What we got wrong in our Premier League predictions: Why Arsenal are title favorites, Villa struggles, more

Seven games gone and what do we know about the Premier League title? We know that I was right when I said West Ham United would be a right mess and truly, what more is there to discuss?

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Right. So, apparently there isn’t much appetite from my editors for me to take a victory lap on successfully calling West Ham’s ineptitude or the promise of a borderline feel good story at Everton. Words like braggadocio are coming up, apparently, and supposedly you, the audience, would much rather read me own up to the many, many overvaluings, underestimations and misguided takes that made up my preseason predictions. Fine, I guess.

After all, the seven game mark is an intriguing one from an analytical point of view. Ideally you’d have a chunky 10 game sample to really feel like you know what these teams are but at this point it’s going to take some pretty compelling arguments against a team’s expected goal difference, for instance. Maybe the fixture list has been rough on you. Maybe you’ve had a Chelsea-esque number of red cards and injuries, sufficient that our analysis of them boils down to “let’s just take a look again when they’re something like themselves”. 

For plenty of others though, they may well be who the table tells us they are. And, remarkably, in some instances who they are is not who I thought they were. Apparently, I must now own up to this.

1. Was the top three out of order?

I said there was a risk in Liverpool’s overhaul. I said that Arsenal had done all they could to position themselves for a title run. Given that, why pick the former? There were a few answers. A lot of the players they bought looked really, really good and it was fair to assume that someone of Florian Wirtz’s talent might not need that long to adapt to the Premier League, particularly after his sparkling Wembley display at the Community Shield. Most of the spine of the team was still in place too.

There were, however, factors that were too easily brushed over. Looking back, now that he is struggling, you could see the early outline of Mohamed Salah having taken his foot off the gas in the final weeks of last season when there were no more worlds to conquer. He is 33 now and no player has ever beaten father time. Certainly not one who has to tailor his fitness to last through an Africa Cup of Nations and World Cup on top of his club commitments.

What was even more obvious was that Liverpool were going to miss Trent Alexander-Arnold. Arne Slot’s side complete about eight progressive passes fewer per game in this season’s Premier League than last. Alexander-Arnold was giving them about 10.5 per 90 minutes. He has proven himself to be irreplaceable in the aggregate. It doesn’t help that Liverpool haven’t even got better at defending their flanks, no wonder when they brought in Jeremie Frimpong off the back of several years playing as a borderline right winger at Bayer Leverkusen. Neither he, Conor Bradley nor an out of position Dominik Szoboszlai have brought steel to the right back spot.

How the title contenders have changed

All stats per Premier League game

The case for the defense, though, is simple. Liverpool have been trying this rebuild in the midst of what has been an extremely trying set of fixtures. Slot’s side have already faced five of the top eight and made trips to Newcastle and Burnley. The fixture list doesn’t really start to look favorable for them until after the November international break, by then perhaps some of the synchronicities so obviously missing from their possession play will have clicked into gear.

That, though, speaks to the difference between them and their greatest rivals. Seven games in, Arsenal don’t need to figure anything out. They are who they are and even after outspending Liverpool in net terms, it does not feel like much has changed. Most of the guaranteed starting XI signings — Martin Zubimendi and probably Viktor Gyokeres and Eberechi Eze — have come in to do similar roles to the players in their spots last season. Most of the rest addressed the depth issue that spoiled the previous title charge. Mikel Arteta’s side hum along with the best defense in the world and have navigated a fixture list that was almost on a par with Liverpool’s for difficulty levels.

Arsenal have honed: sacrificing a bit of final third control for swifter advancement upfield so they can outpace the formation of the low blocks that occasionally befuddled them. Liverpool have overhauled. All this was apparent before a ball was kicked and so perhaps it’s time to admit I got this one wrong.

But wait, is there a third team worthy of consideration? It is not Liverpool, after all, who have the second best xGD in the division by a fair margin, all the more so when you scrub penalties out of the equation. That’ll be Manchester City and you already know the reason why. Erling Haaland saw what Salah did last season and said “yeah, alright, I can have that done by April.” Pep Guardiola has configured his squad to feed the scoring machine to a quite remarkable extent — 63% of City’s Premier League xG is Haaland shots — and you would probably argue that, given the talent elsewhere in the attack, that is the right approach to take.

Heliocentrism has won the league before. It did so last season. But it doesn’t usually. Before Haaland arrived in the league there was a nine season run where the Golden Boot winner did not win the title. What happens if City’s No.9 misses a month plus, as he has in each of the last two seasons? There is not even a true back up for him, maybe Omar Marmoush, who is threatening to be this season’s forward inexplicably cast to the fringes by Guardiola. That is to say nothing of the games where Haaland is a bit subdued, the loss at Tottenham or the hour plus after his goal at Arsenal. City dropped five points in those.

For their reliance on one player alone, it still feels like City might be what they have been so far this season, a smidge off the leading two. The ordering of those teams, though, needs to change. Arsenal have proven that they deserve to be favorites.

2. Sunderland make the most of key fixtures

There was a simple reason to be skeptical about Sunderland’s chances in the Premier League before a ball had been kicked: it had all come too early for them. The youngest club in the Championship could hardly be expected to survive in a division they had no experience of. In preseason it was at least apparent that the club hierarchy knew this with signings like Granit Xhaka and Reinildo Mandava. 

In retrospect they put their experience in the right spot because while Regis Le Bris’ side is still one of the youngest in the division, its foundations are well established. Omar Alderete, 28, partners Nordi Mukiele, 27, in defense. Both they, Reinildo, and the other left back Arthur Masuaka know what is required in Europe’s top five leagues. So too Xhaka. These players have not needed an acclimatization period and in their first seven games Sunderland have conceded just six goals, their 8.04 npxG allowed just a smidge worse than Liverpool’s and good for eighth in the division.

Set against that it has to be said that Sunderland have been able to ease themselves back into the division. Only one of the teams they have played so far this season, Crystal Palace, is higher than 10th and they have played all bar Wolverhampton Wanderers from the bottom five. Balance out their schedule and they might look like the 16th or 17th best team in the division rather than 15th, where they currently rank in xGD.

That would hardly be a problem though. Anything that isn’t 18th or lower should be fine by Sunderland, who look like they are going to benefit from a Wolves side who are less effective than we thought, a West Ham who were just as we warned and the tire fire at Nottingham Forest. Some of those teams will get it right, particularly when they’ve hired coaches like Nuno Espirito Santo whose teams tend to have a floor of competent defense. When those teams do click, though, they probably won’t have as many points as Sunderland do now. Le Bris’ side have bought themselves a wobble in the future and they have done so while taking points off a few teams who could be their direct rivals.

3. Aston Villa give themselves a mountain to climb

Well Aston Villa in fifth looked a lot more worrying three weeks ago, when Unai Emery’s side would do well to hit a barn door, let alone the back of the net. They’ve rallied since their one goal, three point start to the season with back to back wins having them in lower midtable, hardly the top five berth I reluctantly pegged them for. 

Why did Villa rank so highly in the group of teams I wanted to knock down two places? Continuity seemed to be their great strength, the fact that they’d only really lost a few players they’d known were coming in on a temporary basis. Instead a few weeks into the season it felt like they had gone a little stale, that a club who had bungled too much transfers under Monchi needed younger legs with a point to prove.

Although the results of late have suggested that a few of those old pros have knocked heads together in the dressing room, it is not as if something has just magically clicked for an attack that scored five against Burnley and Fulham. First of all… it was against Burnley and Fulham. In those two games Villa did little more than progress to their underlying metrics, a team with six expected goals from their first seven games having now scored six actual goals. The attack looks anemic, Ollie Watkins shot output has been cut off at the knees, his npxG more than halved from each of the last two seasons. That’s not an output gap that is sure to be plugged by Jadon Sancho, Harvey Elliott and Donyell Malen.

The xG makes for grim reading. They are still yet to hit 1.2 in any Premier League game yet this season. In each of their first four games they allowed well over that total. That changed in the last few but against… Burnley and Fulham. Maybe that’s what Villa are, then. Certainly not the fifth best team in the Premier League but maybe a bit better than the bottom six or eight. Boy, I’d like a do over on that prediction.

4. Palace and Bournemouth survive key departures

These ones are pretty straightforward. You really should assume that when teams lose a lot of their best players they will get worse. It didn’t quite happen as expected for Palace, who kept Marc Guehi when they were expected to lose him and Eze. Remarkably taking out their best attacker has brought better individual performances from those left behind. Ismaila Sarr has leapt forward and seems to dovetail very well with new arrival Yeremy Pino, both inside forwards aided by the runaway train that is Daniel Munoz down the right. Meanwhile, Jean Philippe-Mateta has more xG than anyone in the league not named Haaland.

As for Bournemouth, they’re simply a brilliantly coached team who recruit incredibly well. You could say the same for Palace. There’s a beat of heat in Antoine Semenyo’s finishing that is pushing Bournemouth higher much as Palace might have dropped a few more points if Dean Henderson hadn’t performed so well. Suppose these individuals cool down though, the baseline that has been set over the last few games is still a fair way higher than most. At a time when at least two of the Big Six are unable to perform at this level, these two really could muscle into the European places.

5. Right then, let’s re-predict

I’ll see you back here in mid-December so I can chide myself on how much I got wrong again!