Five Knee-Jerk Reactions to Matchday 7 of the Premier League 2026-27

We return with our summary of the weekend’s Premier League action with a bunch of knee-jerk reactions to the nine games played over Saturday and Sunday.

Every week, we round up the Premier League matchday by jumping to some hasty conclusions based on a single round of fixtures.

This isn’t what we normally do. Usually, we plump for larger data sets, and think a little deeper about what we’re going to write.

But we also like to have a bit of fun with this weekly column, and anyway, these knee-jerk reactions can prove to have some truth to them. Sometimes.

So, here are our five knee-jerk reactions to this weekend’s action.

Brighton Are in the Title Race

Seven games into the season and Brighton are still going strong.

A 5-0 battering of rivals Crystal Palace on Sunday made it four wins in a row, each without conceding a single goal, which has ensured they are keeping pace at the top of the table with leaders Manchester City and reigning champions Arsenal.

Their defence is remarkably good – they have the joint best defensive record in the Premier League this season (five goals conceded) – but it is in attack where they are standing out most (23 goals scored). Across the top five European leagues this season, only Barcelona (39) have scored more than them.

Own goals are not included as they have no xG value

And looking back over Premier League history, only three teams have ever scored more goals in their first seven games of a season than Brighton this term: Arsenal in 2009-10 (24), Manchester United in 2011-12 (24), and City in 2019-20 (27).

Interestingly, not one of those three teams went on to win the title. They each set off too quickly out of the blocks and could not keep up the pace for the marathon that is an entire season.

In truth, the same will probably happen to Brighton. The expectation is that they will fall away, too. They surely don’t have the resources to maintain a proper title challenge, especially given they are also in Europe this season.

But any team capable of scoring at a rate of 3.3 goals per game at this level over a not insignificant period of seven games surely has to be taken seriously. On the evidence of the first couple of months of this season, Brighton look like they could spring a surprise.

Hull’s Bubble Has Burst

Two games into this season, everyone (not us) was singing Hull City’s praises, jumping to rash conclusions about how they were going to defy the odds and xG models around the world – as they had in the Championship last season – to storm to safety (definitely, definitely not us).

They won their first two games after returning to the top flight and were third in the table, and things were looking very positive for their chances of survival.

However, since then, Sergej Jakirovic’s side have slowly slipped down the table, failing to win any of their last five games, most recently handing Fulham their first win of the season on Saturday.

Only Sunderland (more on them to come) have picked up fewer points since the start of September (one) than Hull (three). Even Spurs, who have played one game fewer, have a better record in that time than Hull.

Opta’s expected points table, which uses xG data to ascertain how every match ‘should’ have finished based on the quality of chances at each end of the pitch, has Hull in the bottom three of the table. Essentially, this says that if everyone had finished their chances at an ‘average’ rate, Hull would be in the relegation zone.

As the weeks go on, if Hull don’t improve soon, the slide may continue, and the threat of the drop might become more apparent.

Jaissle Will Soon Be Forgotten

Matthias Jaissle was, let’s be honest, a bit of a curveball appointment this summer. There aren’t many Premier League fans who knew what Newcastle were getting when they plumped for a 38-year-old German who boasted precisely zero coaching experience in any of the top five European leagues.

There have been some positive signs that Jaissle was going to overcome the fact that so many key players left Newcastle in the summer, and that the likes of Yoane Wissa and Anthony Elanga would come good under him. They should have held on to beat Liverpool at home on the opening weekend of the season, and the win at Tottenham was well deserved.

But they stuttered and stumbled in the weeks that followed before completely losing their footing against Coventry and this weekend against Aston Villa. After the latest defeat, they are now without a home clean sheet in each of their last 16 games in all competitions – the longest run in the club’s history.

Jaissle has only been in charge for a small portion of those games, but if he fails to fix this particular problem, things could unravel quickly for him, particularly as he has little prior reputational goodwill to fall back on.

If this turns into a bigger issue, he could easily come under pressure, and if he did get sacked in the coming months, he might be forgotten by some as suddenly as he arrived.

Sunderland Need to Drop Out of Europe

We’ve seen this before: team qualifies for Europe in impressive fashion but then immediately struggles with the increased demands in their schedule and swiftly falls back to the level everyone expected of them. That is precisely what appears to be happening to Sunderland.

They were absolutely brilliant last season in finishing seventh, and it would have been difficult for anyone not to be happy for them getting into Europe.

But they appear to be finding it a challenge to balance playing in the Europa League with competing domestically. They have lost four games in a row and are second from bottom of the Premier League. If Spurs get at least a point at home to Coventry on Monday night, they will leave Régis Le Bris’ side bottom of the pile.

The defence is the biggest issue. Sunderland conceded goals at a rate of 1.26 per game last season, and that has shot up to 2.0 per game this term. Only two sides have conceded more goals than them in 2026-27 (14) when last season only three sides had a better defence. Their xG against numbers from this season suggest they have deserved to let in that many goals, too.

Given their joy at making it into Europe, it would be pretty upsetting for many of their fans to see their team tank their Europa League campaign in favour of their fight for Premier League survival. But they overperformed last season when it came to their xG at both ends of the pitch, so maybe a relegation battle was always going to be on the cards.

A European campaign will only make this more difficult, so, for the club’s long-term stability, it might be wise to start prioritising domestic games a little more.

Manzambi is the Signing of the Summer

The sheer volume of player turnover at Aston Villa this summer meant there was every chance they would make a slow start to the season. And they did, losing three of their first four games and failing to beat Hull in the other.

However, they have turned their season around in remarkable fashion since, with summer signing Johan Manzambi front and centre of their revival.

The Swiss international was still only 20 when he joined, and while he was very impressive at Freiburg last season, there can’t have been a great deal of reasonable expectation that he would be the driving force behind the latest Villa rebuild quite this soon into his Premier League career.

However, he scored the winner at Newcastle this weekend having set up John McGinn’s goal at Brentford and scoring the opener at Spurs in the previous two games. That means he has become only the fourth Aston Villa player to either score or assist in each of their first three Premier League starts after Dalian Atkinson in August 1992, Dion Dublin in November 1998 and Danny Ings in August 2021.

They have been crucial goals, too: each of them has put Villa into the lead. Twice they held on to win, while they drew at Brentford.

Without him, Villa could be in a really dire position, but as it is, they are flying up the table with their sights set firmly on another push for Champions League qualification. Manzambi has been playing a very important role indeed.

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