The Premier League's top 5 race gets even crazier

Your EPL weekend recap.

Author

Kim McCauley
February 24, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

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Ted’s on a beach in Florida or something like that, because he is smarter than me. I can see snow out my window.

The race for top 5 in the Premier League was already an extremely exciting one, and this weekend’s results made it even tighter. Losses for Nottingham Forest, Manchester City, Bournemouth and Chelsea. Wins for Aston Villa and Brighton. The entire top half is chaos.

Currently, the difference between 3rd and 7th places in the Premier League is almost nothing (4 point gap, +10 to +15 GD range), while everyone down to 11th is still very much in striking distance for European places. Villa and Brighton will be looking above them and believing they can still make Champions League.

Yes, the title race definitively ended this weekend. But the race for European places is going to be absolutely bananas. —KM

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When Jamie Vardy went on a one-man counter-attack and put a shot on target inside the first 5 minutes, it looked like we might be in for a banger game. Instead, we got a paddlin’.

Leicester were a tad unlucky to concede 4 from 1.51 xG against here, but Brentford deserve credit for some excellent execution. Bryan Mbueno and Yoane Wissa continue to get into quality positions and stick the ball in the goal.

Good team whoops bad team, not much to see here.

Here’s what my notes said about Man United after about 65 minutes:

“There’s nothing left to say about Man United. They’re just ass. Nightmare squad, and especially for this coach. Zero progress. Zero hope of progress.”

Then they battled back for a road point, so at least the players aren’t as hopeless as I am. Manuel Ugarte’s equalizer was awesome. I still think this team is very bad and not getting better.

Both of these teams are now in “no chance of relegation, no chance of Europe” purgatory and should start giving a lot of minutes to kids. I don’t have a clue why Casemiro and Idrissa Gana Gueye are out here getting starts. It’s time to evaluate some younger guys, or at least give them a chance to pump their value.

Given their injury list and lack of depth, Bournemouth don’t really have any margin for error in their fight for European places. Losing at home to a relegation battler is a pretty significant screw-up.

Dwelling on ref decisions is boring but I really did not like the application of VAR and rules about dangerous play on the Illia Zabarnyi red card. I understand it was probably correct by the letter of the law, but do we really want challenges where a defender gets the ball first and does not injure their opponent to be red cards? Maybe I am just 95 years old.

Wolves have been a lot better than the bottom 3 for quite some time, but needed a result like this to prove it, and they’re now in very good position to stay up. A 5-point gap is far from safe, but this felt like a real turning point in the relegation race, and I don’t think we’re going to see it change for the rest of the season.

Another week of Arsenal fans being Mad Online incoming, and I get it. They were conservative in the transfer market and probably should have made a couple more moves. The injuries and red cards are extremely frustrating. But my extremely lukewarm take is: Arsenal would have finished 2nd with a couple more signings, and will still finish 2nd this year despite recent problems. Given player ages and contract situations, I’d rather be them than Liverpool or City heading into this summer. This Is Fine, but unironically.

On the other side, Graham Potter might have finally found a setup that works for this group. He’s tried a lot of different personnel groupings and formations in his short West Ham tenure to mediocre results, but this 3-5-2 with a couple of winger/striker tweeners and no recognized center forward provided a good balance between defensive structure and counter-attacking threat. I think we’ll see it again.

I also want to point out the performance of 19-year-old left wingback Oliver Scarles, who was excellent defensively in his first Premier League start. Hopefully we see more of him going forward.

This had the feeling of a massive blow that signals the end of Fulham’s challenge for European places… but they’re only 5 points behind Man City, and still have a positive GD. They’ve won 3 of their last 5. So I will pump the brakes on the doomerism, as bad as it is to turn in a 0.2 xG performance at home.

Shoutout to Jean-Philippe Mateta, who just continues to be a rock solid all-around attacker for Palace. His setup for the 2nd goal was incredible, and he had an absolute belter called off for being quite literally 1cm offside. I’m not exactly sure how he transformed into this player from what he was back in 2022-23, but it’s been fun to watch.

Looking at the score, you might have no idea that this game started with Liam Delap having 3 huge chances in the opening 6 minutes. One was saved excellently by Guglielmo Vicario, one hit the post, and one was missed badly. Who knows how this game could have gone if any of them went in.

Things turned when Archie Gray — who got utterly rolled and smoked on 2 of those 3 chances — set up the opener with a spectacular long ball to Son Hueng-Min, who assisted Brennan Johnson for the goal. A 180 degree shift on how we feel about an 18-year-old in a matter of seconds. Every Tottenham game feels like the XKCD comic on sports commentary.

About two-thirds of the way through a long season where they couldn’t catch a single lucky bounce, Spurs have now won 3 games in a row without being really good in any of them. Regression to the mean, baby.

Saints are now on a -42 goal differential. They’re really having a go at Sheffield United’s extremely nice -69 from last season. I don’t think they’re going to lose the rest of their games by an average of 2.5 goals per, but it’s not impossible. This team is very bad.

If we did a tiermaker of all-time worst Premier League teams, I don’t think this Saints side would get into the S-Tier with 2005-06 Sunderland and 2007-08 Derby, but they’d be in the A-Tier, alongside last year’s Blades.

On the other side, Brighton have bounced back superbly from a 7-0 paddlin’ at the hands of Forest by posting back-to-back clean sheet victories. Starring in those games has been a guy we absolutely called our shot on back in July and who Brighton are eventually going to sell for £100m. What a miss by Newcastle.

Enzo Maresca tried something pretty weird from the start here, and it worked! Pedro Neto as center forward, Enzo Fernandez as a box-crashing 10, and Reece James in central midfield worked a charm in the opening 30 minutes of the match. But Villa made adjustments, and Chelsea really faded as the game went on.

Maresca really can’t win at goalkeeper. After months of getting criticized for sticking with Robert Sanchez, he finally pulled the plug and put Filip Jörgensen in net. He tries to get his teammates killed with hospital passes much less often than Sanchez, but fumbled the ball into his own goal for the Villa winner.

So much of the match felt like a great summary of both of these teams — fun, chaotic, questionable execution around both penalty areas. Both managers have historically favored very positional and structured styles of play, but their teams are built for an athletics meet instead.

“Newcastle beat Forest by 1 at home” is such a normal result, and yet, this game was jacked up. Newcastle conceded a bad early goal, had an incredible response and absolutely killed Forest until halftime, then proceeded to stop playing football entirely.

Not sure if any manager will be fuming more after a win than Eddie Howe would have been after seeing this.

Both of these teams are still very much in the fight for top 5, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. The qualities and flaws of both sides were really on display here.

The marquee match of the weekend — and theoretically, the season — was a dud. Man City are who we thought they were. Without Rodri and Erling Haaland, this team is extremely ordinary.

Pep Guardiola tried out a weird lineup because, well, what else is he going to do? Foden as a false 9 didn’t work at all, and Kevin De Bruyne now appears to be Old. Mohamed Salah, the best player in the league, made two great plays and that was the game. City had no way back in.

Credit to Arne Slot for correctly recognizing that the only way Liverpool was losing this game was by taking risks, and to his team for being able to execute a temporary one-game switch to a more defensive style. This was a boring match in both substance and the feeling of inevitability after the first goal, but Liverpool had to not screw up in order for it to stay that way. They’re winning the title in convincing fashion.

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