Do you feel overwhelmed? Like the world is just too fast for you? That life is unmanageable, head-spinning chaos?
It could be that you need to make some changes. Clear the diary a bit. Put your phone in a drawer at 9pm every night. No more social media. Drink less coffee and more of those green smoothies that look like a glass of pondwater. Go on a yoga retreat.
Or it could be that you’ve been following the 2025-26 Premier League season.
Because, oh boy, it feels like this season has been happening at warp speed. The Premier League — most top-level football, really — comes with an inherent sense of rapid change, with narratives lurching violently like an oil tanker caught in a tropical storm. But this campaign has been rocking more dangerously than most.
Consider Liverpool.
The reigning champions had a 100 per cent record after five games: sure, there was some luck involved, and they kept having to come from behind and score late goals, but they were winning despite having half a new team after a busy transfer window, so imagine how they will do once they’ve sorted that out, right?
Then they lost to Crystal Palace. Then Galatasaray. Then Chelsea. Then Manchester United (Manchester United!) Then Brentford. Then Palace again. There was a 5-1 thrashing of Eintracht Frankfurt mixed in there, too, but that only emphasised how little all this made sense. By October, there was talk that Arne Slot, the man who took over from an Anfield icon in Jurgen Klopp just over a year earlier and won the Premier League in his first season, could be sacked.
Things reached a point where the only sensible thing to do was to drop Mohamed Salah, Liverpool’s best player of the past decade and probably among their five greatest ever. As you may have heard, he didn’t take it well.
Arne Slot won the title in his first season with Liverpool. Six months later, they are in 10th (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
Aston Villa’s fortunes have fluctuated wildly, too.
The beginning of the campaign was a mess, with a frenzied last few weeks of the summer window resulting in signings who, as it turns out, have barely played. A calamitous set of results left them in the relegation zone after five games, with dark talk that manager Unai Emery’s project was falling apart in its fourth year, sub-par recruitment would torpedo their season and things were on the downswing.
Now, after a string of brilliant results (nine league wins in the next 10 matches), they are being considered as title challengers. Villa were 19th in the 20-club table at the end of September — they’re now third. No other team has had such an extreme swing in league positions this season.
Have a look at this chart, which might look like the result of a child randomly drawing lines with crayons but is actually a visualisation of how selected teams’ league positions have fluctuated. Villa and Liverpool are the most extreme, but pick your favourite and hover over the line representing them to reveal more information about their fortunes so far.
Tottenham Hotspur do not appear on the above chart, but their oscillation in the narrative space has been almost as chaotic.
Good early results, including an away win against Manchester City, drew flattering comparisons between new head coach Thomas Frank and predecessor Ange Postecoglou: the pragmatist has replaced the idealist, the grown-ups were in charge now. Cut to a few months later, and Spurs’ dreadful home form resulted in boos raining down on the Dane, now clearly out of his depth, leaving some fans pining for ‘Angeball’.
Frank’s replacement at Brentford, Keith Andrews, has also been subject to more subtle, but nonetheless significant, narrative swings.
When he was appointed, some were aghast that this set-piece coach who had never been a manager before had been given the keys to one of the best-run clubs in the country, particularly after losing three of their best players in the summer window. But then Brentford beat Manchester United and Liverpool, and the prevailing opinion seemed to shift. Actually, maybe Brentford knew what they were doing and the continuity candidate might have been a good idea after all. Brentford have now lost four of their past six games, though, and the pendulum is creaking back in the opposite direction.
Some reputational fluctuations have occurred in a shorter space of time.
Take Enzo Maresca, who gained widespread praise for how Chelsea played with 10 men for nearly an hour against Arsenal at the end of last month, digging in and collecting a point against the best team in the country. The sense was that Maresca showed that day he is a real Chelsea manager, getting things done by any means necessary. Three days later, they lost 3-1 to Leeds United.
And that’s the home of another one: a few weeks ago, the jig seemed to be up for Daniel Farke, whose position at Elland Road seemed precarious even after promotion in the summer and worsened as they stayed in and around the bottom three over the season’s early months, only for them to back up that Chelsea win by taking a point against Liverpool.
It seemed as though Daniel Farke might have had to say goodbye to Leeds only a couple of weeks ago (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
We haven’t even got to Nottingham Forest, who exist in their own microclimate of chaos: in the summer, optimism was high, European football was there for the first time in a generation and everybody adored head coach Nuno Espirito Santo. Then Nuno talked himself into being sacked less than a month into the new campaign and paved the way for one of history’s more ill-conceived appointments, which lasted eight winless games before Postecoglou was shoved out the door precisely 17 minutes after losing to Chelsea. Sean Dyche became Forest’s third boss of the season before the clocks went back.
Even Wolves, the still point in a turning world, a team whose incompetence you can theoretically rely on for some calming consistency and have been stone-bottom of the table for 14 of the 15 match weeks (they climbed as high as 19th for the other one), have sacked a manager and are the subject of some pretty passionate fan protests that have been brewing for a long time, but really escalated recently.
We could go on.
Bournemouth went from second to 14th in five weeks. Manchester City have been as low as 13th and as high as second. Promoted Sunderland’s league position has been fairly consistent, but even that represents their contribution to the unpredictability of this season: who had them as anything but relegation candidates in the summer?
The Champions League qualification places have been occupied by 12 different teams and until the most recent set of fixtures, there hadn’t been a single gameweek where the same teams from the previous week stayed in the top five. And even then, they weren’t all in the same positions. Arsenal have been top for 10 of the 15 rounds but even they are showing vague signs of wobbling under the sheer weight of injuries.
If you wanted a single game to sum up this campaign, it would probably be Manchester City’s 5-4 win away to Fulham at the start of December. Just before the hour mark, City went 5-1 up and the cigars were out. By the 78th minute, Fulham had scored three more times and the final stages of the match were madness. Afterwards, City manager Pep Guardiola did his best Maximus Decimus Meridius impression: are you not entertained?
It’s difficult to say all of this chaos hasn’t been entertaining. It’s better than staid predictability, where we all know who’s going to finish where. But it’s still a discombobulating season, the football equivalent of being shoved into a washing machine and spun around and around.
So if you are feeling overwhelmed, headspun and outpaced by the world, maybe don’t feel too worried: it’s not you, it’s the Premier League.
There’s probably no harm in trying that yoga retreat, though.
