The Briefing: Is Emery Premier League's best manager right now? Cherki signing of the season?
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Stuart James
Stuart James analyses three of the main talking points from the weekend's Premier League action
Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.
Here, we will ask if Unai Emery is the best manager in the Premier League right now, whether Rayan Cherki is emerging as the signing of the season so far, and raise the alarm about the gap between the bottom three — we’re looking at you, West Ham, in particular — and the rest.
Is Unai Emery a genius?
OK, calm down, Arsenal fans. I’m just quoting Ollie Watkins, not trying to trigger you ahead of Tuesday.
“He changed it because Chelsea were going man for man, but they had the extra centre-back when we were going long,” the Aston Villa striker said about his manager after scoring twice as a substitute in the 2-1 win at Stamford Bridge on Saturday night. “When I came on in the second half, he brought on Jadon Sancho and Morgan Rogers on the wing and put Youri Tielemans in the No 10, so we had an extra man in there. He’s a tactical genius.”
All is going well for Unai Emery (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
When a Crystal Palace fan also described Emery as a genius in the wake of the win at Chelsea, one of the replies that came back on social media was that the Spaniard was enjoying “a massive purple patch”. The Palace supporter duly pointed out that three years and two months, or 161 matches to use his statistic, feels quite long for a purple patch.
Villa, lest it be forgotten, were on the road to nowhere when Steven Gerrard was sacked as manager in October 2022, above the relegation zone on goals scored and looking more like a Championship, rather than a Champions League, team.
Emery has transformed the club in the three years since and, at the same time, rebuilt his reputation in England after that difficult spell in charge of Arsenal. He has the highest win percentage of any Villa manager and has overseen 11 straight victories, equalling a club record that was set in 1897 and 1914 (purple patches were more common back then).
In fact, let’s forget the word genius, which means different things to different people, and rephrase the question: is Emery the best manager in the Premier League right now? Could you imagine Pep Guardiola, Mikel Arteta, or anyone else, for that matter, extracting so much from an Aston Villa squad that looked like it had run its race at the start of this season?
It’s an astonishing sequence of results that has propelled Villa from 18th place in the table after five winless games, and on the back of a transfer window in which the £26m spent on the Nice striker Evann Guessand was their only major investment, to being part of a three-horse title race alongside Arsenal and Manchester City.
Emery would dismiss that kind of talk with 20 matches still to play, as would plenty of neutrals. Villa’s expected goals (xG) has become a stick to beat them with, fuelling a belief that they are overachieving and that the current run of results isn’t sustainable. The win over Chelsea, when Villa were outplayed for the best part of an hour and fortunate not to be more than a goal behind at half-time, reinforced that narrative.
But how do you measure resilience, mentality and a never-say-die attitude? And what value do you attach to a manager’s ability to influence key phases in matches with tactical and personnel changes? The fact that Villa have won 18 points from losing positions this season, and that Emery’s substitutes so often deliver (nine goals and counting from the bench), suggests that the answers to those questions are hugely significant in the story of their success so far.
Indeed, it feels as though the most highly expected goal at the Emirates Stadium on Tuesday night would be for Villa to score after going behind.
Whether that happens or not, Emery returns to his former club as a top manager, respected by his peers, loved by the Villa supporters, and more than capable of delivering another curveball in this title race.
Could Rayan Cherki turn into the signing of the season?
It felt like a curious signing at the time. Curious not because of Rayan Cherki’s ability, which has never been in doubt, but curious because you wondered whether the combination of a creative maverick, Pep Guardiola’s management, and Manchester City’s way of playing would be a happy marriage.
By the sound of things, Guardiola asks himself that question occasionally, presumably after Cherki has performed another rabona.
“Some moments I shout at him and some moments I want to just kiss him. So I have that ambivalent feeling with him,” the City manager said after Cherki’s late goal and assist for Tijjani Reijnders helped City to a 2-1 victory at Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
“But you have to allow him to express his incredible talent.”
Rayan Cherki celebrates after scoring against Nottingham Forest (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
What is becoming increasingly clear is that the £30.3million ($40.5m) that Manchester City paid Lyon for Cherki (he only had one year remaining on his contract with the Ligue 1 club) was one of the best deals of the summer.
Actually, let’s put it another way: it was an absolute steal for a 21-year-old France international who was statistically the most creative player in Europe’s top five leagues last season, outperforming, in order: Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Michael Olise, Lamine Yamal, Ousmane Dembele, Kevin De Bruyne, Bradley Barcola, and Desire Doue.
Cherki has only played 644 minutes of Premier League football for City this season — the equivalent of little more than seven full matches — but already has seven assists and two goals to his name. In all competitions, it’s five goals and eight assists across 19 appearances.
Creating more chances per 90 than any other Premier League player, Cherki’s contributions make him a game-changer for City, and they needed one of those in a post-De Bruyne world.
At this point, as a football writer, it feels as though you should be turning to page two in the ‘overseas signing playbook’ and writing about how well Cherki has adapted to the pace, physicality and intensity of the Premier League. Except it feels more like the Premier League is learning to adapt to Cherki and how he plays.
Cherki is not, for example, occasionally taking corners for City with his ‘weaker foot’. Anyone who has followed Cherki’s career closely in France will know that he doesn’t have a weaker foot. The rabona that set up Phil Foden's header against Sunderland isn’t Cherki showing off. It’s a routine move for him that he’s used for years to deceive opponents. And that lovely piece of skill that he produced inside his own half to wriggle in between Morgan Gibbs-White and Neco Williams at the City Ground is just Cherki being Cherki.
His impact over the past two months in particular is such that it’s hard to avoid making comparisons with some of the big-money attacking signings (wingers and No 10s rather than out-and-out strikers) made by other top Premier League clubs this summer.
Chelsea paid the best part of £40m for Alejandro Garnacho (one goal, two assists in the Premier League) and £48.5m for Jamie Gittens (two assists). Xavi Simons (one goal, two assists) cost Tottenham Hotspur £51.8m, Arsenal paid £48.5m for Noni Madueke (three goals in the Champions League but still waiting to score or assist in the Premier League), while Liverpool, who also tried to sign Cherki in the summer, spent £116m on Florian Wirtz (one goal, two assists).
These, of course, are still early days and there are plenty of other candidates in the mix for that signing of the season category — Sunderland’s Granit Xhaka, who registered his fifth assist of the season against Leeds on Sunday with a lovely reverse pass, high among them.
Cherki, however, is getting plenty of kisses from Guardiola right now.
Is the current bottom three shaping up to be the final bottom three?
The general consensus last season was that the bottom three in the Premier League — Ipswich Town, Leicester City, and Southampton — were hopelessly out of their depth and among the worst teams to grace the top flight in the modern era.
Well, it’s starting to feel as though we can say the same for the bottom three this season, with the only surprise being that just one of the trio was promoted from the Championship this year.
Leicester, in 18th place, had 14 points at this stage last year, one more than West Ham have now. Ipswich, second from bottom after 18 matches, had 12 points, the same as Burnley’s tally. As for Southampton, they were marooned on six points, which is three times as many points as Wolves have to their name.
The good news for West Ham is that the gap to safety — currently five points — didn’t get any bigger this weekend, thanks to Manchester City’s late win over Nottingham Forest. Perhaps there is also some comfort to be found from the sight of Bournemouth, who were second in the table two months ago, being thumped 4-1 at Brentford and dropping like a stone.
That said, the end of December is a bit early in the season to be looking for favours from other teams to stay up. West Ham need to start helping themselves, and that’s a major problem for a club that’s long been broken on and off the pitch.
All is not going well for Nuno Espirito Santo (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
The 1-0 defeat against Fulham on Saturday was their 11th at home in the league in 2025. A similar result against Brighton on Tuesday would set an unwanted record: the most league losses at home in West Ham’s history in a calendar year.
None of the numbers make for good reading, including the fact that the last time West Ham had so few points at this stage of a campaign, back in 2010, they were relegated from the Premier League. In short, the clues are there: West Ham are in a world of trouble.
Wolves are their next opponents after Brighton, and failing to win that game at Molineux doesn’t bear thinking about.
Bournemouth would be in similar pain but for their excellent early-season form, which is starting to feel like a trick of the mind. Andoni Iraola’s team are winless in nine matches, conceding goals at an alarming rate, and their next two fixtures are against Chelsea and Arsenal. On top of that, their talisman is about to join Manchester City. Where on earth do Bournemouth find a replacement for Antoine Semenyo, who scored 15 Premier League goals and registered six assists in 2025?
Elsewhere, there has been enough of an improvement at the City Ground since Sean Dyche took over as manager to think Forest will find a way to pull clear. As for Leeds, they are playing with a mixture of conviction, energy and belief, and in Dominic Calvert-Lewin have a striker in the form of his life.
Jarrod Bowen had better put his cape on.
Coming up
A full Football League programme on Monday, starting with the Championship leaders Coventry City hosting third-placed Ipswich at 6pm GMT (1pm ET). It’s the kind of game that you have no intention of watching, accidentally turn on for two minutes during an ad-break in Die Hard, and end up sitting through the whole damn thing, which Coventry win 1-0 with a goal from a throw-in (I watched that movie on Boxing Day).
Another full Premier League programme across Tuesday and Wednesday (“Does it ever stop?” asks my other half, blissfully unaware that my son and I are off to Swansea vs West Brom on New Year’s Day; yes, there’s another round of Football League games to kick off 2026 in style/misery).
The highlight of gameweek 19 in the Premier League is unquestionably Arsenal against Aston Villa, with the pick of the other games Manchester City’s visit to high-flying Sunderland.
After a 38-hour break from Premier League football when none of us will know what to do with ourselves, top-flight action returns on Saturday at Villa Park, where Unai Emery’s side host Nottingham Forest. North of the border, it’s Celtic against Rangers, which is second versus third in the Scottish Premiership but feels more like it should be 11th versus 12th this season.
Away from domestic football, the Africa Cup of Nations continues at pace, with the group stage ending on Wednesday and the first four of the last-16 knockout ties taking place across Saturday and Sunday.
