Premier League Mood Rankings: Man Utd fall 11 places as Yorkshire celebrates

2026-09-17 · Football365

Somehow, even though it’s impossible to imagine a worse team than them, Spurs aren’t bottom of the actual league table. They are in this one.

We’re a month into the season. Everyone’s got four games under the belt. The European competitions and the Carabao are well underway.

The season is officially up and running. That means it’s the very ideal time for an update to the only Premier League table that matters.

Yes, it’s the all-important Mood Rankings, where we consider the far more scientifically relevant (and indeed rigorous) ideas of vibes and feels and suspicions instead of such misleading frippery as stuff like ‘points’.

The quite frequently already hilariously misjudged pre-season rankings are in brackets here, and you can revel in the full wrongness (or in the case of Hull, accidental banter correctness) here.

20) Tottenham Hotspur (11)

There is no other option now than to conclude this is simply a football club addicted to shame and mortifying embarrassment.

Every time you think they’ve peaked, they find new ways to make a complete show of themselves.

They’ve gone from the quite funny ‘You’ll finally win a trophy, but you’ll end up 17th in the league but don’t worry, not really in any actual danger of relegation – just imagine!’ to the truly horrific and stomach-churning ‘You’ll win absolutely f\ck all and end up 17th having somehow narrowly avoided relegation despite it being almost impossible to conceive of a worse football team than you’ to this season’s show-stopping ‘You’ll win absolutely f\ck all, will be entirely unable to score even a single goal and will this time very probably achieve your three-year mission of contriving to get relegated despite every in-built advantage you possess, oh, and also you’ll have spent several hundreds of millions of pounds in a desperate and futile bid to avoid all this’.

Tottenham are no longer a football club. They are something between a social experiment and humiliation ritual. They might actually need to get relegated to break the cycle. If that is the case, well, we bring good news: it might well be happening.

There are growing signs of Roberto De Zerbi’s famously uneven temperament bubbling up to an increasingly frustrated surface, with the Italian already reduced to the desperate fan’s forlorn ‘something might click’ triumph of hope over expectation.

19) Fulham (19)

A goalless draw at Anfield is nothing to be sniffed at and it does at the very least stem the bleeding, but pre-season worry has still given way to full You Fear For Them status for Fulham. They achieved You Really Do with that defeat to fellow early-season worry-magnets Palace the other week.

Alvaro Arbeloa was an attention-grabbing appointment, but we’re far from convinced it was a good or prudent one. It was the gamble of a club that appears to believe its Premier League roots are far more firmly bedded in than they really are after Marco Silva put a stop to the yo-yo years.

Arbeloa was a kick-on-to-the-next-stage type appointment for a club that just wasn’t there. They needed more of a protect-what-we’ve-got sort.

Also doesn’t help that Arbeloa is visibly nostalgic for his Real Madrid days. Understandable, but Fulham don’t need to keep hearing about Real Madrid or the Real Madrid-adjacent players he’s brought in to keep that personal flame burning.

18) Manchester United (7)

It really does feel like it’s happening, doesn’t it? That all the obvious risks Manchester United took when appointing Michael Carrick to an interim role when they did and then a permanent role when they did might be coming home to roost.

Does anyone really still have confidence that Carrick is truly the man to make Manchester United great again? There really is nothing about his managerial career to date that he is about to do that. His reputation as a manager is still built on the compelling but undeniably sandy foundation of the sort of player he was. The ‘manager on the field’ sort that Fergie so loved.

We’re not going to sit here and say we expected United to finish last season quite so strongly as they did under Carrick. We will say we were not remotely surprised to see them improve dramatically.

That was always both likely and dangerous. Likely because of just how bad and miserable things had got under Ruben Amorim’s increasingly unhinged and immovably rigid, stubborn reign. But also because, as has been said time and again, Carrick had about the easiest time a big-club manager will ever get.

He was appointed to oversee the second half of United’s season at the precise moment it was confirmed that season would consist of the bare minimum 40 games in total on the back of a failure to qualify for Europe and first-hurdle exits from the cups to Grimsby and Brighton.

That is an absurd position for a manager to find themselves in at This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. Carrick got to enjoy all the benefits of the softest possible schedule while facing none of the blame or scrutiny for how such a schedule had come to pass.

The gamble when United appointed him to that interim position wasn’t that he would fail miserably; it was that he would flourish as he did in that cheat-code world that bears no relation to the normal run of things at such a club.

By summer they really had no choice but to hand him the keys full time. And that presented a problem. For all his many faults, Amorim did bring a certain charisma and pull to the role. After a disastrous 24/25 season, United made huge transfer strides that summer with the arrivals of Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha and more.

Carrick has no such pull. There were no marquee signings in the summer of 2026 despite the squad carrying obvious holes and being ill-equipped for the rigours of a full season of all-competition action.

The midfield was renovated from the bargain basement. Signing Youri Tielemans was a shrewd bit of money-saving, but watching Man City’s pair of £100m midfield men march all over him at the weekend was a reminder that United under Carrick are no longer picking up the truly high-end talent. Missing out on Mateus Fernandes doesn’t look like a huge setback right now, but being outmuscled in the transfer market at all by Spurs is a reality check.

Now an underwhelming summer and the knowledge that they’d been backed into a corner that required them to hand a permanent contract to a manager on the basis of half a season’s results that came riddled with caveats have rolled on into a stuttering, unconvincing start to the season.

The absurd injustice of Man City’s winning goal in the derby at Old Trafford is real and worth noting, but the guileless, passive and ultimately gutless way United approached a game against 10 men was of far greater significance than the latest Stockley Park blunder.

There remains a floor at United that will keep them away from absolute catastrophe. There is no real prospect here of a Spurs-style descent. But nor right now does there feel any reason to believe Carrick can succeed where so many other post-Fergie appointments have failed now he’s forced to operate in the real world, one where he has so adroitly already reduced United’s four-front commitments to three.

Who will be the next poor sap through the door?

17) Crystal Palace (17)

Victory in the You Fear For Them derby at Fulham is lifting an awful lot of weight at this time for a Palace side that have also already lost games this season to Everton and Ipswich. Too early yet to call those six-pointers, but they certainly feel six-point-adjacent.

They have, entirely understandably, found replacing Marc Guehi and Maxence Lacroix pretty much impossible. It’s far more observation than criticism, but it does look like it’s going to absolutely f\ck them this year after two of the most memorable seasons in the club’s history.

That colander-like defence travelling to face free-scoring Leeds three days after a Europa League clash looks like a massive accident waiting to happen as well.

It’s not all doom and gloom. We really do think they did just about as well as could reasonably be expected when trying to replace Oliver Glasner, with Pierre Sage’s work in Ligue 1 pretty much unimprovable and highlighting a Glasner-like ability to ruffle feathers and bring down loftier opponents.

And making an alarmingly bad start to the season but also still ending up somewhere between 11th and 15th in the end is Crystal Palace heritage. Even in the two trophy-winning red-letter seasons they’ve just enjoyed they ended up 12th and 15th in the league.

It might be that the best they can hope for out of this season is a return to the days when that kind of league effort wasn’t accompanied by trophies domestic and continental. Not that you should rule any English club out of any Thursday night European comp.

16) Coventry (2)

Always feels like a bit of a shame when a team promoted into the Premier League for the first time – or after a generation away as in Coventry’s case – get no honeymoon period at all.

The fixture computer was not kind to them, throwing Arsenal and Man City their way inside the first three weeks of the season. But it also feels like Coventry just didn’t do enough in the summer, and there’s little excuse for that now given what we’ve seen happen to promoted teams over the last four years or so.

You can be Leeds, or Nottingham Forest, or Sunderland. Or you can be Burnley, or Southampton. It is harder and harder to justify the Burnley-Southampton option. There’s a quirk here too that it’s the teams who get promoted most impressively who seem to be the most exposed to this mistake, cruelly misled by finding the Championship so easy.

It’s just now very hard to have any real sympathy for clubs who think being conspicuously better than everyone else in the Championship means anything in the rarefied Barclays air. It might seem noble to reward those who got you into the Premier League, to show faith and trust in those players. But also: it doesn’t work.

The glass-half-full approach for Coventry is that they have at least ticked off games against some top opposition. The fact all four teams they’ve played so far are currently in the top five in the table is, at this early stage, a bit too much of a related contingency to be truly noteworthy. The fact they’ve already played three of last season’s top eight is the better way of viewing it.

The glass-half-empty approach lies in the inevitable contrast with the impressive starts made by the other two promoted clubs, which have the twin effects of making Coventry’s own struggles look even worse while also making any possible escape route even harder to locate.

Things will get easier. But results will have to improve fast or a reluctant Coventry and even more reluctant media might have cause to consider the unpleasant possibility that Frank Lampard still isn’t a very good Premier League manager.

15) Aston Villa (18)

There are two things saving Villa from subsiding into the very deepest murky depths of despair at this time. One, the Champions League exists and they are in it. Two, they’ve got Tottenham this weekend.

The former has already allowed them some much-needed escapism from their domestic woes in the form of a thoroughly entertaining and largely impressive 3-2 win away from home against an entirely competent Club Brugge side. The latter offers hope of some respite for those same domestic woes.

Because oh dear god the woes. They did at least manage a goal last time out against Nottingham Forest, but still lost to leave them in possession of but a single point – from a goalless draw against Hull – to show for four games of effort from a necessarily new-look team after the guts were ripped out of the excellent one that finished fourth last season and won the Europa League.

As well as the welcome chance to face a team arguably playing even worse than they are, the trip to visit Dr Tottenham is also personal for Villa, who have of course decided it’s Tottenham rather than Chelsea or Man City, say, who are Everything That’s Wrong With The Game and the club single-handedly stopping Villa’s otherwise clear and inevitable path to world domination.

If you were a betting man, you’d currently have to imagine that Saturday lunchtime trip to Spurs ends goalless. So always remember what yer da told you: don’t back the 0-0 draw, back ‘No Goalscorer’. It’s the same price, but gets paid out as a winner if the only goal is an own goal.

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