Arsenal top, Wolves bottom, Liverpool being sh*t and other inevitable Premier League things

We’re precisely 100 games into the Premier League season, so that feels as good a time as any really to take stock, have a look at the way the land lies and agree upon 10 things that have happened that were obviously always going to happen.

And when we can’t do that, to just instead fill that top 10 with stuff that we absolutely should have seen coming and are damn fools for not realising were quite this inevitable.

Of course Arsenal are top of the table. Of course Liverpool’s defence is sh*t. Of course Sunderland are fourth. Join us on our mission to prove once again that hindsight is always 20:20.

Arsenal being top of the table

To reiterate: yes, there’s going to be a lot of 20:20 hindsight in considering some of these things that, it turns out, were inevitable. A lot of the time, as it generally is, the joke will be on us. A lot of these are actually fuelled by self-recrimination and disappointment in ourselves for not seeing it coming.

But f*cking hell, how did so few of us see this coming? Almost everyone got very starry-eyed about Liverpool getting all starry-eyed. Signing all those eye-catching attacking players on the back of winning the league with the old manager’s squad. They were going to p*ss it, weren’t they? And if not them, then City, who had started their preparations for this season a whole six months early with their January spending.

Yet there, all along, were Arsenal. The most consistent team in the country over the last three seasons who spent the summer calmly and impressively improving both the first XI and the squad in just about every single department.

We’re not saying we should all have predicted a six-point lead and almost no plausible rival and the fact their defence has become so thoroughly effective as to fundamentally break the sport, but it really was always quite likely that these lads might be leading the way at a quarter distance.

Premier League table since August 2022:

The Big Three being the top three

The secret of comedy is timing. And the first 100 games of this Premier League season have shown it. Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool being the top three in the Premier League? Not funny at all. Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool being the top three in the way they’ve ended up there? Very funny.

Liverpool are third despite a full-blown crisis and their manager donning the tinfoil, Manchester City have been utterly rotten in a few alarming defeats and have now turned absolute reliance on the goals of Erling Haaland into a feature rather than a bug, and the perennial runners-up Arsenal appear set to absolutely run away with the league on the back of a series of p*ss-boiling set-piece-based 1-0 wins which are just so Arsenal heritage.

To our enormous surprise, we have become enormous fans of this Arsenal side for the sheer scale of the housery and the fact they have not only stopped conceding goals but even shots on target. David Raya is now less busy than most third-choice goalkeepers, set to win the Golden Glove without even dirtying his own. It’s an absolutely tremendous bit.

We’re pretty much handing them the title already because they are both so good at what they do and everyone else so fragile that it already feels done. What we’re interested in now is whether they can break one of the most unbreakable of all Premier League records which, fair play, we are not going to be putting in a list of Things That Were Obviously Going To Happen.

Wolves being bottom and changing manager in November

We’ve held our hands up already and admitted we didn’t quite realise just how obviously inevitable some of these inevitably obvious things actually were until they happened, so we hope you will indulge a bit of abysmal boasting on this one, because we totally saw it coming and have duly awarded ourselves three ego puff points.

Our Spidey Senses started tingling on this one right back in May, when Wolves followed that six-game winning run that rubberstamped their ongoing Premier League status with four winless games to round out the season.

A bad finish to one season bleeding into the next and requiring an urgent managerial change in November is as pure a slice of Wolves as Old Gold, Steve Bull and journeyman Portuguese recruits.

And here they are, in November, bottom of the table and without a win, parting company with Vitor Pereira after all his good works last season.

A shame, though, that they now apparently won’t be bringing back Gary O’Neil a year after sacking him in the precise 10-game-winless-run-just-after-handing-out-a-new-contract conditions they now find themselves in once more.

That was a gloriously lower mid-table Serie A idea and we were already quite excited by the idea of O’Neil returning for his fourth spell at Wolves in around 2031 and bringing a lovely touch of Genoese glamour to the West Midlands.

Thomas Frank small-timing the Spurs job

It was fairly clear what attracted Spurs to the idea of Thomas Frank, a manager who they hoped would – and he still might – find some spot in the absurdly vast middle ground between the defensive and attacking extremes of their recent managers.

But while curbing the defensive insanity of the Postecoglou era was a necessary first step we really are going to have to see some signs quite soon of just some kind of creativity and verve going the other way. Spurs have scored a surprisingly large number of goals, but watching them is not any kind of fun and almost all of those goals seem to be own goals, involve massive deflections, or come from set-pieces.

We’re not saying that invalidates those goals, before you start. Just that there appears to be some good fortune in where Frank’s Spurs currently sit, with both their xG for and against wildly at odds with current reality. Their away form is brilliant and their home form wretched, but the reversion to the mean when it comes doesn’t currently feel like it’s going to come in a good way.

Frank has been slightly hamstrung by the absence of Dejan Kulusevski and James Maddison, who would be expected to provide a huge chunk of that missing creativity in a post-Son world, but it doesn’t really justify abandoning the entire concept of attacking so completely and thoroughly as they did against what is a very beatable Chelsea side on Saturday night.

Frank is still playing like an underdog and needs to work out fast that the game has changed for him now he’s at Spurs not Brentford. A 1-0 home defeat to Chelsea lingers longer in the memory and creates a sharper narrative than a 3-0 away win at Everton.

He faces a huge week both in Europe and domestically. He must get at least one compelling performance out of his side against Copenhagen and Man United or it’s going to be a long and uncomfortable international break.

Erling Haaland crushing all-comers for the Golden Boot

Had his birthright taken from him last season by an extraordinary season for Mo Salah and Liverpool, but there were signs towards the end of even that season that Salah might be slowing down, while the whole Alexander Isak Saga and its conclusion had the happy – for Haaland anyway – effect of creating further doubt about the only two remaining Premier League players with any significant proven track record of being able to take him on. In Salah’s case there is also AFCON taking him out of Barclays action for an extended period of time.

There’s not even a Jamie Vardy or Son Heung-min knocking about the Premier League these days to try and desperately turn back the clock.

And sure enough, here we are three months into the season and nobody else has even half as many goals as Haaland, who is more of a focal point than ever for a Man City team whose second top scorer in the Premier League this season, a mere 11 goals behind the big fella, is Maxime Esteve own goals. Which, in fairness, was not inevitable and none of us should be kicking ourselves for missing that one.

Mo Salah’s continued decline

Let’s get in straight away and say we’re talking relatively here. We’re not saying he’s sh*t, okay? He’s not sh*t. But he’s also now unfortunately at an age where he will never again be allowed to have a tricky little run of form – by his own impossibly high standards – without questions and fears over whether that’s all it is or whether it’s the start of terminal decline. That’s the reality for any player past the big 30.

And to highlight just how relative a decline we’re talking about here for Salah, he’s still scored eight goals in 17 appearances across all competitions this season as a wide forward. Most would be perfectly happy with that, but Salah is not most players and it also feels fair enough to note that his overall contribution to Liverpool feels less potent and less significant than it has before. He just doesn’t look the player he once was as the remaining familiar face in a new-look attack.

But the seeds of this season’s struggle were sown at the end of the last campaign. When Salah scored twice in the second half to help Liverpool avoid coming embarrassingly unstuck at home against Southampton in March, it took his latest run of scoring form to 11 goals in 11 games in which only Newcastle and PSG had managed to keep him out.

In his remaining 14 Liverpool games of the season he added only two further goals, and one of those was against Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham during those giddy months when they’d stopped even pretending to try in the Premier League.

Liverpool were themselves in giddy title-celebrating mode at the time, of course, a title win powered to a large extent by all the great many important goals Salah had scored before he just pretty much stopped scoring any more goals, so quite rightly nobody much cared. The job was done. But now…

Liverpool’s defence being a bit sh*t

And again here we find ourselves looking slightly more closely than we were particularly minded at the time at the way Liverpool closed out last season for evidence that was there all along ahead of this campaign.

In the last 10 Premier League games of last season, Liverpool kept only two clean sheets. At home against Everton, who scored fewer away goals last season than everyone except Southampton, and at Leicester, who did manage to outscore both Southampton and Ipswich for home goals but still had at least eight fewer than any of the 17 teams who weren’t forlornly and obviously going down by March.

And now here we are in November with Liverpool’s defence often looking a complete mess. Virgil van Dijk is no longer a calming and reassuring guarantee of excellence, instead now often resorting to desperately looking around to try and understand who or what is the cause of the chaos unfolding and, generally, settling on Milos Kerkez – which is fair enough – when as often as not a bit of introspection wouldn’t go amiss. Ibrahima Konate has also looked more liability than linchpin, while the sheer extent to which Liverpool have come to realise they depended on Trent Alexander-Arnold’s unique full-back-playmaker toolkit has seen them deploy Dominik Szoboszlai as a right-back on more than one occasion.

The result? The only team in the top half to have conceded more goals than Liverpool is Manchester United, and they’re universally accepted to be a clownish gaggle of clowns acting clownishly. Liverpool are supposed to not be that. They’ve conceded more goals than Arsenal and City combined at this point, and that’s not going to work at all.

Premier League table since March 8 2025:

Chelsea being just unfathomable

We should all just give up trying to predict or understand anything about Chelsea. And by that we mean from season to season and game to game. We all fell for it, didn’t we? In the summer? That Chelsea could be title contenders? Could they f*ck. You actually have to care a tiny bit about the actual football to actually be that.

And as we’ve now established, the only way to understand Chelsea at all is to stop pretending that they, as a business, are primarily a football club. Once you find the correct prism to view them, they do start to at least make a bit of sense. And they’re very good at what they’re really trying to do.

But what that does leave us with is a messy football team that is full of excellent players who only sometimes combine to form a coherent football team.

So yes, they can go and paddle West Ham 5-1 and yes, they can go and lose to Manchester United when their crisis was at its deepest and most profound. They can win six games out of eight, but the other two games can be home defeats to Brighton and Sunderland.

They can reach the quarter-finals of the Carabao, but do so by scraping past Lincoln and emerging blinking yet somehow unscathed from a seven-goal whirlwind against the worst team in the Premier League who are about to sack their manager.

And having shipped three goals at Molineux, they can then turn up at the Premier League’s joint top scorers and win 1-0 while looking like they might never concede a goal ever again.

Chelsea’s next four games are against Qarabag, Wolves, Burnley and Barcelona. Only a fool would try and predict what they will do in those games, which is obviously to beat Barcelona 4-1 while losing at least one of the other three.

Someone falling for Ange’s ‘who we are, mate’ charms and immediately regretting it

We weren’t entirely sure who it would be, but in hindsight Nottingham Forest were always a good fit. They got very cocky on the back of last season’s success, didn’t they? Went to their heads, didn’t it? Mr Marinakis was bristling with Main Character Energy and had clearly by the end of last season had enough of Nuno Espirito Santo, who had clearly also had enough of Mr Marinakis.

That misplaced, hubristic sense of having outgrown the need to worry about the worst that could happen and think only of the best that could happen as a now, in their own minds, established top-half Premier League powerhouse were just the conditions required for Ange Postecoglou’s undoubted charms to appeal to an over-confident chairman who yearned for something more.

Postecoglou, for his part, also needed to move fast if he was to get another Premier League chance. It had to happen while the Europa League glory was still fresh enough in the collective memory to override the sheer sh*tbone awfulness of his last 18 months’ work in the Premier League.

None of the actual big clubs would touch him, but an overachiever that found themselves by hook or by crook in the very Europa League he’d just won with the most trophy-averse collection of pot-dodgers in the land? That could definitely work.

Except, of course, it definitely couldn’t. The only surprising thing about Postecoglou’s failure at Forest was the sheer horrifying, breakneck speed at which it all thoroughly yet so predictably unravelled in a flurry of beautiful goals scored but far, far more avoidably stupid ones conceded in a bleak and slapstick winless run.

Sunderland being in the top four

So predictable. So boring.

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