Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s Premier League football.
This was the weekend when Aston Villa closed in on the Champions League places, Brighton & Hove Albion and Crystal Palace shared as many red cards as goals, Arsenal slipped up again and Chelsea played out a drab 0-0 draw with Brentford.
Here, we will ask about the odd final few weeks of the season for the champions elect, whether the awful Manchester derby was fitting for the Premier League as a whole, and if relegated Southampton have shown next season’s promoted sides exactly how not to do things.
Is the end of this Liverpool season becoming… a little weird?
Arne Slot and Virgil van Dijk were irked with Michael Owen this week when the former striker suggested Liverpool’s season might end as merely brilliant, rather than historic, given at one stage they looked on for a cabinet full of trophies, but are now left with ‘only’ the league title.
Slot made the correct point that there’s no such thing as ‘only’ the Premier League title, particularly for a club who have won just one of the things in the last 35 years. This season cannot be regarded as anything other than a triumph if and when they are confirmed as champions. They have been the best team in the country by a fair distance and the fact it’s in Slot’s first season makes it even more impressive.
They will still win the title quite handily. They’re 11 points ahead with seven games remaining, and even if their form collapsed, would you trust Arsenal to take advantage?
That said, the season is ending quite weirdly, isn’t it?
Liverpool’s last four games in all competitions have seen them exit the Champions League, having been outplayed by Paris Saint-Germain twice, be convincingly beaten by Newcastle United in the Carabao Cup final, narrowly win against Everton, and lose in fairly limp fashion to Fulham.
Liverpool suffered a rare league defeat at the weekend (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Maybe it’s because we’ve all had our brains rewired by Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, who have redefined what champions look like: relentless juggernauts who rarely dip as low as mid-80s when it comes to points totals. Maybe it’s better for all of us that the champions look fallible, fragile even.
But it still must be a bit odd for Liverpool and their supporters. If nothing else because, when they watch performances like Sunday, they may think: how many of this team are going to be there next season?
Trent Alexander-Arnold (absent from this game) looks to have one foot and four toes out of the door, the futures of Van Dijk and Mohamed Salah are still uncertain, Andrew Robertson’s lesser-spotted triple error for Fulham’s second goal is emblematic of his decline, Diogo Jota’s fitness is unreliable, as are most things about Darwin Nunez. The midfield looks broadly fine, but there will probably be significant surgery elsewhere, to the point that half of the team next season might be different.
Which is not something you usually say about runaway champions.
When the time comes, they will celebrate a fantastic achievement enthusiastically and deservedly. But at the same time, there might be a strange nagging feeling at the back of their collective minds.
What did the Manchester derby say about both clubs – and the Premier League?
It felt fitting that the Manchester derby ended with Manchester United passing the ball along the edge of the penalty area, nobody willing or able to either shoot or provide a decent final ball, until the referee finally seemingly grew weary of it all and blew the final whistle.
To describe this game as dreary is probably giving it too much credit. The best you could say of it is that it happened. It was a football match that took place. Beyond that, what could anyone take from it? What will you remember, if you made it to the end?
There were virtually no moments of real quality, maybe aside from Omar Marmoush’s rocket shot in the closing stages that Andre Onana did pretty well to get behind, and Bruno Fernandes’s general performance.
You have to feel sorry for the United captain, the only player of any real class in his team who looks like he’s trying to do everything himself — not for reasons of misguided ego, but because he clearly knows he’s the only one who can.
Bruno Fernandes after United’s dreary draw with City (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
The rest of it wasn’t just boring or uneventful, but pretty sad.
There’s Ruben Amorim on the touchline, desperately hoping to see some signs of progress but having to squint pretty hard.
Then there’s his team, a collection of young players who currently look fairly clueless but might be much better in a different environment.
Take Patrick Dorgu, who was fairly dreadful but you have the sense could be a decent player: he was signed by United in January because they were desperate for a very specific player, of which there are very few in the world, so he had to go straight in and be good immediately, which is a lot of pressure for a 20-year-old. If, say, Brighton had signed him and eased him in sensibly, he’d be OK.
And then there’s Kevin De Bruyne, an approximation of a once-great player who is still trying the things that once made him so brilliant, but they just aren’t coming off anymore. He will leave City and the Premier League a legend in the summer but, watching him now, you’re left with the sense that it would have been a better end had he departed last year.
It was fitting for the weekend as a whole: the top five all dropped points, the big winners being Newcastle who don’t play until Monday and find themselves two points off the likely Champions League places with two games in hand on everyone around them.
The longest current winning streak in the division is three games, jointly held by Aston Villa and… Wolves.
Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, United and City were all, to one degree or another, very poor.
So yes, the Manchester derby was awful. But at the same time, it didn’t seem out of place.
Have Southampton provided the anti-blueprint for promoted teams?
It’s official then: Southampton are down, their defeat to Tottenham on Sunday meaning their return to the Championship is confirmed with seven fixtures remaining, making it the earliest in terms of games that a team has ever been officially relegated. Even Derby in 2007-08 kept it going for 32 games.
To be down with nearly a fifth of the season remaining is embarrassing, as is managing to stand out as awful among this historically bad bottom three.
Are they the worst team the Premier League has ever seen? Maybe. All they have left now is to collect the two points that will mean they don’t finish with the lowest points total ever, the sort of minuscule reclamation of dignity that won’t really matter to anyone but the people involved, and maybe that Derby side from 17 years ago.
What they might do, of broader significance, is provide a blueprint of how not to approach a Premier League season as a promoted side.
Their transfer business is one place to start, with basically all of their recruits having disappointed, with the possible exception of Matheus Fernandes. Of course, assembling a team to challenge in the Premier League is extremely difficult but there was a lack of imagination in their recruitment and some theoretically key arrivals (Aaron Ramsdale, for example) came in at the last minute.
Aaron Ramsdale couldn’t keep Southampton up (Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images)
Then there is how they played. There was no real point in suggesting to Russell Martin that he should play in a different way, because he was always going to be a stubborn fundamentalist and indeed, that’s why Southampton hired him. So, really, the blame for that doesn’t all lie with Martin, rather with the people that appointed him.
They should also be blamed for how long they waited to act: it was clear from very early on that it wasn’t working under Martin, but they kept him on until the 16th game, by which point it was basically all over anyway.
What this shambles of a season proves is that, as a promoted side, the way you play doesn’t really matter: the first season is about doing what you can to survive, by any means necessary, regardless of how ugly that is. That’s what Nottingham Forest and, to an extent, Bournemouth and Fulham did a couple of seasons ago and Brentford before that.
Then, when you are established and have the basis of a decent enough team, you start thinking about the football you actually want to play.
All of that is easier said than done, and even with the approach they chose, Southampton don’t have many excuses for just how bad they’ve been. But it’s something for the teams at the top of the Championship to think about.
Coming up
- One more game of a pretty weird Premier League round of games to go, and it’s Newcastle, who, after a rough weekend for most of those around them, suddenly look pretty good for a Champions League spot — even more so considering they will play Leicester City on Monday night.
- Tuesday sees some Women’s Nations League goodness: England are off to Belgium, while Spain vs Portugal could be lively and Germany face Scotland.
- Bored of an increasingly insipid Premier League season? Good news! The Champions League returns on Tuesday, and there are a couple of big-dog, heavyweight games to kick us off: it’s Bayern Munich vs Inter in Germany, while in London, it’s Arsenal vs Real Madrid. There’s no wrong answer when choosing which one of those to watch.
- And then on Wednesday, it’s Barcelona vs Borussia Dortmund and arguably the favourites for the whole thing, PSG, against Aston Villa, who will be bringing a familiar face: Marco Asensio, who is, of course, technically a PSG player.
- A few seasons will hinge on Thursday night in the Europa League — Spurs host Eintracht Frankfurt in the first leg of their quarter-final, while Manchester United are at Lyon and Rangers host Athletic Club, with Bodo/Glimt vs Lazio completing the line-up.
- Finally, your Euro line-up is completed with some piping-hot Conference League action: Chelsea are at Legia Warsaw for the first leg of their quarter-final, while elsewhere it’s Djurgarden vs Rapid Vienna, Real Betis vs Jagiellonia Bialystok and NK Celje vs Fiorentina.
- Manchester City. 115 (at least) charges. Verdict? Who knows.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
