemade’s enormous credit and just in general quite funny that despite it all, and despite Newcastle’s wider struggles, that he has fared at least as well as and in several cases – including above all Isak’s – far better than any of the other big-money final-piece-of-the-puzzle strikers signed over the summer.

But Newcastle’s bad timing in the summer has reared its head again. If challenged to sum up Newcastle’s Premier League season in a word we would, until the last couple of weeks, have gone for ‘nondescript’. Not good, not bad, not particularly noticeable one way or the other.

They hadn’t had the same result in successive games and were kind of chugging along in that big pack of teams in mid-table. The eye-catching stuff was coming in the Champions League and in their Carabao defence.

Now, though, Newcastle have found some consistency at the worst possible time in the worst possible way.

Having not managed the same result in consecutive Premier League games until the weekend, they’ve now achieved consecutive identical scorelines in the same depressing way and even in the same city.

Early 1-0 leads at West Ham and Brentford have ended in consecutive 3-1 defeats. That’s bad enough, but doing that right before the November international break when there is literally nothing happening and two weeks of dead air simply must be filled with any old sh*te? Really, really bad timing.

Newcastle have moved to crisis-adjacent status at the worst possible time of the season to try and sneak it in without attracting attention.

They’ve slipped out the back of the Premier League’s mediocrity peloton where just five points separate third from 13th. The gap between Everton at the back of that main pack and Newcastle is now three points – bigger than any other current gap between any position in the division outside the extremes of the summit and basement.

Newcastle are now closer to the relegation zone than they are to even the back of a mid-table group comprising over half the league, with Eddie Howe now poised to assume Sack Race favouritism once Daniel Farke is put out of Leeds fans’ misery.

Because even the timing of other clubs’ bad spells is working against Newcastle right now.

18) Leeds United (15)

They have The Fear, and with some reason. The lack of attacking firepower is hurting them, and recent defeats have very much been of the ‘alarming’ variety, with Leeds too easily outplayed and swatted aside by teams who ought to be direct rivals.

The frustrations at the impotence of that last week in the transfer window is undoubtedly exacerbated by the sight of Sunderland, who were miles off Leeds last season, now looking smugly down on them after grasping the nettle and gambling on a truly transformative summer of squad rebuilding.

Daniel Farke’s dismal previous record in the Premier League after bringing teams up enormously impressively does rather proceed him, and it means it’s taken very little time and relatively few setbacks for whispered doubts around him to become cacophonous.

He now appears on borrowed time, as does Leeds’ latest attempt to re-establish themselves as a Premier League team.

17) Liverpool (2)

There’s a lot of flip-flopping from the last Moods and two months really is a long time in football. But nowhere is that more profound right now than at Liverpool, who were riding high at the last update having just beaten Arsenal and apparently up and on their way to at the very least fighting to retain their title.

They’ve got none of that now. Having somehow contrived to lose five of their last six Premier League games they have slipped all the way down to eighth. And to add to the embarrassment, that means now sitting below the Big Six’s two resident banter clubs, Spurs and Manchester United, even after a weekend where those two both spent their time being too daft even to pull off a win against the other.

The worst thing for Liverpool, really, is that the run of bad results has felt far more compelling than the run of good results. That five-game winning run that kicked off their title defence involved far too much seat-of-the-pantsery. Had it been delivered by anyone other than the champions themselves, nobody would have been particularly taken in by wins that so often required desperately late goals and quite often getting out of jail after throwing away leads in ridiculous circumstances.

Their recent run of defeats, though? That’s felt far less forced. Sure, it’s also involved some more late drama, but generally a side outplayed and outthought. And it’s a wide variety of sides they’ve now shown themselves vulnerable against.

If you’re losing deservedly in successive weeks against set-piece merchants Brentford and open-play snobs Man City, it does start to feel like this could be a you problem.

The failure to launch of Liverpool’s new-look attack has attracted plenty of headlines, understandably given the vast sums of money chucked at it, but the more significant problems have occurred further back. Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konate are both struggling, performing way below previous levels. Milos Kerkez has found the Premier League far harder at Anfield than he did at the Vitality.

Perhaps most significantly, Liverpool have struggled massively to replace the unique talents of Trent Alexander-Arnold, with knock-on effects to both their attacking and defending output.

None of this now feels like anything that will be fixed this season as they finally truly go through the transition that was dodged so adroitly when Arne Slot rocked up and performed so splendidly with Jurgen Klopp’s complete and capable squad.

It’s all a bit arse backwards and, while we’d still expect Liverpool to sort things out enough to finish safely tucked up inside the top four when all’s said and done, it’s really hard now to see them challenging Man City, never mind Arsenal.

16) Nottingham Forest (3)

We did warn them. September’s Moods were even delayed by a couple of days to more accurately gauge the initial reaction to the appointment of Ange Postecoglou in place of Nuno Espirito Santo. And that mood remained overwhelmingly positive.

Some were even going so far as to suggest Forest’s squad was actually suited to the Australian’s front-foot, high-line craziness. Despite being entirely ill-suited to that, and very obviously much less suited to it than a Spurs squad that couldn’t do it by the end. Even the success Postecoglou did enjoy with Spurs in the Europa League involved, towards the end, precious little of anything that looked much like Angeball.

By the time Forest came to their senses, Postecoglou’s winless run had plunged them so deep into a relegation fight that having been hubristic enough to believe they were above such mundane concerns had to accept they had no other concern at all. A season that should have been about trying to take the next step up the ladder towards English football’s actual elite with a really capable squad is now all about avoiding relegation under the ultimate firefighter himself, Sean Dyche.

He’s currently doing precisely what you’d expect him to do and you would now expect Forest to ease clear of the very worst catastrophe. But what a pointless, arrogant waste of a really promising season it now looks like being.

15) West Ham United (18)

It’s less gloomy than it was, that’s for sure. Two successive wins from behind have not yet lifted them out of the relegation zone but have at least taken them out of the deepest doldrums and offered, for the first time this season, a compellingly plausible roadmap under Nuno Espirito Santo to avoiding catastrophe this season.

And a catastrophic relegation really did appear to be West Ham’s fate during a harrowing start to the season where even vaguely competing – never mind winning actual points – appeared entirely beyond them.

Not everyone is as bad as Newcastle or Burnley, so caution is necessary. Have West Ham really turned things round, or just run into a couple of teams just as bad as they are?

We’ll have a decent idea one way or the other by Christmas. It’s Bournemouth, Liverpool, Man United, Brighton, Aston Villa and Man City on the Hammers’ menu between now and Turkey Day.

14) Fulham (10)

The initial rush that propelled Marco Silva to the top of the Sack Race market at the start of international week appears to have subsided; he may well once again be replaced by Daniel Farke at the head of that market pretty soon.

But still. The very fact it’s even been possible for the idea of Silva and Fulham parting ways to feel probable points to a fundamental shift beneath the ground at Craven Cottage.

For so long now it’s felt like the most ideal relationship, one where both club and manager were clearly better in the presence of the other. That sense is gone now, replaced by the thought that something really might be broken here.

Combine that with the already apparent fact that this is not the season to have a slump, and you’ve got a recipe for mid-table comfort giving way to panic.

13) Burnley (12)

Outside the relegation zone and not having had to change managers just yet at the November international break is definitely a position Burnley would’ve taken if offered it in August, but this is not the fortnight you want to spend stewing on defeat in a six-pointer at West Ham.

The sight of Nottingham Forest also becoming less silly at the same time is another problem for Burnley, a club that knows however well they do their fate will be inevitably intertwined with just how silly certain numbers of other clubs are being. And West Ham and Forest really were being very silly for a good while back there.

12) Brighton (9)

Proving to be the most gloriously mid-table team imaginable, achieving that middle-of-the-road outcome via the most outlandish means possible.

Newcastle’s successive defeats at West Ham and Brentford leave Brighton as the only remaining Premier League team not to achieve/suffer the same result in two consecutive games this season, which only scratches the surface of their daftness.

They’ve only managed four wins this season, but three of those have come against teams from last season’s top five. Yet they are also one of only two teams to kindly donate a point to the Wolves cause this season and, in related news, also failed to beat Tottenham from 2-0 up.

This kind of predictable unpredictability is great for the rest of us, especially with Fulham apparently unable to deliver their usual sterling work on this front this season, but probably gets a bit annoying after a while for fans. It could be a lot worse, obviously, but beating the teams they’ve beaten and not even having a top-half spot to currently show for it does feel a bit daft.

11) Everton (6)

We thought Everton were going to be tremendously good fun this season, but instead they’ve only been quite good fun. That’s on us, not them. But it still annoys us a little bit and means that we are, childishly, knocking them down a place or two.

Nothing they or anyone can do about it.

10) Crystal Palace (11)

We’re being very harsh and perhaps extremely greedy here but… should Palace actually be doing a bit better?

Sure, they’re in the middle of the greatest period in their entire history, but it has now become slightly incongruous to see a team and manager who have had their balls so relentlessly tickled for so very long now sitting in mid-table below some very, very stupid clubs.

They are obviously a very good team with a very good manager doing very good things. But they are still tenth, and that just feels vaguely underwhelming somehow.

Which itself, of course, is pretty strong evidence for the extent of Palace’s recent overachievement. This is the club that famously finished 12th every year with 40-something points. That exceeding that already feels a little meh does highlight just how good they’ve got. And how fast.

9) Tottenham (7)

Got to laugh, haven’t you? They are really, really trying to be a sensible team under a sensible manager, but it just refuses to happen. Still impossible to know whether they are or will be good under Thomas Frank, still not much easier to know what ‘good’ actually looks like for Spurs this season. What’s the actual aim? The point?

That long-awaited trophy win has brought so much joy but robbed the club of what had become its driving focus over the last few years. Throw that into a club in such a state of on-field and off-field flux, and the uncertainty and instability is understandable. The fans aren’t just at a loss to know what constitutes success this season; in a post-Levy world they don’t even know where to aim their ire if they don’t get it.

How much the swirling uncertainty plays a part in their wildly differing home and away form is hard to measure, but it feels too clear to ignore altogether. Only rock-bottom misery-bound Wolves have a worse home record than Spurs. Nobody has a better away record.

It does seem unlikely that both those things remain true for long; the key will be which moves more compelling toward the other. It’s Spurs so we don’t really know – and we genuinely wouldn’t bat an eye at the sight of them finishing fifth or 15th this season – but you the nagging suspicion is that it’s the away form that will shift most.

That’s what the eye test and data all suggest. Another good Spurs bit this season is that they remain relentless xG botherers. According to the boffins they should have scored way fewer and conceded way more goals than is in fact the case.

Now significantly overperforming their xG is nothing new to Spurs. Historically it’s been because, in Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, this profoundly silly club possessed two of the most profoundly sensible finishers. When your two main goalscorers both consistently, year after year, exceed their xG then it should come as no surprise that a) you as a team will exceed your xG more often than not or more widely that b) playing with that outcome in mind becomes not just understandable but advisable.

All perfectly logical and explainable. So how do we explain what’s happening now? How do we explain that a team that struggles to create pretty much anything is still wildly exceeding its xG while its most reliable finisher is a f***ing centre-back?

And the only explanation that really works is, simply: Spurs, that.

8) Chelsea (4)

We couldn’t understand them as a football club, so we simply stopped trying and started treating them as something else.

Which is fine everywhere except here, because how to rank the mood at so unfathomable a club? Third in the league and not technically out of title contention despite themselves is pretty good, though, and especially for a team that clearly has levels it’s not yet reaching.

They’re not even as inconsistent as you think they are, not really. The defeat to Sunderland was maddening and avoidable, but it’s also the only defeat in a nine-game run across three competitions that features seven wins. The draw in that run? A really daft one as well, obviously, against Qarabag in the Champions League.

They do appear determined to just chuck one of those games in every now and then to keep us all guessing, keep us all on our toes.

7) Bournemouth (5)

A couple of hefty defeats, at Manchester City and then particularly at Aston Villa, have just harshed the buzz a bit for the Cherries, but from where they were in the summer to where they are now is still pretty crazy.

We’re not sure anyone should really be able to cope with losing the players Bournemouth have lost with so apparently few consequences. This led us to believe some kind of witchcraft was involved, and we now believe losing 4-0 at Aston Villa to be an over-cautious act of misdirection and deception designed to put us all off the scent.

It won’t work, Andoni. We’re entirely crazy, and you’ve just if anything made us more suspicious. We’re watching you.

6) Manchester United (16)

So, are they good now, or what? We demand to be told.

Our gut feeling is that they still aren’t actually good, but they are no longer at least actively bad. They’ve been slightly fortunate at various points across this redemptive run of results, and quite how much they’ve benefited from the gentle luxury of a one-game-a-week schedule granted by their own incompetence might become clearer in December when they join everyone else in overindulging through the Busy Festive Period.

But look, two months ago you’d have been laughed out of town even for proposing the question ‘Are Man United good now?’ so the progress is real and undeniable. And it’s very, very funny that they are above Liverpool in the league table now.

5) Brentford (14)

We are in full hands-up mode here, because we thought they would be absolutely buggered without Thomas Frank and a great many of their best players and having entrusted their continued Premier League security to a rookie manager.

Instead, turns out they are absolutely fine, and that promoting the set-piece coach was a genius idea because, if anything, they’ve just got even better at scoring from set-pieces. Can already count Aston Villa, Manchester United, Liverpool and Newcastle among their victims this season since defeat at Nottingham Forest on the opening weekend of the season, already a strong contender for most deceptive result of the season.

Still going strong in the Carabao as well, and Manchester City should hold no grave fears for a team that can long-throw with the very best of them.

4) Aston Villa (17)

It’s already been a season of two halves for Aston Villa, which is a decent effort really when we’re not even a third of the way through the thing.

For six games it really was bleak, the disappointment at how last season ended bleeding into a moribund start to this campaign, one in which five of their first six games ended either 0-0, 1-1 or a 1-0 defeat with the one exception a 3-0 paddling from Crystal Palace.

It really did look and feel like something coming to an end. A bold and often brilliant attempt to disrupt the established Premier League elite under the astute leadership of Unai Emery, a manager who really quite recently found a club battling against relegation back to the Championship.

Didn’t feel at all right that it might happen with nothing tangible to show for it, Villa having bollocksed some pretty presentable trophy opportunities, including but not limited to last season’s FA Cup and the Europa Conference League the year before – a competition not even West Ham had managed to West Ham up.

But now, 10 games and eight wins later? All is once again well and the positive vibes are there for all to see. They’ve started beating decent teams in compelling fashion, even if the two defeats during that run are curiosities – against mid-crisis Liverpool in the Premier League and at Go Ahead Eagles in the Europa League.

That Europa League defeat feels particularly incongruous, sitting as it does between deserved wins over Spurs and Man City in the league but also in stark contrast to what we think is in fact responsible for turning Villa’s season around.

European football can be a curious beast. It can be both benefit and burden, often in the same season and occasionally even at the exact same time.

Villa and Newcastle are not remotely the same club, but they are essentially trying to achieve the same thing: muscle in on the big boys’ turf. And we really don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that they keep alternating Champions League status at the expense of both each other and whichever Big Six clubs happen to be in the process of fumbling about at that particular time.

Newcastle are doing perfectly well in the Champions League, but its toll is already visible on their doom-spiralling league form. And ‘success’ in a competition you have no realistic chance of actually winning isn’t really worth it when your domestic form suffers.

Villa, by contrast, are in the very winnable indeed Europa League which changes everything. There is not the same stress or toll on the same group of players. There is greater scope for personnel changes and the greater possibility that success in one competition boosts the other rather than the reverse.

We’re not saying Villa are better off out of the Champions League, because who knows how different their summer might have looked had they made it. There’s also the financial implications of which tournament you’re in, which for Villa – who continue to fly close to the PSR wind – are more significant than their rivals.

But missing out on the Champions League isn’t all bad. Spurs fans were widely mocked for ‘celebrating’ their Arsenal-scuppering defeat to Man City that may have cost them a Champions League place. A year later, they won the Europa League.

There really is absolutely no reason Villa can’t go and do the same this season, and even if they don’t the Europa League has already had a positive kick-starting effect on their season. That divide between the bad and good parts of their season to date sits conveniently but not coincidentally on the moment their Europa League campaign began.

And there really is every chance for things to get better yet, with Leeds, Young Boys, Wolves and Brighton to come in the first couple of weeks after the international break, before what does admittedly look like an absolute tw*t of a December where they have to play Man United, Chelsea and for some reason Arsenal twice.

3) Manchester City (13)

Something is happening. They’re still going to need a bit of help from Arsenal, but something is happening. They are the last club Arsenal would want to see looming over their shoulder, and Arsenal the club City would feel most confident pursuing.

For both clubs, there is just so much muscle memory at play.

The likelihood remains that City do come up short and that will mean a previously unthinkable two consecutive seasons without the title for Pep Guardiola. But even if that does happen, he appears reinvigorated and engaged again with the challenge of turning a new-look squad playing a slightly different version of Pepball into challengers once more.

For so much of last season, Guardiola just clearly wasn’t enjoying himself or the challenge as City’s season collapsed in on itself around this time last year.

At that point, there appeared a very good chance he wouldn’t even still be in charge of City this season, never mind back challenging at the very sharpest end of the title race.

And history does tell us that if Pep’s City are in the title race at all, they generally come out on top.

It still seems pretty clear that Arsenal are the best team in the country, but City and Pep know better than most that title races involve more than just that.

2) Arsenal (8)

You couldn’t blame them if some old memories are resurfacing, some wounds reopening. Their first dropped points – and first conceded goals – in ages happening the same weekend Man City produce a statement mauling of Liverpool to cut the lead back to four points.

It’s understandable, when you’ve finished second for three seasons in a row, that nagging doubts are par for the course.

But really, there is no need to be alarmed. A 2-2 draw at Sunderland is a far better result than might have been expected to be the case. Plenty of good teams will go there and lose before the season is out.

And Arsenal are still clearly the team to beat in the title race this time. They have comfortably the best defence, an elite midfield and an attacking method that boils p*ss yet gets the job done with confirmed regularity.

They have the deepest squad by far among the contenders as well as the most sustainable, repeatable method. For all the moral panic about set-piece goals, the only valid criticism is about becoming too predictable and reliant. But Arsenal are no more reliant on set-piece goals than City are on Erling Haaland ones.

And that draw at Sunderland draw was moments away from being to our mind the perfect result. Had they managed to win 2-1, having gone behind, with open-play goals, away against a really decent team, it would have answered so many questions – fair and unfair – while also shutting down the noise around clean sheets and all-time defensive records before they became a distraction from the main business at hand.

Right now it really does feel like the season where Arsenal end that wait for a trophy, and that really should involve winning (at least) one of the big two given the way they’ve started both at home and in Europe.

But… what if they don’t do that? No dodging the fact this would already constitute the worst failure yet should that in fact be the banter timeline upon which we land.

1) Sunderland (1)

Even giddier than they were in September and absolutely fair enough it is too.

They are absolutely flying and we’re now way beyond ‘excitingly decent start’ and firmly into something that looks decidedly sustainable. They’ve just given Arsenal as good a game as anyone this season, with the first half at the Stadium of Light perhaps the best anyone, anywhere has yet played against the champions-elect.

And they’re doing it time and again. There’s no longer any mystery to them being as high up the table as they are; they’re just playing that well.

They’ve already pretty much taken relegation off the table, and while it’s fun to compare them to previous promoted sides they’ve already surpassed, it’s also now largely pointless. To consider this Sunderland team in terms of what promoted teams can or should achieve in their first season. How Sunderland compare to Southampton is simply no longer relevant.