Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s Premier League football.
This was the weekend when Arsenal and Manchester City recovered from early scares to seal important wins, Leicester got their first victory of the season, Manchester United and Aston Villa served up one of the most boring games you’ll ever watch and Brentford blitzed Wolves.
Here we will ask whether Arne Slot’s Liverpool can win the title despite their lack of spending, what conclusions can be drawn about a deeply confusing Tottenham and salute the staying power of Michail Antonio.
Have Liverpool got enough to challenge City?
In the summer of 2016, when Pep Guardiola arrived at Manchester City, they spent something in the region of £135million ($177m at current rates) on new players which included Nolito, Ilkay Gundogan and goalkeeper Claudio Bravo.
The same summer Liverpool shelled out a little under £70million, signing Sadio Mane and Gini Wijnaldum among others, to complement the appointment of Jurgen Klopp during the previous season.
Again in 2016 (a busy year in both the managerial and transfer market), Chelsea helped Antonio Conte settle in by spending a little under £120million, £32million of which went on N’Golo Kante.
We could go on, way back through the years, but these are the last three managers to win the Premier League, and it illustrates well enough that when managers take big jobs, it’s usually accompanied with their club spending quite a lot of money, which more often than not will include recruiting players very much suited to the new boss’s style.
That wasn’t the case this summer at Liverpool. Arne Slot’s task in succeeding their most transformational manager since Bill Shankly was always going to be pretty tough, but after barely spending anything, and not bringing in at least one player key to the manager’s approach, it looked even tougher. Their only senior signing was Federico Chiesa, in the closing stages of the window, and that was an opportunistic move rather than part of a grand plan.
But Slot is seven Premier League games in and, aside from the one hiccup against Nottingham Forest, it could barely have gone better. The win over Crystal Palace this weekend won’t go down as one of the great Liverpool performances, but the victory leaves them with 18 points and top of the table at the second international break.
The caveat is that their fixture list has been kind (their highest-placed opponent so far has been tenth-placed Forest) but Slot has exceeded expectations, and will inevitably lead us to ask whether they are true title contenders in what was supposed to be a transitional season.
They could well be, given the possible fragility of Manchester City. Granted, suggesting Guardiola’s side look vulnerable is a dangerous game, as they have a tendency to make prophets of doom look extremely silly, but with the absence of Rodri, the points they’ve dropped so far, plus the pressure of Arsenal and Liverpool, is this finally the season they slip?
Can anyone be certain about Tottenham?
It’s easy to think, especially if you spend too much time on the internet, that everyone is absolutely certain of everything these days. Opinions are strident, takes are white hot, the fear of not having a clear position on something can often be interpreted as some sort of weakness.
But if anyone can draw together a definitive, clear, certain opinion about Tottenham Hotspur, then hats off, you have my admiration. Because they seem to be a deeply, deeply confusing football team.
The game against Brighton was exhibit A in this theatre of uncertainty. In the first half, they were fluid, clinical, certain and full of purpose. They scored one goal and had another disallowed for a narrow offside. Brighton were floundering.
In the second, everything flipped. From the moment Yankuba Minteh scored Brighton’s first you essentially knew how the next half an hour or so would go. It was 3-2 in quick time, and from that point it never really looked like Spurs would come back.
On Sky Sports after the game, former Tottenham striker Dimitar Berbatov speculated that they became complacent at half-time, assuming the game was won, which explains their mental as much as tactical collapse. In his post-match interview, Ange Postecoglou didn’t do much to dispel that theory.
“We got carried away,” Postecoglou said. “In the second half, we kind of accepted our fate, which is quite hard to understand because we haven’t done that since I’ve got here. When you do that, you pay the price.
“It’s a terrible loss for us, as bad as it gets, and that’s my responsibility.”
So which one is the real Tottenham? The incisive, alpha dogs of the first 45 minutes, or the shuffling, blind puppies of the second? Maybe it’s both, and the reason why it’s difficult to come up with a definitive conclusion about Postecoglou’s Tottenham is that there isn’t one. Two things can be true at once — in broad brushstrokes, they can be brilliant and they can be utterly awful — which is good news for the amateur philosophers among us, but not so great for Tottenham.
Had they even managed to pair their first-half excellence with some second-half basic competence, they would be skipping into the international break in sixth place, just a point off the top four. As it is they are ninth, level on points with Nottingham Forest and have left their fans and manager stewing, the consequences of this defeat sticking with them like a nasty headache.
Why is Antonio still West Ham’s most reliable striker?
The world was a very different place when Michail Antonio signed for West Ham United in the summer of 2015.
But some things have stayed the same. Such as the Hammers’ perennial centre-forward problem.
This had been going since before Antonio arrived. Since they were promoted back to the Premier League in 2012, their inability to find — and hold onto — a reliable No 9 has been remarkable. Diafra Sakho scored 10 league goals in 2014-15 but then only managed eight over the following three seasons, and Marko Arnautovic got 11 and 10 in 2017-18 and 2018-19 before catching whiff of the riches of the Chinese Super League. Beyond that, their most reliable sources of goals have been either midfielders or repurposed wingers.
In the nine years since Antonio arrived, West Ham have signed 13 genuine strikers. They are Nikica Jelavic, Simone Zaza, Ashley Fletcher, Jonathan Calleri, Andre Ayew, Jordan Hugill, Arnautovic, Javier Hernandez, Lucas Perez, Sebastian Haller, Danny Ings, Gianluca Scamacca and Niclas Fullkrug.
Perhaps you can quibble with some of the categorisations in that list, and it doesn’t include players like Jarrod Bowen, sometimes used as a striker but a winger by trade.
But none of those 13 players have stuck — according to Transfermarkt, they have cost in the region of £175million — and between them scored 68 Premier League goals.
Number of Premier League goals scored by Antonio, after his opener against Ipswich on Saturday? 68.
It’s a neat statistical coincidence, but it illustrates his powers of longevity, determination and adaptability, and is also an indictment of West Ham’s transfer policy. Perhaps Fullkrug will come good, but once again this season it feels like West Ham will be looking around for a No 9, find that the cupboard is bare and return to old faithful, Michail Antonio, who will continue scoring goals.
Coming up
It’s easy to think of the men’s international break as a complete footballing wasteland, and it does perhaps represent a good time to take a deep breath, have some time off from the game and participate in some other pursuits. But if you insist on sticking with it, there is still plenty to hold your attention: