Sunday’s comfortable victory at Manchester City will surely be seen as decisive in the race for the Premier League title Alexis Mac Allister’s face was a picture and it told part of the story. It was an hour or so after the whistle had blown on Liverpool’s 2-0 win at Manchester City on Sunday and the war wounds were visible, the signs of sacrifice. There were shades of yellow and green on Mac Allister’s left eyelid, angry red above that – just beneath the eyebrow; more red around the cheekbone. The damage was done in the 30th minute when the Liverpool midfielder flung himself into a slidi ..read more

Patient buildup from deep, Guardiola style, can no longer be an unthinking default so perhaps going long again is the answer In 2021, I tried to take advantage of the October international break to go to a game as a fan. No sooner had I booked trains and hotels, though, than it emerged Sunderland had accumulated enough Northern Ireland internationals for their League One game against Oxford to be called off. So I did the only reasonable thing you can do in the circumstances, got in touch with the doyen of the non-league scene in the north-east, Harry Pearson, and invited myself along to whiche ..read more

Unbending coach takes his side to Liverpool on Sunday, with attempts to kick club on undermined by a decade of misrule The thought had always been that it couldn’t happen now. It’s just not possible in modern football that a super-club could be relegated. Manchester United may have gone down in 1974 but it’s not going to happen in 2025. Even when Ruben Amorim said that United were in a relegation battle after Monday’s 2-0 defeat by Newcastle, he was making the point to shock. And it’s not going to happen now. United will not be relegated. They probably only need 15 points from the second half ..read more

Manchester United’s new manager is increasingly looking like an odd hire, especially compared to the successful succession at their arch rivals Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ruben Amorim’s time at Manchester United is the physical effect of the job, the altered optics. Amorim turned up at Old Trafford looking like a handsome pirate: the jawline, the seigneurial smile, the elite Euro-cardigan styling, the sense that here is someone who smells at all times of high-spec automobile upholstery. Seven weeks in he has the air of a doomed royal hostage, shuttled joylessly from corridor to touchl ..read more

Coaches such as Arteta, Iraola and Emery play variations of the Guardiola model – flexibility and adaptability are in vogue Spain are the European champions. Real Madrid won the Champions League. Rodri won the Ballon d’Or and has only come to seem more important since suffering an anterior cruciate ligament injury. Spanish managers won the Premier League, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 last season. No fewer than five Premier League clubs are managed by Spaniards. It has been another year of Spanish domination but the manager who more than anybody has been the architect of what is now considered th ..read more

Doubts are growing around the Tottenham manager and his all-or-nothing team’s lack of a plan B will be tested by Liverpool Almost a season and a half has passed since Ange Postecoglou was appointed Tottenham manager and that means he is entering dangerous territory. He has led Spurs in 65 games. Antonio Conte got 77, André Villas-Boas 80 and José Mourinho 86. Until Thursday’s chaotic Carabao Cup win over Manchester United, he had a lower win percentage than all three, but he has now snuck past Mourinho. Sooner or later simply being not as grumpy as the bloke who came before is not going to be ..read more

Well-travelled coach will bring intensity and attention to detail, but does not have long to fix things at Molineux It was just last month when I spoke to Vítor Pereira and the Portuguese coach made it clear he still had ambitions of working in the Premier League. Those ambitions have now been realised. “The main thing for me is to play quality football,” the new Wolves manager said. “That is what I love, so I really believe my next move will be to a top league in the world. This is my target for the future and I think it will happen. I was so close to being a Premier League manager on three d ..read more

Dribbling runners such as Tyler Dibling are exhilarating to watch, and a reminder that football always finds new forms The Premier League has got more exciting. And it’s fine, really. For the more grudging among us it can be hard to accept this at face value, if only because the league is always telling you how exciting it already is, the regular in-house TV hosts styling the whole experience with the glazed and proselytising look of shopping channel presenters trying to sell you a hamper of executive cheese. But sometimes the hamper of cheese is just good. The games are exciting right now. Th ..read more

Arsenal manager proud of his side’s set-piece record ‘We want to be the best at everything,’ says Arteta Mikel Arteta has said it is a compliment for Arsenal to be compared to Stoke under Tony Pulis for their set-piece prowess but warned their rivals that they still have room to improve in that area. Arsenal scored twice from corners in Wednesday’s win against Manchester United to take their tally to 22 goals via set pieces since the start of last season. Their total of 16 in the previous campaign matched the Premier League record set by West Brom under the management of Pulis in 2016-17, wi ..read more

An extraordinary sense of a club imploding is taking hold and the champions’ title rivals have the chance to make it worse On 30 January 2015, Bayern Munich lost in the Bundesliga for the first time that season, going down 4-1 at Wolfsburg. Pep Guardiola was worried. They had dropped six points in the first 17 league games and the title was almost certainly theirs already, but Wolfsburg, inspired by Kevin De Bruyne, had picked them off on the counter. The space Guardiola’s teams leave behind the high defensive line had always been a vulnerability, could not but be a vulnerability, but somethin ..read more