Spurs and Liverpool have problems far bigger than any one signing can solve, but Hull, Chelsea and James McAtee have cracked it.
The wheat is already being separated from considerable Barclays chaff, isn’t it?
Premier League winners
Matthias Jaissle
Absolutely loving ‘the biggest step backwards in the world’ and his ‘stupid tight suit’.
Hull
Only the fourth promoted club to win their opening two Premier League games. Two of the previous three stayed up. The one which went down was Hull in 2016/17, which does unfortunately nullify the omens somewhat.
It is, in any event, a far better start than most had bothered to forecast. The instinct was to reduce Hull to the latest side whose results would be compared week on week with Derby 2007/08, before pulling clear of that risible Rams points total but still going down without much of a fight anyway.
Yet the Tigers are more than halfway there with 36 games left, having struck amber with a simple yet remarkably effective blueprint of focusing on structure, organisation, teamwork and repetition.
With a solid keeper, three physical centre-halves in a back five, a resolute midfield, plenty of width and some exciting attacking additions in the pipeline before the deadline, Sergej Jakirovic will spring plenty more surprises just by staying competitive while capitalising on game-breaking moments on the break and at set pieces.
Chelsea
Not too Xabi indeed. Alonso’s solitary career brush with Kevin Keegan – 90 minutes of a 3-0 Liverpool win over Newcastle in March 2008 – clearly left an indelible mark on the Spaniard.
It certainly wasn’t while sitting under the Rafael Benitez or Jose Mourinho learning trees that he adopted the ‘we’ll score one more than you’ mantra.
But for Chelsea it’s exciting, if likely unsustainable. In all of last season they only won a single Premier League game in which they conceded two goals or more. Already this campaign they have won 3-2 and 4-3, threatening preposterous collapses each time before belatedly rebooting their game management senses.
The brilliance of that fluid, varied, interchanging attack is ultimately likely to produce goals more often than not, so the question is whether Chelsea’s defensive issues can be addressed over the season. And even the main problems there should be solved purely with time: Emi Martinez adjusting to new team-mates, and Romeo Lavia not being the senior midfielder in a pivot.
Chelsea, extremely tentatively, possibly, maybe, sort of feel a little bit vaguely like mid-process Arsenal of four years ago. The Gunners at the Emirates next week will be the best true test of where they are at, and thankfully there is no recent precedent of the Blues imploding after being declared legitimate title contenders following a positive result against Mikel Arteta’s side.
At this point, the most we have to learn from Chelsea is what happens when they actually go behind in a game, because the cushions put in place against Fulham and Brighton might not always be there.
Malick Yalcouye
At this stage, clubs are guilty of gross negligence for not just automatically hijacking every obscure midfield signing Brighton make.
Marcus Rashford
“Marcus has been part of a rough ride for Manchester United, and when that happens and the team doesn’t deliver, players get dug out and he was one of them at that stage,” said Harry Maguire.
“I’ve been through it. Everyone’s been through it at this club,” he added, summing up the relentless redemption cycle roughly half this Manchester United team has experienced.
Maguire, for want of a better phrase, is the former captain cockroach a couple of coaches have hoped to kill. He can speak with authority about how Luke Shaw, Kobbie Mainoo and even the undeniable Bruno Fernandes have weathered seemingly irreversible storms concocted by managers, pundits and fans and yet emerged on the other side.
Rashford’s situation felt arguably more unrecoverable than each of those, so severed were the ties to his boyhood club during the Ruben Amorim reign.
But a decent track back and tackle is all it really takes to start mending bridges and winning people back over.
Rayan Cherki
The following forwards all have two things in common: Savio, Yoane Wissa, Jamie Gittens, Anthony Elanga, Brennan Johnson, Kevin, Emile Smith Rowe, Dan Ndoye and Dilane Bakwa.
They all joined Premier League clubs in the past year for more than Manchester City paid to sign Cherki, who has more combined goals and assists in 109 minutes this season alone than each of those players mustered in the entirety of 2025/26.
He might be “chaotic” and ignorant as to Enzo Maresca’s safe zones, but Manchester City need plenty of that.
James McAtee
A player signed to help replace Anthony Elanga and, before his golden handshake with Mr. Marinakis, Morgan Gibbs-White in a raided Nottingham Forest attack, might actually have emerged as part of their succession plan for a £116m midfielder 12 months later.
Oliver Glasner, the maverick that he is in balancing internal coaching solutions with external transfers, “decided it’s not target No. 1 to replace Elliot because maybe we can do it from our own squad and spend the money on other positions”.
McAtee was the in-house candidate envisaged in a new role. Having signed from Manchester City in 2025, he just had to wait for Anderson to make the inverse journey in 2026 for his future to become clearer.
Two games into his second City Ground season, McAtee has already been given more Premier League minutes by Glasner (164) than any of his other four Forest managers – almost as many as under Nuno Espirito Santo (50), Ange Postecoglou (77) and Sean Dyche (43) combined.
It turns out playing an Etihad academy graduate in a more reserved position and giving him more of the ball is an idea worth exploring. If you squinted hard enough at Anfield – and willed an unexpected backflip into existence – McAtee didn’t half resemble an Adam Wharton type.
Everton
It is vaguely heartening to see the stakeholders at Everton revert to habitually despising each other again. There was a brief period during which everyone seemed to be pulling in at least a similar direction, which has thankfully been entirely sacrificed at the £40m altar of Harrison Armstrong.
They will be the most interesting club to watch heading into the final hours of the transfer window. When an attack could plausibly go from Dewsbury Hall, Ndiaye, Barry and George to Richarlison and Balogun with Grealish floating around somewhere behind within a couple of weeks, it is worth keeping an eye on.
But even when collapsing in on itself, a David Moyes team remains capable of grinding out results. His Everton being in the European places early in the season is one of the Premier League’s proudest and most enduring traditions for a reason.
Brentford
Just a bloody good team under a bloody good manager.
Leeds
One defeat in 11 games, and that didn’t count on the final day away at relegated West Ham. If you can’t win, don’t lose.
Regis Le Bris
The first manager this season to bring on substitutes who combine to assist and score a Premier League goal. And you’ll never sing that.
Premier League losers
Spurs
Roberto De Zerbi was spot on: “You can’t find the right mentality in the transfer market.” And for a club about to push the record for most money spent by any club in a window ever pretty close, that is a problem for Spurs.
“It’s the biggest problem, it’s the biggest challenge and the biggest target is to find the right mentality,” the Italian went on, adding: “After the goal we conceded, I think we lost the confidence. The reaction was not good enough, not the reaction I want to see on the pitch, and I said immediately after the end of the game, the players, because when you are building something new, it’s tough, there are problems, the difference is how you want to find the solution of these problems, and the solution is not to put down the head, but to react, because we had 20 minutes again to score one, two or maybe three goals.”
It might be harsh to suggest that De Zerbi ought to have come far closer to remedying an issue in “mentality” which he identified when he was appointed four months ago. But also Spurs have spent inordinate sums this summer, and among the five new signings in the starting XI against Newcastle were two Premier League champions and a Serie A winner.
They should not look the least prepared of any team for this season, especially at home to a team they poached a £92.5m midfielder from, who appointed their manager less than a month ago.
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Crystal Palace
Pierre Sage was “frustrated” that his players “gave up a little” and couldn’t “do it for the duration of the game” against Everton.
Crystal Palace “played well during the first half and it’s not normal that we played as we did in the second half” in his first match. So based on them lasting about an hour before basically calling it an evening against Manchester City, Fulham are in for quite the 75-minute test next week.
This has not been a summer conducive to seamless, serene preparation for Premier League clubs. Palace, so well-represented at the World Cup, victims of their own success in terms of UEFA SCR and at the end of a cycle marked by the departure of key players and their manager, have arguably been impacted the most.
Glasner “will have a pint of beer and celebrate the transfer window being closed” later this week. His successor – and indeed probably every other manager in the country – will do the same.
Liverpool
After a pulsating victory over Norwich in January 2016 which underlined Liverpool’s obvious potential in attack as much as it emphasised their glaring shortcomings in defence, the question was asked: How do you solve those problems with Teixeira?
They didn’t. Liverpool passed on that mid-season transfer, improved through coaching and gradual adaptation instead, and laid far more reliable, dynastical foundations in the summer.
The comparison is not perfect; Bradley Barcola is a considerably better player and far more compelling market opportunity, especially if Cody Gakpo is on his way. But it isn’t an irrelevant parallel either because his signing alone will not rectify those conspicuous problems in every other position.
In short: watching Liverpool concede from a keeper punt and a penalty conceded from a quick throw-in, replying to both with well-worked, well-taken equalisers, made £123m worth of incomings before the deadline feel necessary, but not a) in attack, nor b) all on one player.
Andoni Iraola needs a bit more to work with.
Bournemouth
In fairness, it is absurdly unfortunate to draw both the ‘Struggle To Defend Set Pieces’ and ‘Lose Points From Winning Positions’ cliche cards in pre-season.
Bournemouth have a single point from their opening two games despite leading in the 83rd and 90th minutes respectively. All three of the goals they have conceded have been to defenders, with both equalisers coming from corners. It isn’t ideal.
Gary O’Neil
A humbling defeat for Ipswich at Old Trafford. But on a far more humiliating level, O’Neil remains the only manager to lose a Premier League game to Frank Lampard since October 2022 (19 matches).
Coventry
A club apparently ill-equipped off the pitch for their long-awaited top-flight return, and not particularly ready on it either.
Perhaps Coventry have suffered for a schedule which started with the most difficult game of the season away at the champions, and followed that up with their theoretically easiest assignment of hosting the Championship play-off winners. No team will have needed to alter their strategies quite as drastically in the opening couple of weeks.
But they do visit Manchester City next, so it might get worse before there is even a chance of improvement. Not happy to report that Frank Lampard has moved on from The Basics to “the details”, though, without mastering the art of teaching his players the importance of either in the Premier League.
