Premier League manager rankings: where do Amorim and Maresca land in list of all 28(!) managers?

With an epic season of Managergeddon in full swing, it feels like as good a time as any to dust off the ol’ Premier League Manager Rankings for a quick redo.

There are a great many more managers to include, for one thing, because the last time we did this it was all the way back in October. If you want to know just how far back in the ancient mists of time October was, Andoni Iraola was top of this list, and Thomas Frank was in the top eight with Scott Parker just behind him as he steered Burnley to a position outside the relegation zone.

An awful lot has changed, basically. And if we wait any longer to do this then we’d have to include at least two more managers; Michael Carrick once his return to Man United is rubberstamped, and whoever replaces whichever one of Thomas Frank or Nuno Espirito Santo fails to survive this weekend’s El Sackico between Tottenham and West Ham.

So crack on we must. October’s rankings are in brackets below, with the full majesty of the many thousand words of wrongness here to be enjoyed in full if that’s your bag .

Mate. Just…mate. Possibly the worst managerial reign in the entire history of the Premier League , and that is some shout. It’s certainly the shortest .

Look, we sort of get it, we do. We get why he took the job. He probably did need to move fast to get back in the Premier League , try and convince someone to take a punt on him while those memories of Europa League glory were fresh enough in everyone’s minds to stop them thinking too long or too hard about the sheer ridiculousness of taking Spurs to 17th in the league. He wasn’t to know then that Thomas Frank was treating 17th as his target this season.

It’s asking a huge amount to say Postecoglou should have turned down a job that got him straight back into the European competition where he’d just had such spectacular success.

But…he should have turned down that job. Obviously he should. It went wrong in all the ways everyone knew it would go wrong, except at about five times the pace. There were, even among those truly cataclysmically awful results, flashes of what makes Angeball so beguiling. There were some lovely moves and stunning goals.

Yet for every one of those there were two or three defensive calamities, and injuries, for a team that just didn’t have those things last season.

It was always just so obviously asking too much of both Postecoglou and Forest’s players to make such a seismic shift in approach work without any kind of pre-season to bring in the right players and get everyone to understand the process.

Postecoglou will walk away with a nice pay-off for barely a month’s work, but with his reputation in tatters. It is only eight months since he did the unthinkable and delivered a major trophy to Tottenham, yet now, two sackings later, his managerial career at this level of club football is surely over.

There must have been better options with just a bit more patience. But still we’re kind of glad he did it, because Nuno to Ange to Dyche in barely five weeks is something the like of which will never be seen again.

Got absolutely none of the help he needed from the club in the summer, which meant all the talk during the late-season struggles last term about not judging Potter until he had his own players and a full pre-season to instil his methods became instantly moot.

But while Potter was not and is not the primary source of West Ham’s travails, let’s also not pretend he is blameless. West Ham didn’t help him, but he didn’t help himself either, and a once-promising career suffered another huge step back.

We’ll admit we didn’t really know how or where the road to recovery might begin for Potter, but will cheerfully admit we didn’t have ‘Simply be almost immediately named manager of Sweden’ high on our list.

That admittedly incredible run of promotions with Ostersund is still evidently highly regarded in a country that has had an absolute catastrof*ck of a World Cup qualifying campaign but one that still has enormous potential for absurd redemption with their Nations League success meaning they need only find a way past Ukraine then Poland or Albania to bag a place in North America despite finishing literally bottom of their qualifying group without a win to their name.

Now looks utterly doomed to a two-sacking season which, considering what he got up to last season, is just ridiculous really. He was our manager of the year in 2024!

What there is, still, is mitigation. His greatest achievement at Forest might have been in how long he was actually there before the falling out occurred, and West Ham might just be the most impossible job in all of English football.

But he is also one of about 10 managers on this list for whom the old classic ‘not the problem, but also not the solution’ clearly applies.

We’ve never really been able to get past the way, specifically, he approached the game at home against Liverpool. The Hammers were actually something approaching upwardly mobile at that point, with wins by 3-1 and 3-2 scorelines in their two previous home games and a 2-2 draw at Bournemouth. Liverpool were in that bit where they kept losing by three goals for some reason.

Yet Nuno decided this was the time to go full and absolute Nuno instead of sensing the weakness and opportunity. Gunning for a 0-0 draw, he instead got a routine 2-0 defeat.

It might seem silly to pin so much of a relegation-haunted season on a game against Liverpool and maybe it is, but it really does seem like a point at which, well, dreams faded and died.

They’ve managed just three draws and no wins in eight Premier League games since. They’ve lost relegation six-pointers in their last two league games; Nuno surely cannot survive making that three in a row in El Sackico at Spurs this weekend, a misery spectacle of such epic beleaguerment that it is literally impossible to conceive a situation in which both managers survive.

To be honest, we had The Fear when Wolves followed up that six-game winning run in March and April with four winless games to round out the season. Knowing Wolves’ fondness for letting the end to one season bleed into the next.

We didn’t think it would look quite like this, though, even after they followed that little end-of-season slump with the classic ‘let’s sell lots of good players and not really bother replacing them’ tactic.

Pereira went from hero to zero alarmingly quickly, and it was clear he had no idea how to pull Wolves out of the tailspin in which they found themselves.

A real pity given how well he had them playing at one point last season, but hindsight has not been kind to that six-game winning run, either.

It was, rather brilliantly, the second-longest winning run any Premier League team managed in 2025 (and it was only recently that Aston Villa – not Liverpool or Arsenal or Man City – bettered it) but it was also against three of the very worst relegated sides we’d ever seen as well as West Ham, Man United and Spurs who were all enduring nightmares of their own from which none has yet truly awoken.

So… yeah. Good fun, sure, but also perhaps the single most misleading six-game run in football history.

Fell out with everyone, which given who that ‘everyone’ is at Nottingham Forest is kind of understandable. But *, what a waste. Didn’t get the chance to follow through on the brilliant work he did last season and was the first manager out of a job in the Premier League this season.

Despite that, his volatile, anger-filled few weeks at Forest are still probably his best weeks of the season. Because his punishment for the end of his Forest reign has been severe indeed. Surely not even Mr Marinakis would have wished the West Ham job on his new worst enemy.

It’s all about optics, isn’t it? The photos of Thomas Frank wandering gormlessly around Bournemouth looking gormless with a little Arsenal-branded coffee cup in his hand already have a Steve McClaren wally-with-the-brolly quality to them . When – and it is surely now when not if – the axe finally falls on this doomed experiment, those are the pictures that will accompany this story’s telling.

There is a profound Spurs quality to the absurdity of it all, of course. The series of events that leads to it even being possible just feels like something that only happens and could only happen to them.

But also… consider the reverse. Imagine Mikel Arteta was ‘caught’ supping from a Spurs cup. It would all feel very different, wouldn’t it? The memes would all be about ‘drinking Spurs tears’ and such. Even a few short months ago, this daft little incident happening exactly as it now has would have produced many banters about the impressiveness of finding a cup with Arsenal’s name on it. How we’d have laughed.

Point is, it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s all a projection. But a powerful one nevertheless, one that comes to symbolise everything for a manager who arrived as a details man and now can’t even spot a big ol’ Arsenal badge on a little coffee cup.

What actually does matter, we fear, is that Frank has started talking complete b*llocks . Again, pretty understandable that anyone tasked with managing Spurs eventually finds themselves doing so, but it’s not a sign of anything good.

Consider this astonishing guff.

“In a storm, some are building fences and hiding behind it, others are building windmills and getting stronger and getting more energy and learning from it.”

Now that’s the sort of thing you might normally expect to find written on a toilet wall, but written in sh*t. Or worse, on LinkedIn. Or worse still, on a Jake Humphrey podcast.

But here’s the thing that’s even worse than talking like a Jake Humphrey podcast guest – if you can even imagine such a concept. It doesn’t even actually work on its own batsh*t terms.

First of all, if you’re building anything in a storm then you’ve already f*cked it by failing to adequately prepare yourself. Build the windmill before the storm arrives, if anything.

But also… Frank is no windmill-builder. He has spent recent weeks complaining about the fans, repeatedly pointing out that Spurs finished 17th last season as if that was normal or acceptable rather than the specific thing he has been tasked with changing not aiming to repeat, and noting that January is a very difficult month.

The storm has arrived and he’s been busy building crappy little fences and drinking his crappy little Arsenal coffees.

What felt like inevitable defeat to an Aston Villa side that has streaked past Spurs in recent seasons means that the drudgery of the league campaign is all that’s realistically left for a forlorn club.

Barring, of course, a Champions League knockout run of such vanishing unlikelihood as to make the 2019 effort look prosaic.

Vanishing unlikelihoods discarded, and you’re left with a manager brought in to prove that Spurs could compete on multiple fronts now competing on none, and if the upcoming six-pointers at West Ham and Burnley go awry that will swiftly be literally and not just figuratively true

There is no avoiding the thought that Thomas Frank’s fictitious windmill is about to get all spattered with some more very real sh*t.

A shiny yet fictional pound on its way to the first reader who can remember the game Wolves’ Under-21 boss was in caretaker charge for. No, you don’t get a pound of any kind for saying it was a defeat.

Chelsea, it was. Lost 3-0. But it did take them until the second half to score, so it was very much not the worst Wolves effort of late 2025.

Not his fault, of course, but it is just enormously post-2013 Man United that their response to another largely self-inflicted crisis has been to think short and soft before concluding that the answer must again be ‘one of Fergie’s boys’. Except, of course, they’re going one better this time. Now the answer is in fact ‘two of Fergie’s boys’ with Fletcher currently interim for the interim, which at present speed and course appears set to be Michael Carrick rather than Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

Still time, of course, for them both to get a go as United cheerily write off another season. Even if that season is now sure to be the shortest possible 40-game effort that a Premier League team can ‘enjoy’.

Sir Alex Ferguson was an astonishing and brilliant one-off. A genuine contender in any conversation around the greatest manager of all time. But he is now an albatross around this club’s neck. They can never hope to replicate even a fraction of his success while they remain in such deferential thrall to his era. Nobody is saying it’s easy to move on from what was two decades of quite ludicrous success. But they really must.

It says much for quite where United now find themselves that Fletcher’s two-game reign, encompassing a league draw against Burnley and FA Cup defeat to Brighton, legitimately contains genuine positives . How far they done fell.

His greatest achievement at Manchester United will ultimately be the fact he’s found a way to disentangle himself from a cursed club with reputation largely intact.

We’re not even being glib; that’s a stunning achievement that for most of his largely dreadful 14 months in charge seemed entirely impossible.

Yet in the end it was really quite simple and contains a valuable lesson for any other managers who find themselves entirely regretting the life choices they have made that have led them to their current predicament.

Just take on the faceless suits. It really is that easy to get away from any club.

Amorim tried more traditional approaches to getting the tin-tack . Absolute mule-brained stubborn and rigid insistence on his own methods even when they failed again and again. Losing just so very many football matches. Finishing 15th in the Premier League . Losing to Grimsby while p*ssing about with his little magnets. Losing a real-life final to Tottenham, for goodness’ sake.

None of it worked. But mildly suggesting that a random Blackburn winger from the 1990s might not be infallible? Game over.

Amorim’s entire Man United career feels like a modern football parable, and its final act one that should strike a chord with us all. While it may always be the head coach/manager – and Amorim was pretty keen to draw a distinction there as well – who must act as the public face and human shield of any football club it is the silent suits (whether those suits be business or track) who wield the power and yet are nowhere to be seen when trouble is really brewing.

For very much not the first time, Chelsea have treated an established and improving manager rather shabbily and made a deeply unconvincing subsequent appointment.

This one, of course, comes with the added bonus of multi-club chicanery to make it all feel even more unpleasant. See you this time next year for more such nonsense from the nation’s most beloved football club.

Or, who knows, perhaps even sooner. Even that ‘onwards’ up there feels slightly on the optimistic side.

Must be cursing that the deeply complicated back-and-forth and complex negotiations required to extract Liam Rosenior from Strasbourg meant he was also in charge for the shambolic 2-1 defeat at Fulham rather than just the eerily competent 1-1 draw at Manchester City .

The initial and inevitable improvement from the Postecoglou silliness has now faded rather dramatically. The new-manager bounce has, as new-manager bounces are wont to do, run out of energy.

But the fact it still contained just enough oomph to tease out a win at an entirely oomph-free West Ham feels significant.

A full-blooded relegation scrap remains possible but for now unlikely, and we’re not sure even Mr Marinakis, chaotic bundle of main character and arch villain energy that he is, can really be arsed with another sacrifice at this time.

And who knows, there might still be genuine glory at the end of it all. Dyche succeeding Postecoglou as Europa League champion as well as Nottingham Forest manager has an undeniable deliciousness to it.

Doing almost precisely the job you might have expected at this point after a vaguely encouraging start. It’s not been horrendous, but it’s not remotely looking like it might actually keep Burnley up either.

His immediate future rests on whether the club think a) attempting a meaningful fight against relegation this season from this point is realistic and, if not, then b) whether Parker is the right man to keep them in this relegation-promotion time loop next season.

The longer he remains in place working to his current level the more it looks like the answer to a) is ‘Probably not’ and b) is ‘Probably yes’. But at some point surely everyone involved gets a bit bored of it all, no?

The top of the current Premier League Sack Race betting is pretty interesting.

You’ve got two clear favourites. One is in the middle of relegating a team that has been a Premier League club in all but four of its season, and the other is desperately trying to do the same with an ever-present Premier League club while chatting awful and appalling sh*t about fences and windmills while sipping coffee from a cup featuring the badge of their bitterest and most successful rivals.

Up next is the current manager of the team 19th in the league. And then you’ve got the manager of the team in fourth.

Arne Slot and Liverpool are having a deeply peculiar season. Liverpool aren’t having a particularly good one, but we’d argue Slot personally is having a far worse campaign.

As far as Liverpool as a collective go, our current working theory is that fourth is about right. That they have, over the course of the season, played the fourth-best (or, if one were so inclined, 17th least bad) football of any Premier League club this season.

There are two things to note about that. One, it’s still not really good enough. Not when so much has been spent on theoretically improving a team and squad that last season were very much number one.

And two, that broadly and despite the obvious results-driven narratives with which we all inevitably operate, their level hasn’t really fluctuated that much. They’ve been okay but not great pretty much all season.

It’s just that at the start of the season that okay-but-not-great manifested itself in a string of absurd and unlikely late wins, and then after that for ages and ages a run of equally absurd – and also again often quite late – defeats.

Their results remains absurdly streaky. They won their first five league games, then lost six of the next seven, then won four of the next six and have now drawn three in a row. We really don’t think there’s a particularly convincing case to be made that the actual standard of their play was conspicuously better or worse at any time in that run.

Apart, possibly, from the 2-1 home defeat to Manchester United in which the sheer scale of their headloss and panic was genuinely alarming. That was a game in which they spent the entire second half in 94th-minute goal-chasing mode.

And that’s where Slot comes in. He really hasn’t handled the slings and arrows of Our League’s outrageous fortune particularly well this season. And that’s in marked contrast to the cool, level-headed way in which he spent last season merely polishing some of the rough edges off Jurgen Klopp’s heavy-metalers with such devastingly profound effect.

This season just seems to have rattled him entirely. As ever with any discussion of Liverpool this season, it feels unfair not to at least acknowledge the unique and harrowing circumstances in which they found themselves following the death of Diogo Jota. There is ample mitigation for heads not being right anywhere in the club.

But at some point the manager needs to be in charge. To take charge. It was the most impressive thing about Slot’s first season at Anfield. The seemingly gargantuan, arguably impossible, job of carrying enough authority with what was, famously almost exclusively, Jurgen Klopp’s old squad was handled with such casual aplomb.

Yet now, with a Liverpool squad far more his own, he seems to have less authority and control than ever. This feels like a season that is simply happening to Liverpool, and happening to Slot.

Slot’s failure to treat the twin imposters of triumph and disaster just the same in those early months of the season really do feel more and more like tone-setters for the uncertainty of what was to come.

Let’s be honest, we all got carried away with both the start Liverpool’s reigning champions made and the collapse that followed. But we’re not all Liverpool’s actual manager. He’s not supposed to get as lost in the noise as the rest of us. He’s not supposed to basically accuse Man United of cheating because they deployed the darkest art in the game: squad rotation.

He’s supposed to be above that. And now we must face the baffling but entirely real possibility that he could become the third Big Six manager this season to be outlasted by windmilling Thomas Frank.

Another Big Six manager who paid the price (or got his escape, depending on your perspective) for off-field disagreements rather than on-field performance.

We haven’t ever, in truth, been entirely convinced by Maresca as an elite coach. But he also probably did do just about everything and more that could reasonably be asked of anyone working under the unique weirdness that is BlueCo’s Chelsea , where you are less a football coach and more a layer of middle-management bureaucracy in a vast and inscrutable player-trading empire.

We were even more frustrated this season than we were last with the way he self-fulfillingly talked Chelsea out of the title race, but we also understand what he was driving at. It must be immensely frustrating to try and work as Chelsea’s head coach, a job where the thing that is in many ways the biggest hindrance to performing to the best of your ability is also the very thing that means you won’t get the full credit if and when it does go well.

“Oh, anyone could succeed when they get half-a-billion quid to spend!” is a pretty compelling argument. But only if you as the coach get that half-a-billion quid to spend on the specific talents and player profile you need or want to try and drive on-field success. Not so much when that money is instead being buried on players that a spreadsheet suggests have the greatest potential for future profit.

It’s not even that BlueCo are wrong, in their own grim way. Chelsea’s sales sheet tells you this is a wild and unscrupulous but undeniably feasible way to run a business. It’s just surely not a great way to build a football team.

And we very strongly suspect Maresca’s work in keeping the whole show on the road over the last 18 months is about to look far, far better in hindsight then it ever really did at the time.

Inherited a shambles, obviously, but the good news with that is the only way is up. Or at least no further down.

The first seven games, which all ended in defeat, did provide some challenge to that notion. But did also offer occasional hints at progress. The 2-1 defeats at both Arsenal and Liverpool were not those of a club with two points from half a season.

And now look at them. Five points from three games and a nice big FA Cup win against lower-league opposition might not seem much, but it is a veritable feast compared to the famine that preceded it.

They probably will still go down, like, but they do now at least appear set to a) beat Derby’s infamous all-time low and b) potentially chuck some spanners in some works for others elsewhere along the way.

It’s not much. It’s a lot more than looked possible a month ago.

Slightly odd team, are Everton. Often feels like they’re right on the brink of breaking out into being really quite good and really quite fun, but then they… don’t. And, we slightly hate ourselves for this conclusion, but can’t help it: Moyes, that.

He’s not doing a bad job, obviously, because Everton are not in mortal relegation peril and that has been the general pre-Moyes vibe in recent seasons. There is further mitigation in the initial growing pains that come with any move to a new stadium and the loss of familiarity and atmosphere that is all but unavoidable.

Above all else for anyone thinking of aiming any serious criticism Moyes’ way at all is the extreme cautionary tale that West Ham have become since his departure.

We still maintain that Hammers fans’ desire for more than the perfunctory survival football he was offering by the end was perfectly understandable, but bloody hell.

So yes, maybe Everton do for now still have to be careful what they wish for. But at the same time it is now just one win in seven games for the Toffees, including some markedly insipid efforts against Burnley and Brentford and Wolves and a third-round FA Cup exit that confirms the extension of what is now one of the league’s most eye-catching and embarrassing barren runs will continue into a 32nd year.

It was October 22 when we declared Iraola the best manager of the first two months of the Premier League season. Four days later they eased to victory over Nottingham Forest – their fifth win in eight games after an opening-day defeat at Liverpool – to move second in the table.

Then simply didn’t bother winning any of their next 11 games in the league before a desperately needed visit from Dr Tottenham. Tottenham, for what it’s worth, were just a point below Bournemouth in third at the end of October.

We do hold our hands up when we get things wrong here. Usually because we have no choice and are bang to rights. But this time we don’t think this is an egregious *-up on our part.

Given the players they’d lost in the summer, what Iraola appeared to be doing two months into the season really was extraordinary and we stand by our assessment.

Such was the strife of the summer that even after that 11-game winless run nobody could really say Bournemouth were in a place wildly different to pre-season expectations. Even now he still gets a passing grade for having them just about clear of the stickiest relegation soup.

But for Iraola himself, if he harbours – as we assume he does – loftier ambitions somewhere down the line then he really does need to sort out this idiosyncratic penchant for absurd alternating streaks of brilliant and terrible results.

There are obvious examples within this very league this season of just how much harder it is to conceal those flaws once you’re at one of the clubs where the spotlight is more harsh.

Look, overall he’s still doing extraordinary things isn’t he? Nobody’s disputing that about a man who delivered Crystal Palace’s first ever silverware and some absurd above-weight-punching all round.

But… coming to an end, isn’t it? Definite ‘far as I can take them’ vibes coming off the place now, and there’s a bit of a funk developing. Let’s not any of us pretend that becoming the first top-flight side to ever lose an FA Cup game to a sixth-tier one was something we expected; but the idea of Palace getting into some kind of strife at Macclesfield on their first return to the competition since lifting the trophy was very easy to picture.

In all, across four competitions, it’s now nine games without a win over the last month or so. They’ve gone out of both domestic cups in that time, and have made hard work of the Conference League where they must now come through a play-off against European heavyweights Sigma Olomouc or Zrinjski Mostar just to reach the last 16.

Most damningly of all, that winless run even includes defeat at the hands of the good doctor after a really quite pitiful non-performance in a 1-0 home defeat to Spurs .

It’s a real shame because it’s been quite a ride, but it just all feels like it’s over. That’s reality for clubs like Palace, who always knew they wouldn’t have Glasner forever. But it still seems to us like it didn’t absolutely have to peter out quite so meekly as this.

The FA Cup win at Man United feels like a significant one for Hurzeler and co, bringing interest back to a season that had grown in real danger of aimless drift after a run of one win in eight Premier League games dragged them right back to the very middle of the great mid-table morass.

Absolutely nothing wrong with steering Brighton to comfy mid-table , of course, and the sheer size of that mid-table this season has led to Hurzeler having a slight under-the-radar feel. There is not for him the same links to ‘bigger’ jobs that we saw in Roberto De Zerbi’s time or that you get now with your Glasners and your Silvas and the Iraolas of this world.

Which is odd, really, because Brighton do have a pretty eye-catching way of going about their incessant mid-tabling, always seemingly equally happy to be pulling down the pants of the biggest boys – four points this season off Man City , for instance – as they are donating cheap points to helpless lost causes like West Ham or Wolves or Spurs .

When you’ve set the standards Guardiola has set, it doesn’t take much to look like failure. And two seasons without a meaningful title challenge, which now seems likely after a damaging run of quite silly draws, would constitute that.

The most alarming element of it all is that City have come unstuck at what looked like the precise moment they would in fact strike. They’d reeled Arsenal in, cutting the lead to just two points somehow, and looked poised to make life extremely uncomfortable for a team that had seen it all before.

Instead, they’ve failed to beat Sunderland , Chelsea and Brighton – the latter two setbacks worsened by coming at home in games where they led. Just not very City and not very Guardiola to be letting anyone – either in those matches specifically or their wider league context – off the hook like that.

We keep swinging one way then the other with Guardiola this season. Sometimes we think he’s reinvigorated by the challenge of building a new team and at others we think he won’t last the season without doing a Klopp.

Our internal Guardiola swingometer is once again headed in that direction.

We really did worry that either he or Fulham were going to do something very silly they would both regret when the ever-tempting sack window of the November international break arrived with Fulham in something approaching doldrum status after a fairly miserable defeat at Silva’s former club Everton.

Happily, six wins and two draws from their subsequent 10 Premier League games have put all that silly talk to bed and lifted Fulham right back to their correct and proper place in the middle of the pack, vying once again with Brighton for the crown of the Premier League’s most mid-table club in what is looking like the Premier League’s most mid-table season.

Obviously the risk now is that he has, if anything, gone too far the other way. He’s almost, for me, Clive, now managing Fulham too well. Because with that comes the danger that he finds himself doing something really stupid like taking the Tottenham job.

Everyone must resist. Fulham and Silva is just one of those rare and precious club-manager combos where no good can come for anyone if it is set asunder.

A man with a famously excellent record of marching teams into the Premier League in glorious fashion and then meekly steering them immediately back whence they came has, at last, hit upon a formula for bucking that trend.

It’s a fine effort and well worth remembering now just how unlikely it all looked as recently as November. Leeds had lost three in a row and were 2-0 down at Man City at half-time, and it looked like another textbook Farke promotion-and-despair one-two punch.

But while the unlikely second-half fightback in that game cruelly didn’t deliver actual points it did instil belief and confidence.

Leeds have been an entirely different prospect since that day. They’ve beaten Chelsea , drawn twice with Liverpool and hammered Crystal Palace in a seven-game unbeaten run that only ended with an instant classic of a game at Newcastle that could have finished with just about any scoreline but was, unluckily for Farke and Leeds, 4-3 to the home side when the music stopped.

Absolutely no reason that performance should derail what Leeds have going on right now, and they were impressive again in sidestepping a potential FA Cup banana skin at Derby on a weekend when others were far more careless.

That he and Newcastle now find themselves sixth in the league after what has, for the most part, been a difficult and challenging campaign says perhaps more about this season’s Premier League than it does specifically about Newcastle.

The entire mid-table area, in which nine points separates 12 teams from fourth-placed Liverpool to Bournemouth in 15th, is built to deceive and hoodwink. Find yourself 13th one weekend and it can feel like the sky is falling in.

But win a few games against Burnley, Palace and Leeds and suddenly all is right again. The humdrum reality, of course, is that unless there’s something truly compellingly obvious for good or bad, then caution must be advised about getting over-excited in either direction.

We can all see with our eyes that Brentford are performing wonderfully well, for instance, or that Spurs are f*cking rancid. With Newcastle, though, they weren’t really terrible when they were 14th and they aren’t suddenly great now they’re sixth.

But maybe that’s the point. This is not a season when greatness is a necessity for great things to happen. And for both Howe and Newcastle, for all the difficulties they’ve faced in the transfer market and with injuries and noise, great things remain entirely possible in multiple ways.

They’re back in the Champions League hunt via the league, and they’re going to be in at least the play-offs of this season’s competition, all while remaining active players in both domestic cups.

It’s not been a straightforward season for club or manager, but it absolutely could still be a generational one. Or they might crash out of everything and wind up 11th. That’s part of what makes it all so exciting. There aren’t many others who are crossing the midway point of the season with quite such a wide range of potential outcomes as Howe and his team.

In the summer, Brentford lost their inspirational manager, the fourth and sixth leading goalscorers in the 24/25 league season (with a mere 39 goals between them), their captain, and their goalkeeper.

They replaced these individuals with their set-piece coach, Dango Ouattara from Bournemouth, some spare parts from here and there, and a Reiss Nelson.

They are fifth in the Premier League . Now even allowing for the congested bunching-up of all the teams who aren’t either challenging for the title or desperately fighting relegation, that’s ridiculous.

We don’t trust Keith Andrews, but we do fear and respect him because we can only conclude some ungodly and dark magic is involved here.

Sunderland are actually now without a Premier League win in five games. Nobody has noticed this because a) they’re still doing tremendously well, obviously, and more importantly b) they still drew four of them.

The amusing reality is that during this sticky spell since the derby-day win over Newcastle they have still extended their lead over each and every member of the current bottom four.

In summary, then: even when things have been as bad as they been all season for Sunderland , when they have been shorn of their AFCON stars and bedevilled by injuries, Regis Le Bris and the gang are still comfortably exceeding, even in that specific run, any and all pre-season expectations.

If you find yourselves, as a promoted club, in a situation where you can have a bad run and slip all the way down to 10th in the table , then things really are going tremendously well.

The starkest of all reminders that October was f*cking ages ago. Back then, Emery and Villa were still making their first tentative steps in turning round a miserable start to the season, one that felt full of hangovers and regrets and disappointment at the way 2024/25 had finished on the final day at Old Trafford.

Missing out on the Champions League by cruel and fine margins had felt like a significant sliding doors moment for Emery and Villa, and a difficult summer and even worse start to the new campaign left the unmistakable sense of something wonderful coming to its end without ever really hitting the heights it might have done.

Then Villa – and we really don’t understand why more managers and teams don’t adopt such a policy – simply set about winning all of the football matches.

After no wins and just a single goal in their first five league matches of the season, Villa won 12 of the next 13. Even after a recent ‘slump’ that comprises a defeat at champions-elect Arsenal and goalless draw at Crystal Palace , they remain level on points with City and miles clear of any undignified squabbly scramble for a Champions League finish.

Add in routine FA Cup progress at Spurs , who they have for now overtaken entirely, and serene progress through the very winnable Europa League and this now longer feels anything like something coming to a premature end.

It really might only just be getting started.

Still as odd as socks, but he has built a champion Arsenal team that, for the first time since The Invincibles, combines both the talent to win the league with the minerals.

There was a good deal of guff after the defeat at Villa, with a large amount read into the body language of the players after conceding the late winner.

Now a lot of that is because it is always and undeniably funny to watch grown adult men have full limb-thrashing toddler tantrums more akin to a three-year-old denied sweets in Tesco. But a lot of it was along more faux-concerned ‘hope not, hope not’ lines about what it indicated about their mental state and preparedness for the battle ahead.

Now it’s true that Arsenal weren’t good in their next match either, and were pretty lucky it was against Wolves. But they did still manage to win it. And then the next four after that. And then draw with Liverpool to preserve what had by then grown into a six-point lead at the top of the table.

We’re not saying Arteta suddenly has a gang of mentality monsters on his hands. But they’re not about to do anything that even the internet can dress up as a bottling, and just as importantly nobody now looks remotely equipped to place them under the kind of pressure that might test that new-found steel in any meaningful way.

They will win the league, they will thoroughly deserve to win the league, and the fact they’ll have done it after signing a ‘missing piece of the puzzle’ striker who is absolutely sh*tbone awful is only more impressive, in a way.

Whether it’s vindication for absolutely all of Arteta’s various eccentricities we’re not so sure. But it will absolutely prove what has been obvious for some time now behind all the banters and whimsy. He is very, very good at this job.