Premier League panic meter: Manchester City’s five-alarm fire isn’t the only cause for alarm in England

Each week in the Premier League there’s a crisis club. The goal is never to be it. All the more so at the start of December, when the English game demands every last drop out of its teams. Between now and January 6 there are seven rounds of fixtures to negotiate in addition to any EFL Cup and European commitments.

It is, then, as bad a time as any for form to desert you. And yet to some extent every one of the five clubs listed below has something to worry about. Ok, maybe not you Tottenham, rated a mere one on the CBS Sports’ Premier League crisis-o-meter, not quite the comfortable zero of a Liverpool or Chelsea, but a fair way from the threes and fours of Newcastle and West Ham.

1. It’s not really a crisis but the format makes demands of us all – Tottenham

Yeah Spurs are broadly fine, but fine in an interesting enough way that we are simply going to have to crowbar them in here. Seventh in the Premier League table is not where supporters, players or Ange Postecoglou would have expected to be through 13 games. The fact that those have brought five defeats is suboptimal too. Following the best performance of their manager’s tenure by blowing a lead against Roma in the last minute and being held to a draw by 10 man Fulham is disappointingly familiar for many.

Then again the caveats for any sense of struggle are relentless. First of all, injuries and the fixture load. The entire foundation of their defense was missing on Sunday, Guglielmo Vicario having joined Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven in the treatment room. Dejan Kulusevksi had played the full 90 in the Europa League so he needed a break while Dominic Solanke was suffering with illness too. “I guess people are looking for easy targets, but if people don’t understand what we are dealing with at the moment and how the players are coping with it, I think it’s fairly self-evident,” said Postecoglou.

“There aren’t too many teams in the league with both their center backs out. I’ve seen so much violin playing over one center back out, but we’re supposed to get on with it. But the beauty of it is that these boys are and I love that, I love the character they are showing, the fact they aren’t seeking excuses or wanting me to make allowances for it. But I need to acknowledge the massive effort that these guys are putting in.”

A good but weakened Spurs XI  gave up the better shots, more through volume than allowing high grade openings, and they still got the point. That is about as close as Tottenham have got to the balls bouncing in their favor this season. That probably explains best of all why they are where they are, still only three points from fourth in a Premier League table that, Liverpool and Southampton aside, refuses to stratify itself.

Their superb win over Manchester City was the first time Tottenham had picked up all three points when bettering their opponents xG by less than 0.5. Tight games against Arsenal, Crystal Palace and Ipswich have delivered zero points. Every one of their wins has been a trouncing, delivering Postecoglou the second best goal difference and third best xG difference in the league. At full fitness, what is keeping this team from putting together a run of wins? Giorgio Chiellini memes? They’re not nothing but you’d probably lean towards the quality of performances Spurs are putting in being reflected on the table. 

2. Patience is a virtue – Aston Villa

A run of eight games without a win for Aston Villa might have sent them plunging into the bottom half of the Premier League table, but this is still a season where they have beaten Bayern Munich on an unforgettable night in B6, one of several results that has them set fair to reach the knockout rounds of the Champions League. That would have seemed more than satisfactory in May or in the midst of a turbulent, PSR-inflicted squad rebuild in the summer. Go a few years further back and this would have seemed like a collective fever dream in the claret and blue parts of Birmingham.

Perhaps it was never going to last, certainly not when the Premier League’s financial regulations forced them to balance their books by moving on big names such as Douglas Luiz and Moussa Diaby. Villa have gotten younger, only slightly in terms of the average age of their XI, but more notably when you dig deeper into a squad where four of the five substitutes with the most Premier League minutes are 23 and under. Swapping out Luiz for Amadou Onana and Diaby for Morgan Rogers perhaps means something of a short term hit — on the basis of their performances so far this season not a particularly significant one — but Villa will be better off for it in 2027-28.

As they took a step back, other teams have strode forward. That much is apparent in Villa’s four Premier League losses this season, at Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham and at home to Arsenal. They’ve been convincingly beaten by the teams who are better than them and, in domestic league play at least, no one else. 

Meanwhile, so many of their other dropped points have been clustered around Champions League matches, the sheer emotional exertion of meetings with Bayern Munich and Juventus visibly taking its toll a few days later. An undermanned squad, not aided by Unai Emery’s heavy usage of veterans Youri Tielemans and Ollie Watkins, has dropped points immediately after its last five continental matches. With last season’s senior depth that might not have happened either. Certainly Emery is finding it harder to manage two high priority competitions rather than a top four bid and Conference League sideshow. The likelihood, however, is that next season he’ll get back into the groove of 2023-24.

3. Try to get through this season (again) – Everton

With Everton it really is invariably worth taking a step back now. If they can just get through this season, get into the new stadium and get new owners in place, there is at last some cause for optimism in the blue half of Merseyside. You do, however, just have to get through it by hook or by crook. Sean Dyche has appeared to be the man to get them through to 2025-26 in the Premier League, but boy are Everton fans hating it, all the more so after a 4-0 defeat to Manchester United riddled with defensive errors. The deal you make when you sign up with Dycheball is you might not enjoy what your team does with the ball, but they won’t have you tearing your hair out when they don’t.

That really did not happen and the reality is it isn’t the first time that Everton’s Dycheian qualities have gone AWOL as the man himself admitted. Thank goodness there is so little hair left to tear out. “It is very difficult when you make such glaring individual mistakes,” he said. “It is a very difficult task. This has to get parked quickly.

“I don’t expect our team to make so many mistakes again. They are well versed in this scenario, it has been here for three or four years at this club. We are trying to break this pattern of work for a breakthrough, drop down, breakthrough, drop down.”

It gets worse though. The previous week had offered a display of the other great headache of life under Dyche, particularly when his squad is being built in such straitened circumstances. A man up for 50 minutes against Brentford, Everton managed to take plenty of shots. The 17 were just dreadful, worth a combined 0.85 xG. I promise you the bubbles in that graphic below are sized by xG. Whether Burnley or Everton, Dyche teams have always been most comfortable as an underdog. Must they be so insistent on trying to rawdog every possession though?

Still, big picture. Everton needs to win 40 points more than they need to win hearts and minds. It would be great if the final year at Goodison Park was awash with free-flowing football, a gorgeous tribute to the champions of 40 years ago. It would, however, be cataclysmic if this season ended in relegation. With Dyche at the helm it doesn’t look like it will. Everton sit 15th in the table and have the 15th best xG difference in the division, the latter with quite a wide margin from the newly promoted trio of Leicester, Southampton and Ipswich. The margins might be tight, but in such circumstances don’t you want someone who isn’t merely adapting to the relegation battle but was born in it, molded by it, for whom the light of 10th place and a cup run might now be blinding? Everton just need someone to get them through what lies ahead. Few are better at that job than Dyche.

4. Yikes, this looks bad – West Ham

David Moyes was sacked for this? It may well have been the right time for the Scot to move on and for someone else to have a go at getting West Ham’s many technical forwards to play in a system with more authority, but was Julen Lopetegui, a coach with a pretty spotty record prior to keeping Wolves in the Premier League, ever the man to do that? Compared to last season West Ham are scoring notably fewer goals, conceding slightly fewer while putting together almost the same xG profile and getting a few less points. 

Perhaps that latter fact is down to the depths West Ham seem capable of plumbing in games that should get a rise out of them. They never raised a glove against Chelsea, but in many ways their defeats to Tottenham and Arsenal were worse. For a time in each of those games they had something of a foothold, rarely has an away crowd seemed as jittery while 4-2 up as they were on Saturday, and yet the most basic of errors handed their opponents ways back into the match.

Already there has been speculation of indiscipline off the field this season, a rumoured bust up between Lopetegui and star forward Mohamed Kudus, and it has bled on to the field with Kudus banned for five games and Lukasz Fabianski giving up a sloppy penalty after 45 minutes of chaotic marking off set pieces. Their manager, meanwhile, was watching on from the stands after three yellows in 12 games.

What is the case in favor? Three points against Newcastle, who delivered one of the five worst shooting games of the season according to Opta’s statistics? A win at Manchester United off a Danny Ings shank and perhaps the worst VAR intervention of the year? About all that can be said in West Ham’s favor right now is that they have accrued enough points already that the too good to go down line can remain on ice for now.

5. Does this fire alarm only go up to five? – Manchester City

It may well all be absolutely fine at the Etihad in a few months’ time. Kevin De Bruyne could be back to playing meaningful minutes, papering over the cracks of disastrous final third recruitment over recent years. Add someone with a bit of dynamism to central midfield and all manner of other issues can be swept under the carpet for now. The reason, however, that City top our rankings (or are they at the bottom?) is because of how bad it might be, at least compared to what this club has been accustomed to under Pep Guardiola.

Set aside for a moment the great existential threat hanging over City, the mountain of Premier League charges and a legal case whose conclusion is no more apparent than it was when the champions were referred to an independent commission in February 2023. After six defeats in seven games it’s now not unreasonable to see something going badly wrong for City on the pitch before matters in the court room are resolved.

Sporting titans don’t always succumb to the drip, drip eroding of their authority. Sometimes you suddenly look up and David Moyes is rolling out midfields of Tom Cleverley and Anderson and of course Manchester United are losing at home to West Brom. In an instant LeBron and AD can find themselves with a who? who? of a supporting cast and the champs are having to scramble through the play in. You only realise the extent of the decline with a little bit of hindsight, but couldn’t you imagine that in six months’ time you look back at a 4-4-2 with Matheus Nunes and Rico Lewis patrolling the flanks and ask why anyone ever made City favorites to win the Premier League title.

A rebuild won’t be the most arduous task given City’s wealth and the new contract for Guardiola. However, given the age of so many key figures in defense and midfield that is what the champions are looking at, perhaps as early as January but quite possibly not. Already this looks like a lost season for City and when you have been as indulged as their supporters over the last few years, it is easy to see why that would be cause for panic.