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EPL Premier League Action Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football. This was the round when Manchester United fought through the rain to beat Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur came back from two goals down for a point away to Brighton & Hove Albion and Liverpool continued their perfect start. Advertisement Here we will ask if Mikel Arteta could have been bolder in Arsenal’s draw with visitors Manchester City, whether Unai Emery’s post-match savaging of his Aston Villa players was wise and whether West Ham United and Wolverhampton Wanderers are sleepwalking towards relegation. It’s tempting to think that Liverpool — the only Premier League team with a 100 per cent record, five points clear after just five games and with an absurd array of attacking talent that they’re gradually making sense of — are going to win this season’s title by roughly a million points. It’s far too early to reach those conclusions, of course, but it’s clear that they were the big winners of the weekend, not just in a literal sense after beating Everton at home, but after Arsenal and Manchester City drew 1-1 on Sunday afternoon. It was a strange game at the Emirates, City seeming to mark Jose Mourinho’s return to football management by parking the bus after Erling Haaland gave them an early lead. They registered just 32. 8 per cent possession, which, you will not be surprised to learn, is the lowest of Pep Guardiola’s nine-year tenure. It’s not the sort of thing you expect from City, or any Guardiola team for that matter, but it nearly worked. Indeed, one of the reasons it nearly worked was because of counterpart Mikel Arteta’s conservatism. Arteta received much criticism for naming an unadventurous starting XI in their eventual defeat by Liverpool a few weeks ago, but that was understandable: they were away at the reigning champions, without a clutch of key players and but for a phenomenal Dominik Szoboszlai free-kick goal late on, it would have worked. Less understandable was the line-up he chose against City, who seem to still be undergoing an existential crisis, and who have already lost two games this season to teams with much less talent than Arsenal can put on the pitch. Sure, the absence of Martin Odegaard influenced Arteta’s selection, but to the extent that the solution was Mikel Merino as his starting No 10, with so much attacking quality kept back on the bench? As this column has pointed out before, it’s not necessarily the big games that will make Arsenal champions in May. Last season, they lost the same number of games as Liverpool but drew a whopping 14, five more than the eventual champions, and mostly against teams they should have beaten. Convert some of those single points into threes and the gap closes in a hurry. Advertisement But as absurd as it might sound, City were a team that Arsenal should have beaten yesterday, given their form so far this season and for a lot of 2024-25. Arsenal won this fixture 5-1 then, and with a much weaker squad than they have now. With that in mind, you could probably have predicted that City were going to be more circumspect, so why choose such a cautious line-up yourselves? The rebuttal to accusations of conservatism would be that Arteta eventually called for the cavalry and at one stage had Viktor Gyokeres, Bukayo Saka, Ethan Nwaneri, Eberechi Eze and Gabriel Martinelli all on the pitch. And the latter two did combine, brilliantly, for the stoppage-time equaliser. But it was Arteta’s initial conservatism that made that goal necessary. With the resources available to him, it was strange that he didn’t use them from the start. Even in the ranks of ‘potentially unwise post-match interviews given by an emotional manager’, Emery repeatedly calling his Villa players “lazy” after their 1-1 away draw with Sunderland yesterday stands out as… well, less than ideal. It’s hard to work out what has gone wrong at Villa this season. Perhaps last season’s winter-window loanees Marco Asensio and Marcus Rashford had a bigger influence than we thought. Perhaps the summer window, in which Villa seemed to dither and plead poverty before finally making some pretty good signings at the last minute, has contributed to their slow start. Perhaps, after almost three years in charge, Emery’s words aren’t having the impact they once did. If it’s the latter, then you wonder how publicly teeing off on his team will help. “We have to recover our identity, ” Emery told the media after the game. “I am not frustrated with the result, but how we are playing. We are not feeling comfortable with our style. We have to try to recover our personality and confidence to play like we are training. Advertisement “We were lazy sometimes. Lazy. The goal we conceded, we were lazy. Perhaps that’s because we didn’t play in our style. ” Emery knows his players much better than we do, so he is better placed to judge what will motivate them. Maybe he thinks this will be the kick up the behind that they need. But historically, criticism of this wattage, in public, can destroy the relationship between manager and dressing room. The Athletic wrote about this a couple of years ago, when then Manchester United boss Erik ten Hag singled out Jadon Sancho (now on loan at Villa, although given he only came on in the 82nd minute against Sunderland, he presumably wasn’t the main target of Emery’s ire), to which the player responded on social media. In this case, it’s not just the criticism, but the specific word ‘lazy’ that could be problematic. The bare minimum for footballers is that they make the required effort, that while they might sometimes play badly and make mistakes, it isn’t because they’re not putting absolutely everything into their performance. Perhaps some allowances should be made for Emery using his second language, and perhaps he didn’t mean lazy in quite the same way as a native English speaker might, but he used the word repeatedly across several post-match media appearances, so it’s tough to think he meant anything else. Maybe the players won’t take it personally, but of all the words he could have used, this one comes loaded with risk. Last season, the three promoted teams to the Premier League — Leicester City, Ipswich Town and Southampton — collected 59 points between them. They only registered 12 wins, four of which were against each other, and the gap between 18th and 17th place stood at a historic high of 13 points. They were, in short, pathetic. Which was bad news for neutrals but good news for the rest of the Premier League, who knew they were safe from even the vague prospect of relegation. Advertisement That’s not the case this time. Sunderland, Burnley and Leeds United already have a combined 19 points five games in, 32 per cent of the total from their equivalents last season. This weekend, Leeds beat hosts Wolves fairly comfortably, Burnley got a decent home point against Nottingham Forest and Sunderland came from behind, with 10 men, to draw with visiting Villa. Yes, it is early days, but it feels like the rest of the league is not so insulated by the inadequacies of the new intake in 2025-26, leaving some more established names are in serious trouble. And at the moment, those names are Wolves and West Ham, who aren’t so much sleepwalking towards relegation as already in full zombie mode. The prospects for the two managers involved are quite different, with Vitor Pereira having just signed a new contract at Molineux while Graham Potter is on extremely thin ice in London’s East End and in danger of being booted out, possibly pretty soon. The Pereira situation is a strange one, but it indicates he is regarded as the least of Wolves’s problems, a man who squeezed survival out of them last season after being hired in December, since when most of their best players have been sold and replaced with inferior versions by a hierarchy which seems, to put things kindly, unambitious. You can’t really accuse West Ham of lacking ambition, given that they routinely spend vast sums of money on their squad, it’s just that they seem to have an incredible talent for putting their foot in a nearby can of paint and then getting whacked over the head with a ladder. They are a club who can’t seem to get anything right, which makes Potter’s decision to accept their offer of a job back in January quite strange. He spent a remarkable amount of time picking his next club after leaving Chelsea in April 2023, and opting for West Ham felt like a man taking years to choose a house before buying one with rising damp, subsidence and next door to a deaf techno DJ. Last season, teams such as West Ham and Wolves could have got away with it, protected by a dreadful bottom three. Maybe not this time. (Top photo: Mikel Arteta; Alex Pantling/Getty Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Nick Miller is a football writer for the Athletic and the Totally Football Show. He previously worked as a freelancer for the Guardian, ESPN and Eurosport, plus anyone else who would have him. Follow Nick on Twitter @Nick Miller79