Five games to go: The Premier League’s unpredictable season turns again

This was supposed to be Arsenal’s title. For 200 days, it looked like it would be.

But Wednesday night, Erling Haaland scored his 35th goal of the season after five minutes at Turf Moor, and Manchester City went top of the Premier League for the first time since October. Arsenal’s 200-day lead was gone, just like that, to a team that three weeks ago looked like they had run out of steam.

I am a Manchester United supporter. I have no dog in this fight. So honestly, watching this title race from the outside has been one of the most entertaining things the Premier League has produced in years. Not because the football has always been brilliant. Because it really has not. But because absolutely nothing has gone the way anyone expected.

Arsenal were supposed to win this!

The title felt done. Football journalists were already writing the “Arsenal end the wait” pieces and filing them for publication on whatever Sunday it became official.

Then Bournemouth beat them at home. Then they lost at the Etihad to goals from Rayan Cherki and Erling Haaland. Then last night, City beat Burnley, and Arsenal’s 200-day stint at the top was over. Now they have no tie-breaker advantage. If the two clubs finish level on points, goal difference and goals scored, City win the title because they have won more points in the head-to-head matches this season. Arsenal hold none of the cards. It’s a case of who blinks first, and I think Arsenal will blink.

Mikel Arteta has taken Arsenal close, and he deserves some credit for that. But his performative coaching on the sideline, his cringeworthy “tricks” in training, they point to a man feeling the pressure. He’s so worked up, I think it’s translating to the pitch.

The Chelsea disaster …

While the title race has been the main event, Chelsea have been providing the most genuinely extraordinary sideshow in Premier League history. Three managers in 16 months. Some 2 billion pounds ($2.7bn) spent on players. Seventh in the table. And my personal favourite stat of the entire season: five consecutive league games without scoring, the first time that has happened to Chelsea since 1912.

Their most recent manager, Liam Rosenior, was sacked this week. He had been in the job for 106 days on a six-and-a-half-year contract. He is perhaps best remembered for a news conference in January where he explained that the word “manage”, split into two, gives you “man” and “age” and that, therefore, management means “ageing men”. He aged extremely quickly. He is now 41 and unemployed.

The week he was sacked, Chelsea’s parent company published accounts showing operating losses of 689 million pounds ($930m) over three years. That is a loss of 629,000 pounds ($850,000) every single day. For three years. At a football club that cannot beat Brighton.

There is a serious point buried in the Chelsea comedy. Spending money without a coherent plan is not a strategy. The clubs who disrupted the established order this season, Bournemouth above all, did it through organisation and intelligence. Bournemouth sold their five best players for a combined 250 million pounds ($338m) in 18 months. Their manager, Andoni Iraola, adapted, rebuilt and is still on course to finish in the top half while playing some of the most attractive football in the country. Bournemouth beat Arsenal at the Emirates. They beat Liverpool at Anfield. Chelsea spent many times their budget and could finish below them.