There is little let-up in football’s ever-expanding schedule, but its sprawling nature allows just the occasional pause for reflection.
The past week has brought some big occasions in the Carabao Cup and FA Cup. Next week offers the unfamiliarity of European competition in January. This midweek Premier League programme has crept up almost undetected, yet much has changed since the last round of fixtures: managers have come and gone at West Ham United (Julen Lopetegui out, Graham Potter in) and Everton (Sean Dyche out, David Moyes back for a second spell); the beginnings of an unusually busy winter transfer window at Manchester City; a heightened state of anxiety at Arsenal in advance of Wednesday’s north London derby.
Just past the halfway stage, how has the Premier League’s 2024-25 season been for you?
If you are a Liverpool fan, then the answer will likely be one of cautious excitement. Nottingham Forest? Unexpected thrills. Bournemouth, Fulham or Brentford? Fun. Newcastle United? Much better than five weeks ago. Chelsea? Much worse than five weeks ago. Manchester City? The type of nightmare you thought was in your distant past. Manchester United or Everton? The type of nightmare that has haunted your present for too long. Southampton? Chastening. Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur? Maddening, in different ways, but ask them again after 10pm on Wednesday.
Some seasons take shape almost immediately. This one has been more peculiar. Manchester City’s nosedive in late 2024 is one reason for that, but there have been others. One team after another has looked strikingly impressive for four or five weeks before stumbling into difficulty. The only consistency — of the right type — has come from Liverpool and, to widespread amazement, Nottingham Forest.
What do we read into this? Are Liverpool really as strong as their commanding lead implies? Are Forest, who have the lowest share of possession in the top flight, as good as their run of six consecutive wins suggests? What on earth do we make of Manchester City’s struggles? And is all of this the sign of the high-quality, ultra-competitive league we demand? Or one where standards have slipped?
One consequence of Manchester City’s golden era under Pep Guardiola is that it has distorted expectations. It has normalised the abnormal.
Of the eight highest points totals recorded in the Premier League era, seven have come in the past nine seasons: Manchester City three times (including a record-breaking total of 100 points in 2017-18), Liverpool three times (only one of which yielded the league title) and Chelsea once (under Antonio Conte in 2016-17). The only previous team to have surpassed 91 points in a 38-game top-flight season was Chelsea under Jose Mourinho in 2004-05 (95 points).
This season has so far felt more… normal. As impressive as Liverpool have been so far under Arne Slot, they have not had quite the imperious look of their team that won 97 points under Jurgen Klopp in 2018-19 (only to finish a point behind City) and 99 points a year later. That side, with Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane in the forward line, was relentless. This one, with Salah joined by any two from Luis Diaz, Cody Gakpo, Diogo Jota and Darwin Nunez, looks slightly less formidable.
But that has been the way of things of late. Between 2009-10 and 2015-16, no Premier League champion reached the 90-point mark. There followed a period between 2016-17 and 2019-20 when the title was won with totals of 93, 100, 98 and 99 points. Manchester City’s subsequent four titles in a row were won with 86, 93, 89 and 91 points. The standard remained extremely high, but in points terms, not as high as Klopp suggested in 2019 when he told reporters Liverpool would have to be “perfect” if they were to be champions.
Right now, Liverpool are on course for 92 points — a tally Arsenal and Forest, their closest challengers, can only reach by winning 17 and drawing one of their final 18 matches. They have also won six games out of six in the Champions League, beating Real Madrid, Milan and Bayer Leverkusen among others.
But as Slot pointed out on Monday, it is folly to imagine the second half of a season will simply mirror the first. “There’s more at stake,” the Liverpool manager said. “That’s what sometimes you feel. That’s why you sometimes see more shocking results in the second half of the season and that’s why we need to improve.”
The chasing pack will hope that Liverpool, held to a 2-2 draw at home by Manchester United last time out, can be pegged back. Forest, already performing beyond their wildest pre-season expectations under Nuno Espirito Santo, will hope to clip the leaders’ wings at a loud, passionate City Ground on Tuesday evening.
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Every UK bookmaker already has Liverpool at short odds-on to be champions — a view shared by Opta’s “supercomputer” predictive model, which puts their chances at 88.9 per cent. But even their most bullish supporter might say that sounds rather presumptuous given they face away trips to eight of the 10 teams ranked immediately below them in the table at present. Both Manchester City and Arsenal can testify to the difficulty of a trip to Bournemouth. In both cases, an unexpected setback at the Vitality Stadium proved hard to shrug off.
Manchester City’s slump was so extreme, winning only one out of 13 matches in all competitions between late October and late December, that Opta rate their chances of a fifth consecutive league title at just 0.2 per cent. Pep Guardiola has been even less optimistic than that: “No chance”.
Mikel Arteta will not entertain talk of a regression in Arsenal’s standards, but he accepts his team have left themselves with an awful lot of work to do and that they must ensure they are ready to capitalise — “we have to continue to be like a hammer, be there every day, every day, every day”— if Liverpool stumble. So far in 2025, his own team have not looked ready to honour their side of the bargain.
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How strong is the Premier League right now?
The usual answer, in any given season, at just about any point in history, is that it is not as strong, as competitive or as entertaining as it used to be — an inevitable view, accompanied by the sweet smell of nostalgia, but one at odds with the reality of the league’s growing financial (and consequently on-pitch) strength.
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Manchester City have drastically underperformed this season, but before that two-month tailspin, they had lost just one of their previous 50 matches in all competitions (the FA Cup final against Manchester United last May). They have also won their past three games in a manner that suggests they will be a force in the second half of the season — and that, even if the damage to their Premier League title defence looks irreparable, they remain one of the strongest teams in Europe.
Last season’s European competition brought a few jolts to Premier League pride, with no English club getting beyond the quarter-finals of the Champions League or the Europa League, while Serie A and the Bundesliga claimed the highest coefficient ranking (and with it an extra ticket for this season’s Champions League).
Manchester City’s struggles apart, this season’s new-look Champions League, with Liverpool top, Arsenal third and Villa fifth in the 36-team Champions League standings, has brought a resumption of what passes for normal service these days.
Twenty First Group, a sports intelligence firm that advises clubs and investors, uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate a rating for every team in world football. From there, it calculates the strengths of each league.
Using its “World Super League” model, the Premier League is nearing its peak in quality this season, with a rating of 761. Only once before (the Premier League in 2022-23) has any league’s average quality been rated higher.
Some of us have a tendency to hark back to the late 2000s when the Premier League’s “Big Four” of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United were consistently reaching the later stages of the Champions League. Twenty First Group’s model proposes that, in terms of overall strength, La Liga was stronger at that time and remained so until 2016-17 (and that the Bundesliga was second-strongest between 2009-10 and 2012-13), but that the Premier League has been strongest since 2017-18. All of that sounds reasonable to me.
To put Twenty First Group’s data into perspective, in 2008-09, only nine Premier League teams were ranked among the world’s top 50. The fact this number fell in the first half of the 2010s, to a low point of seven between 2011-12 and 2013, reinforces the feeling that competition regressed quality-wise around this time, overshadowed not just by La Liga but by the Bundesliga.
Since the late 2010s, it has risen significantly, with 14 Premier League teams currently ranked in the world’s top 50. Broadly speaking, though these rankings fluctuate from week to week, this suggests a mid-table team in the Premier League is roughly as strong as a top-five team in La Liga or a top-six team in Serie A.
So they should be given their financial advantage. Six Premier League clubs featured in the top 10 of Deloitte’s Football Money League, which ranks clubs by revenue. Extend that to the top 30 and there are no fewer than 14 Premier League clubs. Brighton & Hove Albion (23rd) made more money in 2022-23 than all bar four clubs in Italy, three in Spain, three in Germany and two in France.
When you look at the inequality that the Premier League’s financial power has brought to the transfer market across Europe, with so much talent flowing towards these shores, it is surprising English clubs are not even more dominant.
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But that is another argument. What this is not, despite some localised difficulties in Manchester in particular, is a weak Premier League. The data suggests the level at the summit is not as strong as it has been in recent seasons, but that the average standard across the league is higher.
Manchester City’s struggles can be said to have undermined the quality of the league in one way but underlined it in another. The number of teams taking advantage of their struggles in late 2024 — Bournemouth, Brighton, Tottenham, Liverpool, Crystal Palace, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Everton — is evidence of a league in which every club has talent on the pitch and on the touchline. If you coast, you will be punished.
Five weeks ago, Alan Shearer wrote a column for The Athletic expressing concern for Newcastle, saying his former club now seemed to be “drifting” under their Saudi Arabian ownership and at a crossroads under Eddie Howe’s management.
He felt the initial post-takeover momentum and a sense of purpose had been lost. With Howe’s team 12th in the Premier League, after two wins in their previous 11, many supporters were privately expressing the same concerns.
And look at them now. They have won their past eight games across all competitions, including away to Manchester United and Tottenham in the Premier League and Arsenal in the Carabao Cup semi-final first leg. A run of four winnable games lies ahead in the Premier League — Wolverhampton Wanderers and Bournemouth at home, Southampton away, Fulham at home — and suddenly their fans are dreaming of returning to the Champions League (and, even more longingly, glory in the Carabao Cup).
Newcastle’s ups and downs reflect the unpredictability of a league in which fortunes and form seem to be fluctuating like never before.
Sometimes it seems to come down to discrepancies in the fixture list, allowing teams to capitalise on a gentle run of games before the going gets tough again. But often it is nothing of the sort; Brighton and Fulham emerged with great credit from a daunting run of games, only to stumble in a series of matches they were expected to win. Aston Villa lost just one of their first nine games, juggling domestic and European commitments impressively, but have been stop-start over the past couple of months.
By mid-December, Chelsea seemed to be emerging as the team best placed to challenge Liverpool, having won six and drawn two of their previous eight matches. Since then, they have drawn with Everton and Crystal Palace and lost to Fulham and Ipswich Town.
It is a league full of talented but flawed, imperfect teams, almost all of them potent in attack (and particularly on the counter-attack) but few of them anything like so adept when forced to play on their opponents’ terms.
That is where Forest have been so impressive. They have had, on average, the lowest share of possession of any Premier League team so far this season, but they defend in numbers and attack as incisively as anyone. As Slot said in his pre-match news conference on Monday, Nuno “has done a great job at implementing a style of play that suits their players”.
Slot admitted he was surprised in September when Forest inflicted what remains his only Premier League defeat as Liverpool manager, but said that result was no longer “such a shock to me as it was then”.
The trip to Nottingham on Tuesday looks like a serious test of Liverpool’s credentials. Should Forest beat them for a second time this season, the sense of excitement at the City Ground will develop into something more, leaving those long-suffering supporters to wonder just how far this season might take them.
Football has changed an awful lot since the late 1970s, when they conquered England and then Europe (twice) under Brian Clough, but the opportunity to dream is still there.
There are parallels with the 2015-16 campaign when Leicester City came from nowhere to win the Premier League title. Those parallels include the underperformance of several leading teams. Back then, Chelsea were in post-title meltdown under Mourinho; Manchester City and Manchester United were drifting in their final campaign under Manuel Pellegrini and Louis van Gaal respectively; Arsenal were doing likewise as Arsene Wenger’s tenure neared its end; Liverpool were only just getting going under Klopp; Tottenham were progressing quickly under Mauricio Pochettino but, unlike Leicester, were unable to capitalise on the opportunity.
After 20 games, Forest have the same number of points (40) as Leicester had by the same stage of their historic title-winning campaign. The difference is that Forest are six points off the top, having played one fewer game than the leaders, whereas at that stage in 2015-16, Leicester were only two points behind first-placed Arsenal.
Chris Wood’s 12 Premier League goals have helped Nottingham Forest to third in the Premier League (Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)
That was the season that, more than any other, perpetuated the idea of the Premier League as an ultra-competitive league where anyone can beat anyone. It was also a season in which, as shown on the European stage as well as domestically, the bigger clubs fell drastically short of expectations, creating a once-in-a-generation opportunity that Leicester seized in the most wonderful style, not just winning the title, but doing it by a 10-point margin.
Could 2024-25 bring something similar to the East Midlands? So many of the ingredients are there in a competition laced with unpredictability. There is jeopardy almost everywhere, not least in the risks that so many teams take when trying to play out from the back.
Forest, as Slot pointed out on Monday, have no interest in inviting such jeopardy. They appear happy to leave the chaos to others and stick to the serious business of winning matches.
As do Liverpool, content to keep racking up the points and avoid the kind of melodramas seen elsewhere. On one hand, the “best league in the world” hype demands wild twists and unpredictability. On the other hand, it requires its top teams to demonstrate quality and supreme focus and to keep standards high.
So far, at least, Liverpool have only looked interested in setting standards. If it is real unpredictability you want in the second half of the campaign, someone is going to have to do what Forest did to them at Anfield back in September. On a cold January night in Nottingham and throughout the months ahead, Liverpool will hope to keep the drama to a minimum.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Will Tullos)
