Everyone is mid: A Premier League recap

Well, besides Arsenal, they're pretty good. And Wolves, they're pretty bad.

Author

Kim McCauley
November 24, 2025

Nobody knows who’s good or bad in the Premier League right now, or where anyone’s going to be in the table week to week. Arsenal are the best team in the league, Chelsea and Manchester City are flawed but pretty obvious top 4 favorites, and then… chaos.

This week featured some big upsets and xG defying results, but none of it even felt that weird.

I thought Burnley’s mascot playing rock, paper, scissors with some children in the front row was more entertaining than most of the football in this match.

Chelsea center back Tosin Adarabioyo had double the touches of any other player, which I think tells the story nicely. Pedro Neto and Jamie Gittens showing that they can be productive in the final third against lower-tier opposition is something!

I didn’t get to catch this one live, so I was wondering if West Ham are starting to look much better than a relegation fodder team before digging into the stats and a replay. Lmao, lol, etc.

Clearly some game state effects were at play. I think it would be generous to call Bournemouth “unlucky” here, as tempting as it may be looking at those xG numbers. The first goal came from a goalkeeping error, the second had some poor defending, and the Cherries created almost nothing in the first half.

The xG for this game was almost exactly inverse of the real score, but let’s focus on the important things instead: My godson Yankuba Minteh is now tied for 3rd best midfielder in FPL points.

Our preseason predictions are starting to look slightly less fraudulent, with Brighton now up to 6th in the table, on a very nice looking 0.23 xG differential per 90.

The Sunderland correction has finally come, it was a fun run while it lasted. The Black Cats only managed 4 shots for 0.18 xG in this one, and didn’t attempt a shot after the 73rd minute. It took Fulham a while to find the winner, but they were well on top for the whole game and deserved their win. It’s a much needed one too — they’re way more involved in a relegation battle than they should be.

I thought that Sunderland had built up enough of a buffer to the relegation battlers to be safe, but every time West Ham or Leeds gets points and they don’t, it’s going to start looking scary. I don’t think either of those teams will be 9 points better than them the rest of the way, but it wouldn’t be that strange of an outcome.

StatsBomb thinks Liverpool wins this game 52% of the time and draws 26% of the time with these sets of shots. And if one of Liverpool’s two big blocked chances from the first 15 minutes goes in, this probably is a much different game.

But from the time Forest’s opener went in, the Reds never looked like they were going to get a result. The amount of space that Nicolo Savona and Morgan Gibbs-White had for their shots on the 2nd and 3rd goals was shocking.

Liverpool are now down to 11th in the table with this loss. Here’s what they’re getting out of their £200m of new strikers so far this season.

I still think that both of these players are very good, and so is Florian Wirtz. I think Liverpool have enough midfield and back line talent to get the ball to these players without Trent Alexander-Arnold in the team. I would still be very surprised if they didn’t finish 4th. But this was an awful performance from a team that can’t afford to have too many more of them.

I don’t think we need to spend much time on the Wolves games in these recaps for the rest of the season. I can’t imagine Wolves fans are going to be too upset about that.

The first half of this game was wild, with both teams missing some enormous chances and both keepers making spectacular saves. The score could have been just about anything at halftime, and I have no clue how it was 0-0.

Harvey Barnes had the biggest miss of the bunch, and went on to score both of Newcastle’s goals en route to what feels like a huge, season-changing win.

I don’t think anything about this performance was alarming for City, but they’re now 7 points back of Arsenal, who I don’t think are going to drop more than 12-15 more points between now and the end of the season. Their margin for error for title contention is now almost nothing.

Almost every Leeds game looks like this. They’re in 18th place with a positive xG differential.

On Understat’s expected points, there are 9 teams ahead of them in the real table with fewer xPTS. One of them is… 4th placed Aston Villa.

While I don’t think this was a particularly great performance from Villa, shoutout to Morgan Rogers, who had been in pretty stinky form before scoring two goals in this game.

3 shots, 0.04 xG from Tottenham. Richarlison’s 50-yard chip shot was very cool, but it hardly covers up the stench of this performance from Spurs, who are regularly putting in relegation fodder efforts. Their statistical profile has a lot more in common with Wolves and Burnley than the likes of Leeds and Forest.

Not to take anything away from Arsenal, but this was a complete non-effort from their rivals, who dropped their heads and stopped getting tight to attackers in the box after the first goal went in.

Monday: Manchester United vs. Everton

If Manchester United win this game, they could move up into the top 4. If they lose, they’ll still be behind Tottenham. The difference between 4th and 18th in the Premier League in quality right now is almost nothing. Media’s takes on Ruben Amorim this season are going to be oscillating wildly like the Dril racism dial.

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