Premier League winners and losers: Man City, Wirtz, Benitez, Glasner, Brighton, Aaronson, O’Neil
Manchester City are embracing their pantomime villain role, but there is less good time being had by Wirtz, Glasner, Carrick and others.
It’s a weird time for Barclays, but persist we must.
Manchester City Top of a division they might soon be expelled from, singing from the same process-respecting, cartel-shunning hymn sheet and fully embracing their role as the villains in an infernal pantomime with no heroic lead.
It’s an almighty and absurd mess but Manchester City are thoroughly enjoying themselves and, at least for now, cheaters are very much still prospering.
Walter Benitez As the presumably unrelated Rafa might attest: the Jerzy Dudek to Liam Delap’s Andriy Shevchenko.
Benitez is a dream of a second-choice keeper, and a remarkable Palace pick-up on a free last summer.
In 13 appearances he has kept six clean sheets, played an important role in Conference League trophy glory, saved two penalties in a shoot-out win over Millwall and inspired a victory over Mr. Marinakis and a returning Oliver Glasner.
That is pure cult hero; Dean Henderson can rest easy and take his time recovering.
Crystal Palace On the one hand, the Premier League is utterly, irretrievably and irredeemably broken. On the other, Palace are 12th and the world is healing.
Brighton A stupidly good team.
That Pascal Gross through ball? That Chema Andres tackle? That Jaouen Hadjam debut finish? The seamless shift in formation and approach after the red card? Fabian Hurzeler’s substitutions and tactical flexibility? The squad depth to not only cope but thrive with the most debilitating injury list in the division? The fact their last seven Premier League wins have been to nil?
Stupidly good.
Arsenal Never touch their identity.
Gary O’Neil Only four clubs have spent less time leading in the Premier League this season, but while each languish in the bottom six, Ipswich are sat snugly in the top half.
With their three wins delivered by goals scored in the 90th minute or later, the Tractor Boys are a quarter of the way to a reasonable safety target after six games.
And first-season parachutist O’Neil might be the biggest guarantee of survival that currently exists in the Premier League sphere.
In a Spoke Well I Thought-coded MNF appearance at the end of last year, O’Neil said it would be easy to rest on the laurels of his successful escape acts at Bournemouth and, at least initially, Wolves, but that his failed second Molineux season was the one he “learned the most from” and “will make me better”.
Ipswich are currently benefiting from those difficult lessons taken on board by a quietly excellent crisis coach.
Chelsea As long as they keep spinning, everything might be fine.
Jordan Henderson Might actually be the signing of the season. Our bad.
James Justin The scorer of as many Premier League goals against Arsenal as Andy Cole, Michael Owen and Frank Lampard, more than Ruud van Nistelrooy, and more than Les Ferdinand and Ryan Giggs combined.
Brentford After spending four minutes trailing against Bournemouth, Brentford should be satisfied at compressing their response time even further to just two at Villa Park.
Brentford have been behind for six minutes in the Premier League this season. The closest clubs to that are Leeds and Manchester City, both on 58 minutes. That is daft.
Joe Gelhardt If penalties won are included in the former, Gelhardt has as many goals and assists as starts in his Premier League career, with seven each.
And sod it, they should be included, and Jamie Vardy considered one of the finest playmakers of his generation.
Rodrigo Bentancur Saved Roberto De Zerbi and potentially kickstarted Spurs’ season through a show of incredible self-sacrifice.
So, so, so much time for a substitute coming on, not doing enough to prevent a goal and then being sent off, all in the space of 12 minutes, and still getting a kiss from his manager.
Bentancur has played the most minutes (382) of any Premier League player yet to be on the pitch when their team has scored. It’s an exceptional trick.
Premier League losers
Liverpool You had one job, ffs. Even if they did carry it out well enough for a bit.
Florian Wirtz You…actually, what do you do?
Only two players have had more shots without scoring in the Premier League this season, but both Julio Enciso and Diego Gomez have at least created three and two big chances respectively to Wirtz’s zero. And even combined, they cost their teams less than one-third of the fee Liverpool spent on their creative deadweight.
It took an even smaller fraction for Manchester City to sign Rayan Cherki, who looked more comfortable at Anfield on Sunday than Wirtz has in 18 months.
At least Bradley Barcola has the nine-figure excuse of acclimatisation to the “intensity” and “physical” side of the Premier League. A few weeks into his second season, Wirtz looks worse than his already underwhelming first.
Alvaro Arbeloa Used to manage Real Madrid, don’t you know?
Bournemouth Theirs status?
Their status among the Premier League’s killer Bs is not permanent and might well have already expired.
Andoni Iraola’s nine-game winless start as Bournemouth manager has been invoked with ferocious frequency, and it did not feel then that he would establish them as a phenomenal Premier League side, and himself as a sensational Premier League coach.
The same curved path might lie ahead of Marco Rose after these chastening opening weeks.
But Bournemouth, having specifically avoided selling any first-team players this summer, have lost Eli Junior Kroupi, Justin Kluivert and Alex Scott to injury and have been unable to come up with solutions after being handed the toughest start of any side on paper.
While Rose can point to that in his defence, the inevitable shadow of Eddie Howe and Jason Tindall is looming.
Oliver Glasner That really is quite a preposterous defeat to have inflicted upon oneself, largely by oneself.
Glasner accepted the “karma”-based “blame” for a vaguely humiliating loss, having coached a comprehensive away win which was slightly scuppered by the profligacy of his players.
Forest were so dominant at Selhurst Park in the opening 40 minutes that their inexplicable collapse over the course of the subsequent 20 did actually make complete sense. In those circumstances, total and collective headloss was the only reasonable response.
But Glasner will know this form cannot carry on much longer under this owner. Forest have gifted Palace their first home win, Coventry their first win of any kind, Spurs their first point and all eight players to have scored against them their first goals of the Premier League season so far.
It’s not a level of generosity Mr. Marinakis enjoys or indulges.
Michael Carrick Altogether now, in what has become a motto so ingrained at Manchester United that they should install it on a plaque on the door to the manager’s office: not the problem, but not the solution either.
Carrick is far from faultless. Manchester United’s distinct lack of energy and impetus both on and off the ball is preposterous and, to reiterate:
‘This season, Manchester United have: faced two promoted sides, losing convincingly to one and beating the other in controversial fashion; played two teams who were bottom when they faced them, drawing with both; played 95 minutes at home against ten men while winning or drawing, only to lose by an aggregate score of 0-2.’
He has been exposed by another layer of abysmal recruitment this summer, carefully laid on top of years’ worth of fundamental squad and executive mismanagement.
But Carrick just doesn’t have it. He hasn’t been best in class for about a decade and a half and carrying on pretending otherwise is pointless enough for the INEOS big brains to persist.
Brenden Aaronson Not since the first equaliser in a 2-2 draw with Bournemouth in April 2026 has Aaronson been on the pitch for a Premier League goal scored by Leeds.
If that does not sound too absurd, please do consider that he has appeared in all ten subsequent games – starting five of them – in which Leeds have scored 13 goals, but all with him either having been taken off or not yet brought on.
He is either remarkably unfortunate, or incredibly ineffective. A great many Leeds fans already appear to have deleted where applicable.
Aston Villa In the last four Premier League seasons, Villa have finished 4th, 4th, 5th and 6th respectively in the home table. But only Coventry have fewer points on their own turf in this nascent campaign – and the Sky Blues have a game in hand.
The season-long closure of the North Stand for redevelopment was dismissed as a legitimate excuse for their form before the game by Unai Emery, but Keith Andrews noted that “naturally it does not generate the atmosphere” and “with the stand missing it is a bit different”.
Wherever the truth lies, it does only add to the transitional vibe of Villa’s season.
Sunderland There is mitigation in having faced each of the current Champions League qualification place inhabitants in their last four games. The loss of Brian Brobbey, too, is sub-optimal.
But Sunderland looked like the team with fewer answers when numerical advantage was added to the ostensible upper hand of playing at home.
“We will struggle at times, but it’s part of the process,” said Regis Le Bris afterwards. ‘Struggle’ has very much been the operative word so far for a side yet to really get going.
The rest of this month – Torreense (a), Bournemouth (a), Lech Poznan (a), Leeds (h), Brentford (h) and Coventry (a) in six games over the course of 16 days – feels magnitudinal and already season-defining.
Ainsley Maitland-Niles Deploy a backheel as an instinctive defensive manoeuvre once, shame on you. Deploy a backheel as an instinctive defensive manoeuvre twice, shame on the club which spent years failing to sign an adequate right-back and eventually landed on a budget option who remains “not a defender” and “an attacking player by trade”, as he himself said seven years ago.
Everton, nevertheless, have gone unbeaten in their first six Premier League games for only the third time ever – of the 41 teams who have accomplished that feat since the first season they managed it in 2006/07, their current record ranks 39th.
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