Premier League winners and losers: Arsenal, Frank’s pathetic excuse, Dyche, Liverpool, Minteh, Farke

Thomas Frank lands in the losers alongside Arne Slot after his embarrassing five-word admission after defeat to the really quite ridiculously good Arsenal.

Liverpool were also undone by the simplicity of Sean Dyche’s 12-word footballing mantra.

Losing 4-1 at Arsenal having faced Brighton away barely 24 hours earlier is not that bad a resu…oh. Oh no.

Just very obviously the best team in the country , and certainly in the top three in the world.

With three forwards signed for a combined £163m absent from the squad entirely, their captain injured and their best centre-half who doubles up as one of their most effective attacking options unavailable, Arsenal just swatted aside a bitter rival with everyone watching.

Only Arsenal can stop Arsenal and they appear to be in no mood to do so.

Not many managers can boast two Premier League wins away at Anfield; Dyche’s Everton successor has failed to mastermind just one victory there in 23 visits .

And that is testament to his coaching adaptability. Burnley ended Liverpool’s unbeaten home run in January 2021 though phenomenal defensive solidity, efficiency and a late Ashley Barnes penalty, scoring from one of their six shots and keeping out the hosts’ 27.

Almost five years later, Dyche returned with a Nottingham Forest side who had more than twice as many shots on target as Liverpool to underpin a first Premier League clean sheet since August.

There was a set-piece goal, but also a well-worked second from the league’s foremost attacking full-back and a wholly deserved third.

There were no backs to the wall. Forest had as many shots as Liverpool in the second half and at the precise moment Dyche might have been forgiven for shoring things up on the hour and holding on, his first substitution introduced another forward at 2-0 who played a crucial role in the goal which sealed victory not 20 minutes later.

That is testament to how he has already developed a better grasp of this squad’s strengths and weaknesses than the two managers who came before him, and this result was evidence of a coaching acumen he often simplifies to the point of deliberate parody.

“Put the ball in that end, stop it going in that end,” is Dyche’s self-professed mantra. It has taken just six games to permeate a team which had forgotten how to do either.

A first Premier League win over Manchester City since Salomon Rondon and Matt Ritchie scored for Rafa Benitez’s side in January 2019 to make Newcastle the last team to take points off the champions that season.

This was slightly different, although Fabian Schar did provide another man-of-the-match-worthy performance which perhaps only defensive partner Malick Thiaw and goalscoring hero Harvey Barnes could better.

The return to St James’ Park invigorated Newcastle but so too an international break which offered time to pause and reflect after those damaging defeats to West Ham and Brentford.

Eddie Howe used it wisely to plan his first Premier League win over Manchester City in 19 attempts after losing their prior meetings 10-44 on aggregate.

As he said after the game, Howe has “lists and lists of things that haven’t worked” against Guardiola’s side, but that “very small piece of paper” containing the things that do can finally be laminated by Jason Tindall. Although good luck condensing that ridiculous game down to just a few words; only a madman would undertake such a task .

That might have been, not entirely facetiously, the single most complete centre-forward performance in the history of the entire sport.

Wilson scored from two of his three shots, did not register a successful pass and generally tormented the Bournemouth defence before being taken off with West Ham 2-0 up as Nuno Espirito Santo sought to shut up shop long before the shutters were ready to come down.

Erling Haaland could never. This revolutionary West Ham resurgence goes on .

Fifth in the Premier League. Ninth in the Conference League. Twelfth in the European club football Elo rating system. Top of teams who could form an appropriate parting message to their opponents from the first three letters of the first two words in their name. In the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup.

Never let Oliver Glasner’s ridiculousness be normalised. No player should ever be bigger than the club – they are doing this having sold Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise and with Jean-Philippe Mateta seemingly cursed – but this manager really might be. And Palace should hold onto him for dear life.

Fabian Hurzeler will have to address the Carlos Baleba problem soon with a solution beyond trying to play him through it, and Brighton probably ought to record a single consecutive result of any kind at some point. But there is an imperiousness to their home form which only Arsenal and Manchester City – who lost at the Amex in August – can beat.

And in Minteh they have a genuine game-changer of potentially elite quality. He has the most goal-creating actions of any player in the Premier League this campaign and only Erling Haaland and Mo Salah have had more touches in the opposition penalty area.

The cross for the Danny Welbeck goal was exquisite and while the shot which deflected into Jack Hinshelwood’s path for the winner was perhaps an indication more of how he can improve his decision-making more than anything, the dribble which preceded it underlined his majesty in unlocking and unsettling an obdurate defence.

What we’re saying here is that it’s easier to just accept now that Chelsea will sign Minteh for £100m next summer. And they’d spend a similar amount on Lewis Dunk’s big diags if they could.

It hardly sounds right that Rogers, a Champions League hat-tricksman, had never scored more than once in any of his 166 senior domestic appearances for West Brom, Lincoln, Bournemouth, Blackpool, Middlesbrough and Aston Villa. To be honest, the subs probably ought to check it.

He certainly made his quality known when Villa needed it most. Rogers completed more than twice as many take-ons as any other player but also ranked second for ball recoveries. And divisive soloist Jude Bellingham will never sing that .

They needed that. Marco Silva needed that. The owners who wanted it known he had been offered a contract extension needed that. Raul Jimenez needed that. Samu Chukwueze needed that. The Alex Iwobi in central midfield hive needed that.

Newcastle selfishly beating Manchester City meant Fulham’s position in the table didn’t actually change despite their first non-Wolves win in the Premier League since September. But the mood was definitely transformed at Craven Cottage through a performance of consummate control.

Fulham had not had as many as 24 shots in a Premier League game since April, nor allowed as few as four since January. Sunderland had neither conceded as many nor mustered as few since their top-flight return, having taken to promotion remarkably well.

But this was a side devoid of confidence and with questions surrounding their manager teaching a high-flying side and problem-solving coach some harsh lessons in standards and, as Regis Le Bris put it, “basics”.

As desperate as that performance was , that one Thomas Frank quote might have been even more forlorn.

“I apologise to the fans. I think it’s also fair to say where we’re coming from. We finished 17th last year.”

And then spent £182m on a Europa League-winning squad which has been summarily embarrassed in consecutive London derbies. Plus Spurs had more points at this stage last year.

Only Spurs could produce a season so polarising as to cause this much lasting headloss. It was always likely that they would have to sell their soul to the devil for a trophy but it might also have cost Frank and Ange Postecoglou their careers at this level, Daniel Levy his job, Nottingham Forest their dignity and Tottenham supporters their sanity.

Imagine winning an actual trophy six months ago but being reminded you were actually shit after being bent over the knee of your most bitter rival and humiliated by the player who turned you down to join them .

Not to kink-shame, but that feels like too much self-debasement for one club to handle.

Arne Slot has managed six full seasons at senior level. In only one of those campaigns (2021/22 with Feyenoord, ten defeats) has he lost more games than Liverpool already have in 2025/26.

Not to denigrate a journey to the top which can only have required immense personal sacrifice on any number of levels, but it seems fair to say that in a professional sense since breaking into this bracket of managers, Slot is entirely unversed at facing and responding to this level of adversity.

He seems to have no answers – or worse, those he comes up with solve nothing and create a series of different problems. The floppy Alexander Isak should not be playing and Dominik Szoboszlai at right-back has barely ever been worth the cost of the whole team’s balance.

It is not a question Liverpool will want to ask , but one they cannot hope to avoid for much longer on this trajectory.

Iwao Hakamada – which sounds like the name of the player who will be signed for about £5m to replace one of their few saleable assets in January – once spent almost 46 years on death row before being released and later acquitted.

This six-month stay of execution might feel as perpetual for Wolves.

Only two clubs in Premier League history have had a worst start after 12 games – and one of them had incurred the biggest ever points deduction in the English top flight.

It feels every bit as hopeless a situation as that which Sheffield United faced in 2020/21, but at least for the Blades there was a sudden and sharp drop from the brilliance of the prior season, and no sense their Premier League status could not be quickly retrieved.

This is different. This is a needlessly protracted and painstaking process of handing in the fob and company laptop while everyone points, stares and checks the calendar with that typical football fan dread fear about being the team who hands Wolves their first and probably only win .

And there is no indication they will be back soon. It is a laughably poor squad which has been systematically weakened through a baffling transfer policy and the damage could last for years.

The appointment of Rob Edwards was with at least an eye on that drop to the Championship, and Wolves should perhaps count themselves fortunate that a talented coach exists who was willing to add another relegation to his CV.

But there is a need to define what success – or at least the avoidance of failure – looks like for Edwards in 2025/26. The rest of this season cannot be written off as a free hit, not with 26 games left. There must be clear improvement, and what transpired against Crystal Palace felt like a continuation of the final days of Vitor Pereira down to the system, the same poor players being picked and the same desperate post-match messages to the supporters.

Edwards has willingly jumped aboard a sunken ship but that can still only buy a finite amount of goodwill when Marshall Munetsi is still flapping around with his inflatable armbands on.

Not sure what Daniel Farke is saying to his Leeds players at half time but it isn’t working, unless the general message is to be quite considerably worse.

Leeds are 11th in a first-half Premier League table , scoring more goals than they concede before the break. Then they collapse: only Wolves have a worse record in the second half of games , and this is not the season to be associated with ‘only Wolves’.

Daniel Farke has either built or been handed a squad predicated on physicality but Leeds run out of steam in basically every game. They have only scored two second-half goals all season: an 84th-minute Lukas Nmecha penalty on the opening weekend, and Sean Longstaff’s stunner against Bournemouth in the 54th minute in September.

That isn’t close to adequate to compete at this level. The amount of points lost in that apparent deadzone in between has been catastrophic and Farke seems to have no answer to Leeds almost always starting well but, in more ways than one, finishing atrociously. It happens so frequently that it could be mistaken for an actual gameplan devised by a manager who doesn’t have long left .

Imagine being an obviously brilliant coach who nevertheless simply cannot figure out West Ham.

Iraola has beaten Barcelona, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Spurs and Dundalk as a manager but six meetings with West Ham have delivered five Premier League draws and a Carabao Cup defeat. And Enes Unal has had to rescue two of those stalemates as an 80th-minute substitute, which is a weird if effective solution of sorts.

His Bournemouth might be the only team in history to have conceded to both Wilson and Niclas Fullkrug at any point. Not saying he should be sacked but maybe Iraola could just have the day off when they travel to east London in February.

There have not been many shortcomings or obvious points of concern in this excellent return to Premier League life but deserved defeats away at the teams currently in 15th and 19th do hint at an issue which could ultimately hold Sunderland back from their loftier ambitions this season.

It might be an idea not to reprise the five-man backline against Your Evertons and The Fulhams Of This World, as well as it has been shown to work against far more ball-dominant teams in Chelsea and Arsenal.

Is it really a Premier League weekend if Parker doesn’t either entirely justifiably or completely hilariously cite “fine margins” in deserved victory, heavy defeat or anything in between?