Six rounds in and the Premier League picture is already pleasingly weird. Liverpool glide, Arsenal simmer, and Pep Guardiola’s team have the division’s scariest finisher even when he is merely average by his own alien standards. Crystal Palace are carving out a top-four impersonation with a grown-up, coherent plan. Sunderland are back and already giving the neighbours a headache. Chelsea are a bag of noise and talent that keeps misplacing points. And Manchester United still feel like a team that lives one pass away from trouble.
The Premier League roundup
Manchester United look better… and they’re still kind of rubbish
There are signs of an adult idea at Old Trafford. Out of possession the shape is tighter, the distances between midfield and defence are improved, and the press at least resembles a press rather than a group jog. United are more willing to win the ball higher and attack in three and four passes instead of twelve. A few attacks have finally looked repeatable.
Matheus Cunha links phases as a roaming nine-and-a-half, Bryan Mbeumo gives them a reliable outlet on the right with pressing bite and back-post menace, Benjamin Sesko adds straight-line running and penalty-area timing, and he finally got off the mark on the weekend against Brentford.
The problem is that the steps forward arrive in short bursts before the spacing frays, the counterpress dies, and the game flips into a track meet United cannot control. Better ideas, better profiles, still too many soft minutes.
The trouble is that the steps forward are tiny and the steps backward are slapstick. The spacing gets ragged when opponents switch play. United still concede the kind of transitions that good teams use as a free buffet. With six matches played they sit in the bottom half and have the goal difference to match. That is not a hard-luck story. It’s the product of a side that can’t chain together 90 sensible minutes.
🚨 If Manchester United pull the plug on Ruben Amorim, the names in contention are already lined up:
— 365Scores (@365Scores) September 24, 2025
🔴 Andoni Iraola
🔴 Marco Silva
🔴 Oliver Glasner
Which of these managers do you think fits Old Trafford best? 👀 pic.twitter.com/sG4RPWgCI0
Defensively, the best passage is usually the first 20 minutes. After that, the structure loosens, distances stretch, and United begin to defend their own penalty area in individual duels. A team that wants to be proactive becomes reactive. It’s how you end up with a bottom-half record despite flashes that look like a plan, and heat down Ruben Amorim’s neck.
The glass-half-full reading is that some fundamentals have improved and the table position exaggerates the gloom. The glass-half-empty take is that United are on seven points after six matches and that is mid-table output. Both things can be true. They look better. They are still pretty bad. And the league, unsentimental as ever, is punishing every lapse.
Crystal Palace are really, really good
There’s a version of Palace that everyone recognises: organised mid-block, great on set pieces, dangerous if you let their wide forwards spin into the inside channels. This season’s version has a little more ambition. Palace sit third after six games and that rise is not a quirk of the fixture list. They’ve taken down heavyweights, including a deserved win against Liverpool, and the numbers behind the results look sturdy rather than lucky.
Crucially, the squad profile fits the plan. Even without Eberechi Eze, sold to Arsenal, they’re looking fantastic. The centre-backs are clean distributors. Midfield has Adam Wharton. The attack has variety. It’s pragmatic football with the handbrake lifted a notch. If they keep this balance, Palace feel less like an autumn fling and more like a Europa-places team with upside.
Sunderland are outshining the neighbours
Back in the Premier League for the first time since 2017, Sunderland were meant to spend early autumn learning hard lessons. Instead they have been handing them out. Fresh off promotion, they sit in the European places and, perhaps even more satisfying for them, they’re above both Manchester United and Newcastle.
This is not fairytale stuff. It’s competent, modern Premier League football with a sharpness that belies the step up. A mid-table landing would be a success. A top-half finish would be delirium. For now, they are not just surviving. They are irritating bigger clubs simply by being better drilled, and they head to Old Trafford this next weekend. That is a lovely sentence for Sunderland supporters to re-read.
Yankuba Minteh is next up
If you’ve watched Brighton for any length of time you know the pattern. Quiet signing, clever development plan, sudden explosion into the broader football consciousness. Yankuba Minteh looks set to follow that route. The Gambian winger is still only 21, left-footed on the right, and already has the trademark Brighton habits: receiving on the half-turn, punching passes into central runners, carrying with purpose rather than for show.
Minteh’s off-ball work is the hinge on which early minutes swing at Brighton, and he gets it. He presses in arcs, not straight lines, stopping the pass back inside before hunting the full back. In possession he attacks the blind shoulder of the centre-back, which opens the cut-back angle that Brighton live on. The top end needs sanding. Final-third choices are occasionally rushed, as you’d expect, and defenders have begun to show him the outside. But the tempo, the bravery to receive under pressure, already a goal with two assists this campaign, and the ease with which he gets into high-value spaces scream future star.
Panic stations in West London
Chelsea are eighth after six matches (with eight points). That’s not a crisis in pure points, but it feels tense because of the volatility and the opponents that they’ve faced – principally bottom half team. A thumping win at West Ham suggested lift-off, then came the Champions League stumble and a limp home defeat to Brighton that snapped momentum. The underlying issue is a familiar cocktail: a very talented, very young squad that does not yet know its best version, mixed with injuries to key creators.
Enzo Maresca has tried to set Chelsea up with clean spacing, one pivot, two No 8s who can arrive in the box, and wide players who stretch the pitch. At times it snaps into focus and they look a top-four side. Then the next match turns into a catalogue of almosts. The attack is pleasant until it reaches the penalty area, where an extra touch replaces decision. The set-piece concession rate remains a problem. Chelsea are not soft, but they are still too easy to disrupt.
Danny Welbeck’s heroics from the bench against Chelsea have him the Super-Sub of the week!
— 365Scores (@365Scores) September 30, 2025
The English star came on in the 67th minute and scored twice to help his side to a 3-1 win. pic.twitter.com/9H99RsxjJl
Erling Haaland might be the greatest striker in Premier League history
The most unsettling thing about Erling Haaland is that a haul which would certify almost any other forward as ‘the form of their life’ is, for him, merely fine. Six games in and he has eight league goals. That’s already clear at the top of the scoring chart. Even stranger: it equals his worst start across his four Premier League seasons.
What has changed this time is the way City find him. The wide patterns are a touch more direct and the supply line from the right half-space has been ruthless. Haaland has added another layer of near-post movement, almost daring centre-backs to plant a foot before he darts across them. The finishing remains freakish. He can score from the penalty spot, from second-phase scraps, and from one-touch arrivals where the ball seems to appear on his laces by appointment.
The Premier League has had different kinds of great strikers. Shearer as the iron accumulator. Henry as the artist. Aguero as the metronome of doom. Kane as the complete forward. Haaland is the outlier who turns chance quality into a rounding error. When eight in six counts as his slow start, the conversation about all-time status begins to feel less provocative and more like an accounting exercise.
Erling Haaland has just matched Solskjær as the Premier League’s highest-scoring Norwegian 🇳🇴
— 365Scores (@365Scores) September 21, 2025
The twist? Solskjær needed 235 appearances… Haaland’s done it in just 102 games
91 goals – Ole Gunnar Solskjær
91 goals – Erling Braut Haaland pic.twitter.com/vM6dN67F5A
The shape of the league
The early table is a fun inversion of expectations. Liverpool and Arsenal look well set. Palace are holding a Champions League place on merit. Sunderland are elbowing their way into conversations they have no business being in, which is exactly what promotion stories should do. Chelsea are teetering between two futures. Manchester United remain a live-action stress test for the idea that you can fix a superclub quickly just by throwing good intentions and new principles at it.
If you were writing a one-line takeaway for each, you might land on these: United are repairing the plane while flying it. Palace are a plan made flesh. Sunderland are back and unafraid. Minteh is a highlight reel loading bar. Chelsea must choose efficiency over aesthetics. Haaland remains a cheat code. That feels like a truthful, randomly, hand-picked, Nicky-inspired, snapshot after six breathless weekends. Let’s see who still looks the same by Halloween, or whose been wearing a mask the whole time.
By Nicky Helfgott – NickyHelfgott1 on X (Twitter)
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