Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss the biggest questions from the weekend’s football.
This was the weekend when Manchester City blew the title race open with victory over Arsenal, Virgil van Dijk scored a dramatic stoppage-time winner to settle the first Merseyside derby at Everton’s new stadium, the pressure mounted on Newcastle United’s Eddie Howe after yet another home defeat, and Leeds United took a significant step towards Premier League safety.
Here, we ask if this has become Manchester City’s title to lose, whether everything is unravelling at Chelsea on and off the field, what damage it would do to Tottenham Hotspur’s survival hopes should West Ham United win at Crystal Palace tonight, and if Daniel Farke has proved that he is a Premier League manager after all.
Are Manchester City favourites for the title?
Pep Guardiola would scoff at that question. “It gives us hope, that’s all,” the Manchester City manager said when asked about the significance of their 2-1 victory over Arsenal. “Who is top of the league? We’re not. Whose goal difference is better? They are. It’s step by step, that’s it. But we have hope.”
Factually, Guardiola is right, of course. But City have more than hope — they have momentum, too, and to many observers, they will now be the favourites to win their fifth Premier League title in six seasons, partly because of their track record under Guardiola but also because of the contrasting form of both teams.
City have won their last four matches in all competitions, including two victories over Arsenal, first in the Carabao Cup final and now in the Premier League.
Good luck finding anyone who doesn’t expect it to be five straight victories come Wednesday night, when City travel to second-from-bottom Burnley, knowing that three points will knock Arsenal off the summit.
Mikel Arteta’s side have been enjoying the view at the top since the start of October, and it would be intriguing to see how they respond to the challenge of City overhauling them, especially as the gap was nine points a little over a week ago.
Are Arsenal psychologically damaged by a run of four defeats from their past six matches, or can they take solace from the way they played at City?
Roy Keane didn’t see it that way on Sky Sports on Sunday, when the pundit and former Manchester United midfielder said it’s “about points and not plaudits”. But that overlooks the fact that Arsenal, who have faced plenty of criticism for their style of play this season, gave as good as they got against City and on another day, could easily have taken something from the game.
Their attack-minded approach — evident in Arteta’s team selection as well as the performance — could be crucial over the next five league matches, bearing in mind there is a real possibility that the title could be decided by goal difference this season.
Pressing aggressively, in the way that Arsenal did at the Etihad, won’t work every week because few teams will be as wedded to playing out from the back as City — something that was to the home side’s detriment on Sunday, when Gianluigi Donnarumma conceded a farcical goal. But the positive mindset that Arsenal demonstrated at City, in particular a desire to commit more players forward and to play with far greater freedom, is exactly what they will need to show in the weeks to come.
“They are now more convinced,” Arteta said when asked how his Arsenal players were feeling after losing at City. “They were talking about it in the dressing room. It’s a new league now. They have a game in hand. We have a three-point advantage and five games to play. Everything is still to play for. We know how much we want it and we’re not going to stop. We’re going to go again, that’s for sure.”
For the neutrals among us, it sets up a fascinating finale to the season. Who doesn’t, for example, want to see two teams not just being under pressure to win matches but to outscore their title rivals in the process?
The mind goes back to the sight of Luis Suarez putting Liverpool 3-0 up at Selhurst Park 12 years ago and rushing to retrieve the ball from the back of the net only for — and apologies to the Liverpool supporters among you for taking you down this path again — Crystal Palace coming back to draw 3-3 in one of the Premier League’s most memorable matches.
Over to you, City.
Chelsea isn’t working, is it?
Protests outside the ground, boos inside. All is not well at Stamford Bridge. A run of four straight league defeats without a goal for the first time since 1912 raises serious questions about Chelsea’s direction of travel under owner BlueCo and head coach Liam Rosenior.
Chelsea are drifting dangerously in the Premier League, at serious risk of missing out on European football altogether, never mind qualification for the Champions League, with seven points separating them from Liverpool in fifth place, and Brentford, Bournemouth, Brighton & Hove Albion and Everton all within a point at most.
Anger is building among the fanbase about the way the club is being run, and the players look increasingly dejected, too. As for Rosenior, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this job has come too soon for him. Chelsea have lost six of their past seven matches, while two of their three victories in the past 11 fixtures were against Wrexham (a Championship club) and Port Vale (League One).
How much immediate pressure Rosenior is under is hard to know. But there seems to be a lot of ‘thinking’ going on behind the scenes about whether everything will work out.
“We’ve had a tough past five, six matches, but I think we’re behind Liam. Of course, it’s a results business, but we think he can be successful long term.”
That was Behdad Eghbali speaking at CAA’s World Congress of Sports conference in Los Angeles on Thursday, when Chelsea’s co-owner admitted that mistakes had been made at the club and that their player-trading model, which has such a strong emphasis on youth, needed to be tweaked.
Some of the more experienced players (and there aren’t many, which is a big part of the problem) had worked that out already. In a candid interview with The Athletic a couple of weeks ago, Marc Cucurella explained how he felt “discouraged” by the manner of Chelsea’s chastening Champions League exit against Paris Saint-Germain.
“We have a good core of players,” Cucurella said. “The foundations are there. But to fight for major trophies such as the Premier League or the Champions League, you need more. Signing young players only might complicate achieving those goals. Against PSG, we lacked players who had gone through situations like that.”
Cucurella for sporting director, anyone?
Aged 27, the Spaniard was Chelsea’s oldest outfield player against Manchester United on Saturday, in a game where the visitors had one shot on target and scored. I guess you could call that lucky. You might also call it clinical — which isn’t a word anyone would use to describe Chelsea’s attack. Not even a makeshift United defence could be breached.
Liam Delap has gone 20 games without scoring, it’s been more than six weeks since Cole Palmer shivered in celebration, Pedro Neto’s goal drought in the league extends even longer, and then there is the curious case of Alejandro Garnacho, who last found the net in the Premier League in October.
On as an early substitute for the injured Estevao, the Argentinian’s final act of the game was a mishit cross that, unfortunately, summed up his night and his Chelsea career so far. If signing Garnacho was the answer last summer, what was the question?
It feels like there’s an awful lot to fix at Chelsea, which is a strange thing to say about a club that has spent more than £1.8billion on players in four years. How much are the experienced footballers going to cost to take, in the words of Eghbali, Chelsea to “the next level”, and will they want to come to Stamford Bridge without Champions League football?
Will the gap get too big for Spurs?
As if conceding a stoppage-time equaliser on Saturday night wasn’t bad enough for Spurs fans, they had to endure the sight of Morgan Gibbs-White — the one who got away last summer — scoring a second-half hat-trick to haul Nottingham Forest further from the relegation zone.
Trailing 1-0 at home against Burnley at half-time, Forest turned things around in the second half on Sunday, courtesy of an exceptional individual performance from Gibbs-White, who was on the verge of joining Spurs last July before a last-minute U-turn. The midfielder scored three times for Forest in 17 minutes.
Spurs are now firmly playing catch-up, five points behind Forest, eight adrift of Leeds, who beat Wolves 3-0 on Saturday, and will trail West Ham by four if Nuno Espirito Santo’s team can follow up their emphatic 4-0 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers with another victory at Selhurst Park tonight.
Psychologically, a gap that size would strike a real blow to Spurs, given they would go into Saturday’s match at bottom-of-the-table Wolves knowing they would remain in the relegation zone even if they win in the league for the first time since the end of December. Would this Spurs squad have the mental strength to deal with that sort of scenario?
Roberto De Zerbi said after the 2-2 draw against Brighton, which featured an outstanding goal from Xavi Simons, that he believes his team can win all five of their remaining fixtures. Realistically, two wins and a couple of draws are likely to be more than enough, but that’s still a tall order for a team that has been struggling for form and confidence for so long.
The good news for Spurs fans is that there has been an improvement in performance levels since De Zerbi took over, even if that has only translated to one point from the matches against Sunderland and Brighton. Encouragement can also be taken from the way that Simons showed against Brighton that he can produce moments that change matches.
The bad news is that their fate is out of their hands and that the teams around them won on the weekend. The sight of West Ham doing the same at Palace would crank up the pressure on Spurs, who simply have to get three points at Wolves to give themselves the shot in the arm their season so badly needs.
Has Farke proved a few of us wrong?
Farke is a Championship specialist but not a Premier League manager — that was the narrative at the start of the season, and it was the narrative long before that.
His record in the Premier League with Norwich City was 49 games, six wins, eight draws and 35 losses (0.53 points per game), leading to one relegation, in the 2019-20 season, and a sacking 11 matches into the 2021-22 campaign. In fact, there were even doubts about whether Farke would be kept on after winning promotion with Leeds.
A short and not particularly sweet stint in the top flight with Leeds was on the cards, all the more so when the crowd turned on him in November. After losing 2-1 at home against Aston Villa, in what was a fourth defeat in five matches, a section of Leeds fans chanted: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“It’s not very enjoyable at the moment, we’re getting a lot of stick,” Farke told reporters after the Villa game. “But I don’t need to hide. I was aware of how passionate this club is from the first day here. If you can’t handle the heat, don’t become manager of Leeds United. I never expected this season to be an easy ride.”
Cue a turnaround that few could have imagined, aided by a tactical change to the formation that suggests Farke knows what he’s doing after all.
Leeds have lost only four of their 20 Premier League matches since the start of December, picking up 28 points in the process. In a league where it’s notoriously easy for promoted teams to get into a cycle of losing, Leeds have been remarkably difficult to beat.
Saturday’s win over Wolves completed the best week of the season for Leeds and Farke. A 2-1 triumph against Manchester United — Leeds’ first victory at Old Trafford since 1981 — was followed by a 3-0 victory over Wolves five days later.
With 39 points on the board, Leeds are within touching distance of survival. They also have an FA Cup semi-final at home against Chelsea to look forward to on Sunday. Not bad for a manager who was written off by plenty of us before a ball had been kicked.
Coming up