We’re all another month closer to the grave and that cheery start means it’s time for another update of the Mood Rankings.
Aston Villa are pretty happy and Tottenham are very miserable. No shocks there, but between those two lurk many thousands of words and all human emotions.
Last month’s rankings are in brackets, and the full reasonings can be read/mocked here.
It’s a familiar yet unfamiliar feeling for an increasingly unmoored Spurs. Events of the last six or seven months really have discombobulated everyone.
They won a trophy, which feels weird. They sacked a manager, which doesn’t. But then they sacked the man who sacked the manager, and we’re back to weird.
Watching Thomas Frank struggle desperately to find acceptable answers to the impossible Tottenham question is nothing we haven’t seen before. He may even have had his Nuno Moment with those resignation-letter substitutions in the capitulation at Forest.
What’s different is that while Tottenham fans increasingly know they don’t want Frank, there’s a lot less clarity than usual about what they do want, who they want to do it, and most importantly of all perhaps: who’s to blame for the mess.
That’s the big change. Daniel Levy’s role as lightning rod for fan anger should not be underestimated. With him out of the picture, nobody knows where to direct their ire. Is it too much to suggest the boos that rained down so infamously on Guglielmo Vicario against Fulham would in previous years have perhaps been aimed in more familiar fashion at the directors’ box?
We’ve said before that we no longer even know what success even looks like for Spurs this season, but it’s increasingly obvious that it definitely isn’t this. Frank’s version of Spurs have achieved something that you’d think impossible without real concerted effort: as moribund as Mourinho’s team in attack, as leaky and error-prone as Postecoglou’s in defence.
He might be given a bit longer, but it seems rather pointless. It’s impossibly hard to visualise him turning this around.
But that only raises the further question of who could turn this around, and compelling answers to that lie thin on the ground.
To add to the disorienting lack of familiar things to grab on to in this otherwise all-too familiar Tottenham scenario, there isn’t even Ryan Mason around these days to take the caretaker reins.
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Every Moods has a decisive ‘A month really is a long time, eh?’ moment, and already so early we have it.
A mid-table Mood Ranking back in November reflected a situation that had them reaching the third international break outside the bottom three, which already seems like a nonsense idea.
There was a note of caution even then, mind, with the observation that Forest and West Ham might have already put their silliest spells of the season behind them.
That appears even more to be the case now, while also applying to Leeds to some extent. Even Fulham.
Burnley, for their part, have picked up not one single Premier League point since the last update. It’s easy to see where one worse team than them might come from, but increasingly difficult to see where either of the other two they require might be found.
READ: Ten Premier League predictions before 2026 features three sackings
There is seething, righteous anger at what has been allowed to happen to the club over the last few years, but in terms now of this season specifically it actually could be worse.
If you’re going to get relegated – and Wolves are going to get relegated – then you might as well do it without taunting your poor long-suffering fans with futile, nagging hope.
It is the cruellest and most mischievous of all emotions, and say what you like about everything Wolves have or haven’t done this season, you cannot argue they have been so cruel as to allow even the tiniest crumb of hope to fester and gnaw away at the fans.
And are they grateful? No. Just no pleasing them, is there?
Still, for all the obvious nihilistic benefits of allowing hopelessness to wash over you, it might still be an idea to at least get themselves past Derby at some point.
Our worry for West Ham is that the Liverpool game at the end of November will be the one that looks like a massive moment in their season.
Liverpool were at their lowest ebb coming into that one. West Ham, on the other hand, came into it on the back of 3-1 and 3-2 wins and a 2-2 draw at Bournemouth.
They were scoring goals, and getting results. For the first time all season, they looked like a viable, functioning Premier League team.
Then Nuno decide thoroughly out-Nuno himself. Instead of making any attempt to strike at a wounded Liverpool, they rolled over meekly and accepted a fate that really need not have looked so inevitable.
They’re not doomed, but they have tossed away hard-won momentum that may not return. The timing of that is compounded by coming alongside significant signs of live at both Leeds and Nottingham Forest, and to an extent Fulham, have left West Ham again looking among the most likely relegated trio at this time.
That they are very much only the third most likely of that trio is cold comfort.
We understand all the reasons why Eddie Howe isn’t currently under pressure.
He delivered some of the most long-awaited silverware in the land to Newcastle last season, in a competition they may yet successfully defend this season which would be a good bit after such an absurdly long barren spell. And he also delivered Champions League football again. The summer shambles that befell Newcastle was not in any way his fault.
And he is above all an English manager of the Spoke Well, I Thought school who looks like he listens to and carefully transcribes every single episode of the High Performance Podcast so he can really drink in all the valuable life lessons contained within at his leisure later.
Which an awful lot of the press pack in this country think is correct and good behaviour. They like Howe, who has no dubious foreign ways, speaks to them politely if with those eerie dead eyes of his, and there’s also clearly a lucrative ghost-writing deal for his autobiography out there for someone at some point down the line.
So yeah, we get all the reasons why the Newcastle boat remains so entirely unrocked.
But also aren’t they really quite sh*t? Like far, far sh*tter than it’s remotely necessary or acceptable for them to be in their Champions League-and-Saudi era? They are quite literally as bad as Tottenham, and Howe doesn’t even have Thomas Frank’s flimsy ‘I’m new here and this club is batsh*t’ excuse. And Frank is under immense pressure now.
Yet there’s Eddie Howe, just carrying on, his team showing desperately little fight and almost zero bottle in going down to a tame defeat in the first Premier League Tyne-Wear Derby in nearly a decade.
That’s not really acceptable is it, surely?
They really shouldn’t be as bad as this, stumbling along at the back of a deeply mediocre mid-table peloton, seemingly incapable of stitching together the kind of run that would get them out of there.
We’re not asking for Aston Villa-style ridiculousness here, but it does seem reasonable to think they shouldn’t be getting left behind by Brighton or Everton. Or most pointedly Sunderland, who now sit four points clear of their local rivals.
There’s a couple more things that explain the apparent lack of panic at Newcastle. That mid-table is awfully congested. Villa have already sauntered clean through it and out the other side. Everton had a little go at being fifth. Man United have been sixth here and there.
The point being: below the top three and above the bottom five the Premier League table, essentially, isn’t real and can’t hurt you.
Feels like that’s a dangerous mindset that could easily lead a daft big club into trouble, but it’s also reasonable to be less bent out of shape about being 12th when the top five is four points away rather than 10.
The other thing is that the fact there is absolutely no peril or jeopardy in the Champions League now – we designed it that way – means Newcastle are in no danger of messing that up in the way they ultimately (if slightly unfortunately) did a couple of years ago. They’ve hit the odd wrinkle, but still sit four points above the generous 24th-place cut line with two games to go.
We still can’t quite shake the sense, though, that Newcastle are having really quite a bad season, one that reinforces the growing idea that they can’t put two good seasons together and compete on all fronts, and nobody seems to be losing their sh*t about it.
That’s no good at all. We thought this was Modern Football with all its instant gratification and baying for blood.
What’s going on here?
You do feel that at some point the wind is going to change and Bournemouth will be stuck permanently in one of their two guises. The key will be whether that’s the Champions League-form or relegation-form versions of Bournemouth. Because they really are never anything else.
Their first nine games of this season brought five wins, three draws and a solitary defeat at Liverpool which was way back in the before times when nobody realised that was actually quite bad.
Their seven subsequent Premier League games have delivered no wins and four defeats.
The possible good news is that draws with Chelsea and Man United that currently sit in the ‘relegation form’ section could yet in fact be the start of another ‘Champions League form’ run.
With Burnley and Brentford up next, we’ll know more by year’s end.
Riding high in November on the back of a brilliant win over Newcastle, but it’s been a distinctly bump-based return to earth since then.
The Newcastle game was the third in a brilliant triptych of autumn home wins also featuring Man United and Liverpool, and even now it’s still going far better for the Bees than many (let’s be honest here: we) expected and there is still some distance between them and the real strugglers.
But not the distance there once was. They’ve won only once in the last month, and that was against Burnley which is mandatory anyway. Tricky away games at Brighton and Arsenal have gone as you might expect, but there really is no excuse for anyone losing a league game at Spurs this season. Not even Wolves did that.
A home draw with Leeds represents a missed chance to put more distance between themselves and trouble, and they’re now out of the Carabao as well.
We don’t wish to paint too gloomy a picture, but this is a team we ranked fifth last time out.
Still, though: it’s not all bad news: Wolves next. The ultimate Christmas present.
Have inexplicably and incredibly irritatingly spent a second consecutive December talking themselves out of the title race for absolutely no good reason. Truly maddening stuff, especially on the back of fighting so, so hard to prove exactly why they could compete for the title in that 10-man draw with Arsenal – which was the same week they dismantled Barcelona in the Champions League.
Have stumbled in that competition as well with defeat to Atalanta leaving them likely facing the unwanted hassle of the play-off round.
Chelsea have reached the semi-finals of the Carabao, although presumably Enzo Maresca thinks it’s just plain daft to talk about them maybe winning it when so many other good teams are involved.
Tentatively encouraging signs, on the field at least. They played well in Champions League victory at Inter before a solid home win over Brighton. Their next two league games are at Tottenham, which generally proves to be a lift for Liverpool spirits and absolutely should do this time, and then at home to Wolves.
Every chance they hit 2026 on a four-game winning run and then an instant chance to kick off the new year by putting right what went wrong at Leeds the other week.
And with absolutely no off-field drama whatsoever to worry themselves with, it’s all looking far rosier than it did even a couple of weeks ago, never mind at the time of the last Moods.
We didn’t really expect Daniel Farke to still be here for this update. Leeds had lost four of their previous five Premier League games at that point and were heading into an absolutely brutal run of games: Villa, City, Chelsea, Liverpool.
They duly lost the first two, but then took four points from a pair of riotously encouraging and potentially season-turning performances against Chelsea and Liverpool. Then followed that up with a point at Brentford, which is an absolutely acceptable result for pretty much anyone there; it’s more than Man United, Liverpool or Newcastle have managed there already this season.
They remain under serious and obvious threat of relegation, but to be approaching the halfway stage of the season on an apparent upward curve, outside the bottom three and with the same manager they began the season with? It’s not too bad at all.
Here’s what we said a month ago:
Proving to be the most gloriously mid-table team imaginable, achieving that middle-of-the-road outcome via the most outlandish means possible.
And a month later… here we still are. They have now, sadly, lost the dream of going through the entire season without having the same result in consecutive games – last month’s wins over Brentford and Forest put paid to that.
But that is still the only time it’s happened to Brighton all season. A team that has beaten four of last season’s top seven already this season remain determined to have it count for as little as possible. And we respect that.
In a congested mid-table built on endless shifts and flux, one where all positions between fifth and 14th seem to be handed out at random week by week, Brighton are 10th and it feels like they are always 10th. Seems churlish, considering that, to put them anywhere other than that here.
Really did look like they were going to do something quite silly and bin Marco Silva for a while there. It would have been a catastrophic misjudgement. Fulham and Silva is one of those combinations that just works. Neither would be as good without the other; both should think long and hard before even considering the temptation to look elsewhere.
The end of the Carabao adventure is a disappointment for a club who have seen peers claim silverware recently but three league wins in the last five – and a stirring if ultimately not quite successful comeback against City – have at least quietened the noise suggesting they might be about to do something stupid.
In our best Mark Lawrenson voice: They’ll be fine.
A month ago we demanded to be told whether Man United are good now, or what. Still none the wiser, frankly.
The mood at Manchester United has definitely shifted over the last couple of months, but – as with the team itself – we’d stop some way short of calling it a good mood.
Indeed, that is the very crux of the current problem for Ruben Amorim and Manchester United.
They are no longer utterly, humiliatingly mortifying. That deep sense of embarrassment at being just so profoundly sh*t that United felt throughout last season and into the start of this one has now dissipated.
The stain of finishing where they finished last season and bottling a cup final against a Tottenham – Tottenham! – side apparently being player-managed on the fly by Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven will never truly come off. And nor should it.
You don’t have to be This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About for that to be an unacceptable season. There can exist no mitigation that justifies finishing 15th and collecting fewer league wins than a Wolves team now making a historic attempt at knocking Derby County off their f*cking perch.
That shame will always be there. Grimsby will always be there.
But it’s fair to say now that those very darkest days do appear to be behind United. Things still aren’t perfect by any stretch. At almost any other period of United’s Premier League history their current effort would be a poor one, and that itself is part of the problem for anyone trying to turn this ship around.
Even after the historic lows of last season even the significant current improvement doesn’t constitute success.
And herein lies the ongoing niggle. United are now at the very least competent. That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, but it’s a huge step up from last season. Competence is welcome at this stage.
But with it have already come some extremely irritating missed opportunities. Last year’s incompetence may have only slightly dampened expectations, with the club’s own stated aims for this season a nine-place leap into the top six, but it has handed United another advantage.
It’s not the advantage any club of United’s stature wants, but the absence altogether of any European football – with the Grimsby debacle almost eliminating midweek football altogether – offers United benefits that none of their theoretical rivals can enjoy.
And they just keep refusing to fully accept those chances. They have dragged themselves towards the top of the mid-table peloton but they really could have got themselves into something approaching Villa’s current situation.
United have only lost once in seven Premier League games since the start of November, but it’s a run riddled with annoyance and frustration.
The defeat was a ludicrous one, at home against a good-not-great Everton side who handed United an absurd early advantage by friendly-firing themselves down to 10 men.
And the other six games in that run have all been against distinctly beatable opponents. The league positions for the seven teams at the time United played them were 18th, 6th, 13th, 5th, 17th, 20th and 13th.
The sixth-placed team was Tottenham, who we now know to be more rubbish than that, and the fifth-placed one was Palace, who United beat. The only other win was against the team in 20th, who we don’t think we need identify by name.
In the last seven weeks United have drawn four games against opposition of bottom-half standard. And they have been in front in every single one of those games. In three of them they have led going into the final 10 minutes.
Sure, at Spurs they ended up salvaging a point in the last seconds but only after throwing away a winning position with six minutes of regular time remaining.
West Ham equalised on 83 minutes at Old Trafford, and Bournemouth 84 in a game United had already led twice and trailed once before getting their noses in front with 11 minutes to go.
And such is the congested nature of the league table that these spaffed points really, really hurt. They have had so many chances now to get themselves into the (likely) Champions League places and every time they seem to sabotage themselves, very often infuriatingly late on in games.
Ifs and buts are candy and nuts, but when the table is so tight it is impossible to resist thinking about what might have been. There is a compelling case to make that United could have won every single one of their last seven league games, which is good. Instead, they have won only two.
Even turning two of the five failures into the wins United really should have managed would be enough to have them in top four now. You might even, if you wanted to be entirely reckless, talk about them being on the fringes of the title race.
Instead: there they still are in the mid-table bunch, still having to worry every bit as much about what’s behind them as ahead of them, still in danger of slipping right back into mid-table should they stumble again.
So yes; it’s much better than it was. But what it was, was complete turd. At the moment they’re still doing little more than polishing it.
A couple of vaguely alarming home defeats to the Manchester clubs are mood-dampeners, but the main thing keeping all things from being deliriously cheery for Palace is the long-term future of Oliver Glasner.
It is the way of the world and Palace fans know their place in it. He will not be there for much longer but wonderful things have happened – and in a way entirely sustainable if they get the next appointment anywhere near as correct as this one – and continue to happen.
Never mind what comes next for now. Palace are competing in the top six of the Premier League and on cup fronts European and domestic. They have never known days like these.
Phew. Dycheball is doing the necessary, and then some. Let us never speak of Angeball and the most predictable Premier League disaster of all time ever again.
Is it happening again? It does feel like it might be happening again. We’re not even really sure Arsenal have done a lot wrong. But you can entirely understand The Fear after a run of iffy away results and then a truly honking if still somehow just about good/lucky enough performance against Wolves.
It says a lot about that performance that escaping with a last-gasp win when not playing well is usually your classic Hallmark of Champions territory. But Arsenal were so bad, so panicky when 1-0 up at home against what may yet go down as the worst Premier League team in history it actually became what might be the first in an entirely new genre: a match win that makes you less likely to win the title.
That seems silly. Even as we write it, it seems silly. But it felt true at the time, and doubly so after especially Man City but even Aston Villa with another come-from-behind special recorded far more impressive wins from far tougher assignments the following day.
A weekend that ended up ‘as you were’ on paper didn’t really feel that way in the gut.
We’re not saying anything is f*cked for the league leaders who still have the best team and squad in the league, but surely everyone involved will feel a little more comfortable if they can quite swiftly find a convincing league performance.
And their next few games are ticklish. Everton away is a funny one, because some teams – even crap ones – have found it very easy there and others absolutely have not, while after that it’s Brighton. You never know what to expect from Brighton but they can be extremely mischievous when put up against one of the bigger boys.
And then it’s Aston Villa again. Hmm.
We were very, very harsh on Everton in the last update. What we were cross about was that we wanted Everton be lots of fun this season and they’d only been quite fun. It was childish of us.
But listen, fair play. Everton have taken it on board. Since that update they’ve gone down to 10 men in the opening minutes at Old Trafford after a fight between two of their own players and still gone on to win. In consecutive home games they’ve been beaten 4-1 and then won 3-0.
They are in absolutely no danger of relegation, and at one point for a brief time even jumped up to fifth place in the table to the widespread delight and wide-eyed surprise of all.
This is what we wanted from Everton in their first season at the Hill Dickinson. Plenty of fun, and no real existential drama or stress. They are now firmly on course.
If the 24/25 season had an overriding theme it was the ending of trophy droughts.
Crystal Palace won the first major silverware in their history. Newcastle won their first trophy that wasn’t in, well, black and white and even Tottenham ended the most discussed trophy drought of all, in the most Tottenham way imaginable and have since sacked or moved on almost everyone involved in such a hideously off-brand endeavour.
But there was another story rumbling along in the background of all this drought-ending catharsis and joy. And it might have been, in its own roundabout way, just as necessary.
For while all those droughts were ending, something almost as unthinkable was happening in Manchester: Guardiola and City won absolutely nothing unless you count the Community Shield which you absolutely should not. That is just not how things are supposed to be these days.
It was City and Guardiola’s first trophyless season since his very first in England back in 20216/17. And it really might have been just what City needed.
It’s not that there was massive complacency. Certainly older City supporters need no reminding that what they’ve experienced over the last decade is not normal, not Typical City.
But for younger fans it was a more unusual experience; even in the years before Pep turned City into English football’s dominant force there was still success on a scale most clubs never experience ever in their history.
Between 2010/11 and 2014/15, City won two league titles and finished second twice as well as an FA Cup and League Cup. And that was the bit before the gold rush.
Since Guardiola’s arrival, City have won six more league titles, a Champions League, four Carabaos, a couple of FA Cups, A UEFA Super Cup and a Club World Cup.
It is a lot of stuff. Even the most well-adjusted fanbase is going to get a bit blasé about it. How could you not? It’s inevitable.
But a year of going without – especially one like 24/25 where City didn’t even really mount any kind of meaningful challenge for the two top honours – can have a reinvigorating effect.
It certainly seems to have done so for Guardiola himself, who last season often appeared to have grown entirely weary of the whole thing. There were long spells where it wouldn’t have surprised us at all to hear he’d decided to leave in the summer a la Klopp. We’re certain he contemplated it.
But now he’s got the scent in his nostrils again. He’s got a new-look team. It’s not quite as precise and efficient a machine as his very best City teams but in its way all the more charming for that.
Above all, he’s once again caught up in the thrill of the chase. Worth remembering that after back-to-back early-season defeats to Spurs and Brighton it felt entirely reasonable to wonder whether City, so dominant so recently, would once again have to settle for the role of mere spectator and occasional agitator in the title race.
They still don’t fully convince us. They still don’t quite have that look of champions about them. But that might be the most exciting thing of all; that for all the doubts, for all their flaws, for all the uncertainty, there they sit, right on the shoulders of Arsenal.
Both these teams have been here before. Both know how that played out.
City and their trophy-hoarding manager can smell blood in the water and are suddenly right up for this.
Sometimes it really can be the ground left fallow for a year that proves the most fertile.
A team that probably shouldn’t even have got promoted – they finished 24 points behind Leeds and Burnley and even 14 behind Sheffield United having ended the regular season in horror form – now absolutely ripping it up in the Premier League? Wonderful.
First things first, they (although we must acknowledge Wolves’ selfless assist here) have already pretty much guaranteed we won’t be seeing the three promoted teams go straight back down which is a hugely welcome development. And if the three promoted teams do now all go down, then, well, we’re in for a truly astonishing second half of the season anyway so that’s also fine.
More likely, though, is that Sunderland continuing knocking about in the rarefied top-half air they currently breathe. Even if they don’t in fact end up level on points with Liverpool and separated only on goals scored when the music finally stops in May.
There are all sorts of ambitions you could reasonably have for the remainder of Sunderland’s season. They could definitely qualify for Europe, for instance, which would be a spectacular bit of work.
Our goal for them is, inevitably, more mischief-based. We want them to reach 59 points. Why 59? Because it’s the sum total the three promoted teams Leicester, Ipswich and Southampton managed last season.
At present speed and course, Sunderland get 61 points. We are watching, and hoping that AFCON doesn’t blast too big a hole in our dreams and/or Sunderland’s season before the next update.
After five games of the season, Aston Villa had three points and had just managed their first goal of the campaign after a nevertheless disappointing 1-1 draw against 10-man Sunderland.
It looked for all the world like last season’s Champions League near-miss after getting f*cked over at Old Trafford on the final day had ruined them. That something fundamental had been broken.
That slow start to the season came on the back of a difficult summer, where Villa were unable to do the business they wanted to do and were hamstrung to a large extent by their continued flirtation with the very edges of the PSR regulations. Even now, it still feels like something quite bad is being stored up for the future there.
But never mind all that now. Because since those five games in which Villa managed three points and one measly goal, they’ve scored 24 in a further 11. And rather ludicrously won 10 of them.
Their late winner against Arsenal prompted absolute cinema in the reactions of the Gunners, but it was also one of the most significant three-point swings of the season, one swing of Emi Buendia’s right foot turning a six-point gap to Arsenal to a three-point one.
Villa have even since then passed up the traditional opportunity for such over-achieving clubs to chucklef*ck their way back out of a title race the moment they unexpectedly find themselves in it.
