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Without angering Liverpool supporters, who have also had a great time watching others drop points, Manchester City have come back from Sadi Arabia and already taken steps closer to another retention of their title. That’s because their victory over Sheffield United combined with Arsenal’s second defeat in a row, this time at Fulham.
Nuno’s impressive start at Forest continued with a 2-1 home win over Manchester United that continues the Erik ten Hag sack hokey-cokey – United were rotten throughout and yet Ten Hag says he’s clearly the man for the job.
The bottom three all lost again, meaning that a gap has opened up. That said, Everton’s good recent run has come to an abrupt end and Brentford are in danger of getting sucked into trouble.
Scroll down for my verdict on every team (listed in table order)…
This weekend’s results
Saturday 30 December
- Luton 2-3 Chelsea
- Aston Villa 3-2 Burnley
- Crystal Palace 3-1 Brentford
- Man City 2-0 Sheffield United
- Wolves 3-0 Everton
- Nottingham Forest 2-1 Man Utd
Sunday 31 December
Monday 1 January
- Liverpool vs Newcastle
Tuesday 2 January
- West Ham vs Brighton
Liverpool
Play Newcastle on New Year’s Day.
Aston Villa
First Sheffield United and now Burnley. I don’t know if it is because opposition managers have started to identify methods for overcoming Villa’s home strengths, but they have conceded three goals against the worst two teams in the division and are incredibly lucky to come out of them with four points.
Still, the other theme of those two results is Unai Emery’s team scoring late goals. This makes it 10 after the 80th minute in the league this season. Since the beginning of December alone, they have earned six extra points from the 85th minute onwards.
It plays into the other theme of this Villa season. In 2021-22, what we might now call The Bad Times, Villa trailed in 24 of their 38 league games. They won one of those 24 matches and collected points at a rate of 0.29 per game in which they trailed.
So far in 2023-24, Villa have trailed in 10 of their 20 league matches, comfortably a higher percentage than Manchester City and Arsenal. Villa have now won three and drawn three of those 10 matches and collected points at a rate of 1.2 per game in which they trailed. It’s not the only difference, but boy does it help.
Man City
This is something we say quite a lot, but this week brought another reminder that footballers are not immune from the rigours of non-football life and, in plenty of cases, are actually more exposed to them.
Jack Grealish was substituted after 52 minutes of Manchester City’s victory over Sheffield United after a fairly ineffective display. After the game, Pep Guardiola explained that he wanted more energy and almost didn’t start Grealish after the week he had had.
Because, while Grealish was playing against Everton on 27 December, burglars entered his house while his fiancee, parents and siblings were inside. They were watching the game, realised that intruders had entered and pressed panic buttons that informed the police while they hid themselves away.
Being an elite footballer is about talent and technique and relentless repetitive hard physical work even when your body is aching. But it’s also about a clarity of mind to think in brief flickers of moments and make the right call. That’s hard to learn anyway, but imagine knowing when you step onto the pitch what happened the last time you did it. We can only wish Grealish and his family well.
Arsenal
Nobody would be foolish enough to suggest that the magic is running out, but it’s certainly true that Arsenal haven’t looked like a top-four team in either of their last two league games, let alone one that will challenge for the title. It is relevant too that they will end the year a single point ahead of Tottenham and 10 points behind where they were last season. Spurs are in the first year of their new age. After spending more than £200m in the summer, was this not supposed to be the peak of Arsenal’s?
The issue, at least to a casual observer of Arsenal, is that they have become a little too Wenger-like in possession. Last season, even when teams defended deep, Arsenal were able to get players into space, either by exploiting slack marking or, more often, playing quick passes. Now that’s just not happening. The passing is way too slow in every area of the pitch, but particularly between 50 and 30 yards from the opposition’s goal.
They pass, they pass and they pass and then they act a little offended and surprised when there is no space to work in. Nobody ever seems to play a proper give-and-go down the wing or take on their man. It has got noticeably worse over the last five games – Arsenal have taken four points from them.
This style itself need not be a problem. To an extent what we are describing here is Manchester City football, but then Manchester City have Erling Haaland who, even when his radar is off, has the movement to get between four and six shots per game. Arsenal do not possess such a striker. They have Gabriel Jesus, who has taken 31 shots this season and scored three goals. Arsenal are playing the type of football that relies upon a clinical striker when they know they do not have a clinical striker. Sorry, there’s a reason Manchester City let him leave and there’s a reason why Eddie Nketiah will eventually join a mid-table club.
Perhaps the break will help. Arsenal do not play a league game until 20 January and do not play a top-half team until 4 February. The transfer window is likely to provide options and it might well be that Arsenal have to do more – and pay more – than they would like to re-energise the title bid.
But this is already getting very expensive and we are permitted to ask questions of what Mikel Arteta has as well as what he wants. Why is the left flank not working? Why does it feel like Bukayo Saka or nobody? Why are teams able to stretch Arsenal wide when they’re out of possession and create gaps centrally? Why are so many of the forwards not prolific in terms of goals? And why did they spend all that money on Kai Havertz when they needed a clinical scorer?
Tottenham
A crucial win, not only because it ensured Tottenham quickly overcame the disappointment of the Brighton chaos and not only because they needed all the points they could get before losing players to the Asian Cup and Africa Cup of Nations. Crucial because Spurs sustained yet more injuries and yet managed to manage.
This is all getting a bit silly. To have one player walk from the field in tears and into the manager’s arms is unfortunate, but to have two on the same afternoon suffer that fate suggests some sort of ancient curse. Pape Matar Sarr may miss Afcon; Alejo Veliz is just gutted to have his potential breakout ruined.
Ange Postecoglou is aware that playing his football without first-team players and without those who fit the needs of the system is akin to surrender – we saw that against Brighton. But then what else can you do when you are missing Yves Bissouma, James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski (that one a suspension), Ivan Perisic, Cristian Romero, Ryan Sessegnon, Manor Solomon and Micky van de Ven?
Supporters of other teams will hate this (and I fully understand why). But to beat in-form teams with that many absentees to go three points from the top of the Premier League having also lost arguably the best player in the club’s history and overhauled the team’s style is absolutely incredible.
West Ham
Play Brighton on 2 January. But David Moyes is signing a new deal so that’s genuinely fascinating because it is absolutely deserved and yet nobody can confidently state that it is a good idea.
Man Utd
Hear me out, and many of you will take little persuasion, but I think that Antony might just be the worst pound-for-pound signing in Premier League history.
He cost £86m, which probably just knocks him into second place on the list of the most expensive Manchester United players of all time. Paul Pogba wins that award, and that one also didn’t work out. But at least with Pogba, there was historic evidence for it being a good signing and there was more than the odd flash of excellence.
With Antony, reports suggest that he was valued at around £25m. Which is probably about right for a 22-year-old who had scored or assisted 12 goals in the Eredivisie the season before (for a dominant team) and just broken into Brazil’s senior squad. Then, as those reports continue, Manchester United lost to Brighton and Brentford at the start of Erik ten Hag’s first season and the need for a new player went up and so did the price – by £60m!
But here’s the thing: Manchester United already had wingers. Their starting right winger against Brighton in the opening game was Jadon Sancho, who had performed in fits and starts but in a vastly underperforming team – he cost £75m. On the bench was Alejandro Garnacho, who came on.
Also on the bench, and also brought on, was Anthony Elanga. Elanga was an academy graduate with a lofty reputation who was two years younger than Antony. Not on the bench was Amad Diallo, a winger who United had paid around £20m for to Atalanta. The deal for Antony got done. Diallo was loaned to Sunderland.
As a result – directly or indirectly – Sancho became disillusioned with Antony taking, and subsequently keeping, his place in the team. You can argue amongst yourselves about whether Sancho’s reaction was justified, but has still caused a £75m signing to be banished from the club.
As a result, Diallo had his pathway blocked and on Saturday played his first minutes since December 2021 – incredible for a £20m player.
As a result, Elanga was sold for £15m, roughly six times cheaper than Antony, and has scored or assisted 10 league goals for Forest this season. Only four players aged 21 and under have contributed more in Europe’s top five leagues.
And for what? Antony was abject against Nottingham Forest. He did not have a shot. He did not win a header. He did not create a chance. He was dispossessed four times, more than any other player on the pitch. He completed one dribble but then lost the ball anyway. He was taken off after 53 minutes and he was lucky to last that long.
But then that has become par for the course. Antony is the £86m winger who has created 16 chances in 16 league games this season, and few of those involved a piece of special skill beyond, say, Diallo. The last time that Antony contributed a goal or assist in any competition for Manchester United, it was a square pass to Anthony Martial against Wolves on 13 May 2023. The prosecution rests.
Brighton
Play West Ham on 2 January.
Newcastle
Play Liverpool on New Year’s Day.
Chelsea
It isn’t guaranteed, because he still has work to do and there are other players in this squad that Gareth Southgate likes (Ben Chilwell, Conor Gallagher, Levi Colwill), but with Reece James perma-injured and Raheem Sterling now out of favour for club and country, there is a slim chance that Cole Palmer might be the only Chelsea representative in England’s Euro 2024 squad. Imagine being told that 12 months ago.
Palmer is a delightfully Manchester City academy player. You see that in what he does but also what he doesn’t do. This isn’t Conor Gallagher, all-action and desperate to be involved. Opta produced a statistic that Gallagher is the only player in Europe’s big five leagues this season with 20 or more shots, 20 or more chances created, 20 or more dribbles completed, 20 or more touches in the opposition box, 20 or more duels won, 20 or more tackles and 20 or more interceptions, and that absolutely makes sense.
Palmer is different. He is not always looking to be involved, without and with the ball. He completed only 21 passes against Luton and had 38 touches of the ball, only three more than Armando Broja (who came off after 61 minutes). Rather than dominating the ball, he instead looks to make a difference when he gets it. With eight goals and four assists in 16 league games, only 12 of which were starts, it is working a charm.
Wolves
All hail the king of Molineux after Wolves’ most complete performance of 2023 in their final game. Gary O’Neil took 51 Premier League points in 2023, enough to put him 12th in the Premier League. Given that he was managing a relegation-threatened Bournemouth and a Wolves side whose manager had walked out on 8 August, it is a prodigious achievement.
And so is this: the only visiting manager to keep a clean sheet at Molineux in 2023 was O’Neil himself, when visiting with Bournemouth in February.
Bournemouth
It might not be consolation to any Bournemouth supporter right now, but they broke some recent records during their away game at Tottenham. The 24 shots they took was Bournemouth’s highest ever total in a Premier League game against a Big Six team.
It was also their highest in any Premier League game since 2 January 2019 (at home to Watford), and their highest in an away Premier League game since 1 January 2018 (at Brighton). What I’m saying is that if you want entertainment and want to watch Bournemouth, go to their closest game to New Year’s Day.
Fulham
Marco Silva said that Fulham would be different when Willian and Raul Jimenez came back into the team and now we know that he is a man of his word. This is a team built upon a few ageing stars who are surrounded by energy and endeavour to make a team far greater than the sum of its parts, but you can ill-afford to take the senior ones out.
The great Jimenez redemption arc also continues apace – he now has four goals in his last four games, as many as in his previous 50 games. But then that is pretty logical because – and this is hardly rocket science – Jimenez is taking more shots. Fulham try to stretch their opponents wide (they did so brilliantly against Arsenal) to create space for their centre forward.
"Back from suspension, back on the scoresheet!"
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) December 31, 2023
Jiménez finishes off a fine Fulham move!pic.twitter.com/fwVnEqTtnS
Jimenez does not have extreme pace, but he is a fine one-touch finisher and can win a header in the box. What he needs, if he’s playing on his own up front, is fewer players patrolling him.
In the Forest win, when Fulham did the same thing, Jimenez had six shots. Against Arsenal on Sunday, he had five. These are of the only three occasions since August 2021 that Jimenez has had five or more shots in a Premier League match. If you feed him, so he believes, he will score. And the evidence points in his favour.
Crystal Palace
At 1-0 down, Roy Hodgson faced the sack. By full-time, Crystal Palace’s manager was angrily talking about the disrespect he was being shown by those linking other managers to his position. Sorry Roy, but that’s the game and you know it. But the old warhorse keeps fighting on.
Do not underestimate how much Palace needed this, or how unexpected it was. Palace had scored three goals in one league game since April and had once at home in the league since May (they were both the same game – 3-2 vs Wolves in September). Hodgson was acutely aware, whether he is offended by it or not, that his job was on the line because Steve Cooper has been a target before, is now out of work and Hodgson has already said he’s leaving in May.
But when you have Michael Olise and Eberechi Eze, you have a chance. It is the great lament of Crystal Palace’s season that this was only the third time the pair have started together in any competition. It was also the story of 2022-23: Palace were without them in combination for almost three months and didn’t win a league game; they both came back and Palace took 18 points from their last 10 league games.
Nottingham Forest
The greatest compliment we can pay to Nuno is that he has won two games in the space of four days in very different ways. Against Newcastle on Boxing Day, Forest streamed forwards after conceding the first goal and won from behind in a manner that we hadn’t seen before. Against Manchester United, Nuno relied upon the Steve Cooper big home game playbook, all energy without the ball and looking for rare chances to counter without overcommitting players forwards.
And if Forest have had a specific specialty since promotion, it is grinding out brilliant home wins against those who would ordinarily expect to beat them. This season, Forest have played each of the current bottom five at home and taken just six points. Last season they lost to each of the two clubs promoted with them at home. They stayed up because they beat Arsenal, Liverpool and Brighton at the City Ground. Across all competitions since promotion, they have now beaten seven of the current top eight and drew against the other (Manchester City, 1-1).
The energy around this ground is something else when they are asked to dig in and help by their football team. The cheers for Turner’s saves after his horrendous mistake (he was faultless from then on); the roars at every tackle won and set piece cleared. Nuno has spoken at length about how important he believes this crowd are and how many points they can win. That playbook hasn’t changed from Cooper’s days to these.
Manchester United may not be Manchester United very much anymore, but for those of a certain generation they remain the big one because they ruined childhoods in the 1990s: five straight league defeats between 1996 and 1999 in which Forest conceded 24 goals and scored two. United had been one of the barometers of Forest’s success in the 70s and 80s and were then their impossible comparison.
All they wanted to do here was to feel like they could make a difference against big teams, that the gap wouldn’t be so vast that all they could do was watch and hope and offer “hard luck” glances to each other at full-time. Over the last 14 months, Forest have beaten Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United at home, each by a single goal margin. On each occasion, the atmosphere has been electric in a way that too many had never experienced before. And on each occasion, you would have to be a fool to believe that the noise and the support did not make a difference.
Brentford
If Crystal Palace vs Brentford was the battle of the teams who are most likely to be dragged into trouble (and Nottingham Forest turning around their form helps neither team), Thomas Frank is in a pickle.
Firstly, this is an awful patch but it is not unprecedented. Brentford have lost seven of their last eight games but then they lost seven of eight games (and nine of 11) in 2021-22 and they went six games without a win in March and April last year. There is clearly some social media chatter about Frank’s position, because that is inevitable when a team goes on a bad run in modern football. The panic about relegation is real and Brentford are falling.
Instead, what Brentford need to do is back Frank and help out the best manager in their history. I’m usually guarded against demanding clubs spend money, particularly in January – transfers are rarely a catch-all solution. But Frank has lost both his full-backs to longer-term injuries. Bryan Mbeumo and Kevin Schade look likely to be out for most of the rest of the season. Nobody is really certain of Ivan Toney’s future. Yoane Wissa is about to leave for the Africa Cup of Nations.
Frank has done so much at this club because everybody has been on the same page throughout the journey. He is not the type to publicly demand transfers in post-match press conferences, but that does not mean he doesn’t want them and does not mean that he doesn’t need them. This squad, particularly the attack, needs a lift.
Everton
It’s probably a little simplistic to say that Sean Dyche got the visit to Wolves badly wrong because he didn’t rotate during a busy period. Dyche made one change to his team and Gary O’Neil made two changes to his – Wolves still had plenty enough energy to win the game. But Everton did look very leggy after the first 30 minutes, when it became clear that the game plan was not working. For the first time in a while there were options off the bench and Dyche didn’t make a change until Everton were 2-0 down and the game was lost.
Dyche certainly did get it wrong by choosing to move away from a back four for only the second time this season. That meant introducing Michael Keane, who has had a rotten time of it over the last 18 months and whose presence in the team seemed to make others nervous.
By matching Wolves’ shape, Dyche effectively turned the contest into a series of one-on-one battles and Everton, depleted in energy and unfamiliar playing with a formation their opponents knew perfectly well, couldn’t cope. They conceded more than twice to a team currently outside the top seven for the first time since April and failed to have a shot on target in a league game for the first time since October 2022.
Luton
The only regret for Luton is that they could not make their extraordinary pressure pay. Between the 78th and 88th minutes on Saturday lunchtime, Luton had eight shots, six shots on target, scored twice and hit the bar once. The most astonishing element of their attempt at a miraculous comeback is that it ended up being more surprising that they did not score an equaliser.
But then this is Luton, whose goal weighting according to the time of the match is probably the most pronounced trend of any Premier League team this season. In total, Luton have scored 23 league goals. They have scored 13 of those 23 goals after the 75th minute.
Since the beginning of October, this pattern has gone into hyperdrive. Luton scored in the 84th minute against Burnley, although they ultimately lost. They scored in the 83rd and 90th minutes against Forest and drew. They scored in the 83rd minute against Villa, although they lost. They scored in the 80th minute against Liverpool and drew. They scored a winner in the 83rd minute against Palace. They scored a winner in the 81st minute against Sheffield United. They scored in the 80th and 87th minutes against Chelsea.
Luton Town have scored three times as many goals in exactly the 83rd minute as they have in the first 20 minutes. This is not normal.
Burnley
Vincent Kompany was as close as he gets to losing his cool after full-time, and you can see his point. The penalty awarded against his team with four minutes of stoppage time remaining was soft in the extreme and Kompany believed that Burnley didn’t get the rub of the green.
There were also reasons to be positive, not least Lyle Foster looking like he could be Burnley’s best hope of survival with his off-the-ball effort and on-the-ball directness. The spirit shown to get back into the game even after Sander Berge’s second yellow card (and he really is going to have to learn to control himself a little more) was outstanding.
But here’s the thing: nobody doubts Burnley’s spirit. What they doubt is the club’s ability to be better than three other teams this season if they are repeatedly unable to collect points after falling behind. For all the energy and guts at 1-0 and 2-1 down, Burnley did still lose. They have trailed in 15 of their 20 matches in the league this season, and how many points have they taken from those 15 matches? None.
Sheffield United
Given the routine defeat in a fixture that Sheffield United were almost certain to lose, it’s worth us instead looking ahead to January. Money will be tight, but Sheffield United are going to have to secure permanent or loan deals for defenders and defensive midfielders if they are to stay in the Premier League. Being only seven points from safety despite taking less than half a point per game is something to be celebrated, but you can make it 10 if Everton are successful in reducing their points deduction.
And it’s no surprise. Wes Foderingham had never played an English top-flight game before this season and he’s 32 – he kept his place in the team but Sheffield United need an upgrade. In the back three, Jack Robinson wasn’t a regular starter when they last went down and he’s 30, George Baldock is dependable but needs pace around him and Auston Trusty’s only top-flight football came in MLS.
The wing-backs are Luke Thomas and Jayden Bogle. The latter had played just over 1,000 top-flight minutes in his career before this season and the other is on loan from a relegated team for whom he started 11 times in the Premier League as they went down. In midfield, Vini Souza has played for four different clubs in three different leagues in four years and it’s a heck of an ask for him to protect the defence at 24 years old during his first months in England.
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