Premier League winners and losers: Crystal Palace, Liverpool, Farke, Arsenal, Moyes, Gibbs-White and more

Liverpool are spiralling hilariously out of control, Arsenal must ‘adapt’ and Morgan Gibbs-White is a massive loser who hit a new career low against Everton .

The Toffees are, of course, in the Premier League winners along with Norwich’s favourite sons, an emblem of Bournemouth sensibility and rotating Newcastle.

Maybe glance at the Premier League table before perusing these many words.

The undisputed main character of the 2025/26 Premier League season .

Entirely deservedly fourth, winning Premier League away games with a 34-year-old Nathaniel Clyne making his first start since April in the curious, speculation-fuelling absence of Daniel Munoz, with Jean-Philippe Mateta only actually scoring in four of their 12 victories this season.

The only team with more away points in Europe’s top five leagues in 2025/26 is Real Madrid, who have played nine such games to Palace’s eight. The Bernabeu is going to be covered in eagle feathers and smothered by Adam Wharton’s lovely balls next season.

What is this? Norwich from 2018 to 2021?

The Buendia renaissance has been stunning and abrupt. But it cannot beat Farke’s Leeds rejuvenation for shock factor.

Rarely has a manager so pointedly and specifically saved themselves through a series of excellent decisions. The switch in formation and approach at half time at Manchester City was replicated to remarkable effect against Chelsea , before another change of tack was required to overcome Liverpool .

While the hammer blow of that Hugo Ekitike double from an individual error and lack of team concentration might ordinarily have put the game beyond Leeds as early as the 50th minute, Farke sensed there were still points to be had.

His triple substitution of Wilfried Gnonto, Brenden Aaronson and Ao Tanaka for Noah Okafor, Jaka Bijol and Ilia Gruev on the hour was transformational: Gnonto won a penalty, Aaronson assisted the first equaliser and Tanaka scored the second.

A run of Manchester City , Chelsea and Liverpool in eight days was seemingly designed to push Farke over the brink after one win and five defeats in seven. It has breathed new life into this team and manager instead.

There is ample praise to be apportioned to Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Gareth Barry’s brother Thierno and just Everton in general for launching somehow their least likely Champions League push ever despite existing on a timeline which included them finishing fourth with a negative goal difference two decades ago.

But really this is about Moyes and his uncanny ability to simultaneously Know Two Different Clubs.

The Scot is the only man to appear twice in the top 20 of Premier League manager reigns ranked by total points accrued. Moyes is fifth with the Toffees – just eight points behind Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool – and 20th with West Ham.

There is absolutely zero doubt that he is on first-name terms with at least five tea ladies and receptionists and their extended families.

Without the means or idea of where to even start researching and corroborating such nonsense, the only viable course of action is to declare that six starting line-up changes is the most Newcastle have ever made for a game they have gone on to win. Would be great if Opta Joelinton could confirm that post-haste. Cheers.

Not all of those alterations were especially foolproof – Jacob Ramsey struggled even before that late, hilarious, panic-inducing penalty concession – but it is vanishingly rare for Newcastle to have such squad depth to rotate so heavily and still win in the Premier League .

It is even more unusual for Eddie Howe to actually use it. Yoane Wissa making the most long-awaited of debuts only reinforced the sense that Newcastle have far more ways of playing their hand or shuffling the pack than perhaps ever before.

Not since he came on at 3-2 down in the opening-day 4-2 defeat to Liverpool has Hill been on the losing side in a Premier League game. Despite only playing eight games, he has managed to feature in four of the five in which Bournemouth have kept a clean sheet.

The Cherries ending the Chelsea match with a defence of Smith, Hill, Diakite and Truffert is sub-optimal for a variety of reasons but Andoni Iraola will embrace having a player able to slot in at short notice to provide solidity and structure to a typically more chaotic team.

Bournemouth have scored and conceded three goals each in Hill’s 303 Premier League minutes this season, making him seeing out a 0-0 draw in a half-hour cameo quite predictable. Every other Cherries player with more minutes has conceded at least twice as many goals.

Nuno Espirito Santo has already matched both Graham Potter and Julen Lopetegui for first-team debuts handed out to academy graduates after Ezra Mayers made his bow, while West Ham have awfully quietly lost just one of their last six games .

Mateus Fernandes also winning the most duels of any player in a single Premier League match this season furthers his case as one of the low-key signings of the season. It will be difficult to resist that £30m Spurs offer next summer.

Another infuriatingly avoidable setback, but Brighton are well on course to defend their coveted Most Different Goalscorers crown. Georginio Rutter was – some might say illegally – number 14 in a season when no other club has more than 11 so far.

The quintessential scorer of great goals.

Now has more Premier League goals than Luis Suarez and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, while pulling level with a fellow inimitable icon of the division. Eric Cantona definitely has posters of Richarlison on his bedroom wall.

It is remarkably, incredibly, hilariously, absurdly damning for Arne Slot, actual reigning Premier League champion and manager of the team who shattered the world record for biggest single-window transfer spend this summer , including nine-figure sums being set aside for two different forwards, to actively, publicly and seemingly without shame lament how he does not possess “the profile of Jacob Murphy” in his squad.

That doing so has likely contributed to one of the greatest players in Liverpool history – and certainly their most well-remunerated – feeling compelled to expel toys from pram and dummy from mouth , is frankly exceptional crisis-clubbing.

A cracked badge hardly feels sufficient at this stage; only an AI mock-up of Michael Edwards on a laptop in his air-conditioned but entirely ablaze office saying ‘This is fine’ will do.

Mo Salah challenging Slot in a baldest man battle cannot possibly augur well for a club already spiralling out of control. Liverpool have enough on-field problems winning two of their last 10 Premier League games and tumbling towards the ignominy of an unseeded Champions League knockout phase play-off place to have to also deal with petty off-pitch infighting.

Ibrahima Konate, for example, is in his own manager’s words “a bit too much at the crime scene”.

It remains to be seen if Slot is bemoaning the lack of Dan Burn’s profile. But with Slot’s desperate search for solutions unable to keep pace with a rise in Liverpool problems, it does not feel like signing more Newcastle players – or more players at all, considering the issues the summer churn has dredged up – is an option.

It is worth wondering what horrors would have awaited Arsenal a few seasons ago had they been reduced to using their fifth-choice centre-half, considering that was a pecking order in which Rob Holding sat third.

But ultimately, and despite one of the many misconceptions surrounding Mikel Arteta as a manager who clings to hopeless finger-pointing and mitigation in defeat, they have the right man in charge to “use that pain to go again”.

“The team has to be able to adapt to that,” he said of a first defeat in 18. “Don’t look for excuses.”

Their previous loss to Liverpool in August prompted a run which has taken them top of the Premier and Champions League tables. They have enough credit in the bank for this to be seen as a blip rather than a bottling.

But certain players absolutely need to step up in the crucial moments, perhaps after investigating precisely what Leandro Trossard’s diet and preparation entails.

Arsenal need more from Viktor Gyokeres, from Eberechi Eze when not powered by the banterful narrative of facing Spurs , from those who really ought to have cleared that ball ten times over in stoppage time.

From Arteta, too, whose reticence to use someone like Christian Norgaard in a difficult midfield battle can only be explained so far by the defensive upheaval they are having to contend with, and whose apparent total repurposing of Mikel Merino as a centre-forward has robbed a knackered engine room of a viable and trusted option.

Declan Rice and Martin Zubimendi rank first and second for most outfield Arsenal minutes this season and it showed at Villa Park. Arteta knows he cannot afford to wait for these injury problems to subside, and must lead by example in their quest to “adapt”.

After feeling like he “can finally breathe” in the absence of Ange Postecoglou, Gibbs-White made the most of that fresh air with four goals in six games in a promising run of Forest form.

But the sense of suffocation has returned with three goalless matches – the playmaker failing to even register a shot in the last two – as Sean Dyche has been forced to re-equip the firefighter gear many thought would no longer be needed.

A Player of the Month nominee for November has entered the festive period in a generous mood against Premier League defences. To say Everton summarily stifled Gibbs-White would be an understatement: it was the first game of his entire recorded professional top-flight career in which he started, failed to have a shot, make a key pass or even attempt a take-on.

As the creative fulcrum of this team and highest-paid player in the club’s history, Gibbs-White will know better than anyone that isn’t nearly good enough.

The double-barrelled battle with Dewsbury-Hall was a clean-cut, no-frills, low-key, one-sided non-starter.

With the biggest discrepancy in the Premier League between points won home (16) or away (3), there is at least solace for Keith Andrews that whatever ails Brentford is easy to diagnose.

Finding a cure to their form and performances on the road is rather less straightforward, as seven defeats in eight away attests.

The impeccable timing of their visit to West Ham during Nuno Espirito Santo’s strikerless identity crisis is only slightly masking Brentford’s biggest weakness. Only Wolves have accrued fewer away points this season.

And that was the lowest xG (0.2) amassed by an opponent in a single game against Spurs in well over three years, since Frank Lampard met Antonio Conte in the dugout as Everton manager .

Brentford have won at least twice as many penalties as any other Premier League side this season, and are considerably less effective at non-throw-in attacking set pieces since appointing their coach of them as first-team manager and replacing him with, essentially, one of his mates.

It could be worse. But the room for improvement is stark, too.

A five-game winless run through Christmas and into early this year derailed Chelsea last season to the point that talk of the title pivoted immediately into Champions League qualification chat.

History is repeating itself on the basis of three matches without a Premier League win, the last two of which have summarily squandered any momentum and belief built in the performances against Barcelona and Arsenal .

Be it the reintegration of Cole Palmer, the absence of Moises Caicedo or the continued struggles of Liam Delap, the rumblings of discontent and disjointedness have emerged at Chelsea again.

A high-scoring team which has looked somewhat susceptible in defence has kept four clean sheets in six and failed to score in a game for the first time since the opening weekend.

The Rafa Benitez “short blanket” analogy will never die, mainly because this column won’t let it.

Scott Parker and the Fine Margins is, frankly, an exceptional band name.

The shtick is also admittedly far less funny when no team has lost more games by a one-goal margin than Burnley , who were essentially undone at Newcastle by only the 20th Olimpico goal in Premier League history, a player being sent off on his first Premier League start, and the first Premier League instance of an outfielder trying to catch a cross.

Give it up for Lucas Pires on the drums and Lesley Ugochukwu on the bass.

Only the O’Sixht player to be sent off in each of England’s top four divisions. How unfortunate that Ian Evatt, Grant Holt, Claude Davis, Stephen Quinn and Liam Cooper was such an unimprovably Barclays /Coca-Cola/npower/SkyBet succession line for such an accomplishment.