The Score: Brighton’s title charge, Forest in trouble and a new rivalry emerges

This is The Score, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here. In Anfield’s press room on Sunday afternoon, you could have thrown a medium-sized blanket into the air and covered a decent all-time Premier League team. Alan Shearer and Daniel Sturridge up front, perhaps. Theo Walcott and John Barnes on the wings. Milan Baros and Vladimir Smicer offered a Czech connection. Lee Hendrie and Jason McAteer for your streets-never-forgetting quota. This only happens at the biggest matches and Liverpool vs Arsenal was Sunday’s only show in town. If that disappointed those eyeing up a full afternoon on the sofa, it was prescient too. A thought dawned as I sat in my seat during the first half. Manchester City may well not be a Premier League club next season. Manchester United are in their own shame spiral and should be left in a league of one to work it out. Brighton are upstarts for sure, but still only that. Chelsea and Tottenham are in stages of transition and maybe always will be. Neither have finished in the Premier League’s top two since 2017. Liverpool and Arsenal has never felt like the Premier League rivalry: too late-1980s coded, too steeped in history, too much missing each other and taking it in turns to surge, too many other clubs complicating things with their geographical rivalries. But this could become its time to shine. Sunday felt seismic. Its importance – either Arsenal making a statement or Liverpool hauling themselves into a title race – hung heavy in the air. The atmosphere was hardly the stuff of fevered vitriol, but there was absolutely a prickly dislike.Liverpool are their own work in progress, of course. There are still component parts that must improve to match the champions. Milos Kerkez, aka the man who refuses to win a duel, is simply not good enough. Florian Wirtz is still impacting games in a way that just about passes for satisfactory but it’s been 15 months and so many millions and we’re still waiting for a high-profile match to be bent to his will. Still, we have the makings of something: feistiness, lots of booing and gnashing of teeth, enough talented young attacking players to make it fun for a while, the occasional scrap. If nobody else in the Big Six is going to step up, I could get used to Liverpool and Arsenal properly hating each other. Are Brighton in the title race? There are two relatively simple pieces of evidence in the affirmative here: Brighton are third in the Premier League and they have beaten Arsenal and Manchester City without conceding a goal. That alone means Fabian Hurzeler’s team merits being in the wider conversation. The numbers are phenomenal, too. Nobody has scored more goals than Brighton. Nobody has kept more clean sheets. Nobody has created more big chances. Nobody has scored more set-piece goals. Nobody has won the ball with more regularity in the opposition third of the pitch. They are the real deal. Of course, there are caveats. The Conference League will get harder in the knockout rounds, eventually. The squad is not as deep as those around them. The shift from a centre forward presence to a fun band of zippy attackers has caught opposition coaches off guard and they may adapt. But, right now, why would you focus on any reasons to doubt Brighton. They are magnificent and they are magnificent to watch. They are appointment television and that’s enough for me. Nottingham Forest and the xG problem Oliver Glasner is now officially in firefighting mode. After Nottingham Forest again created the better chances, again failed to score and again lost, Glasner spoke at length about players needing to buy into his era – and the chance of yet another managerial change at the City Ground if they don’t. "If it doesn't work, the sixth manager will come in and it will be the same… then the seventh and it'll be the same." A frustrated Oliver Glasner speaking after Nottingham Forest's 2-0 defeat to Brentford 🔊 pic.twitter.com/U1XAhT2Gqj— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) October 31, 2026 His entire campaign so far has been baffling. The xG table has Forest third and only three teams have created more big chances, yet Glasner’s group are the lowest scorers in the division. They spectacularly fail to finish their dinner, make individual mistakes in defence and have proven incapable of stopping setbacks ruining the entire game plan. The problem is that the numbers only hint at what may happen in the future. With the mood in the fanbase eternally chaotic because their club has long matched that vibe, Glasner knows he needs a squad that is fighting to shift what already feels like an ingrained pattern. From what he said at Brentford on Saturday afternoon, the culture within the club is fragmented. Gameweek 9 highlights Player of the weekend – Evanilson (Bournemouth) A brilliant Premier League striker whose form continues to go under the radar as a result of where he plays his football. Evanilson presses, creates and scores goals, this time for the fourth league game in a row. And Bournemouth have now won six straight games without conceding. 🔥 Evanilson has six goals and assists across his last six games for Bournemouth – including three Man of the Match ratings! Erling Haaland is the only player with more Premier League G/A this season than Evanilson. 😮‍💨 pic.twitter.com/zFlMwFRni1— FotMob (@FotMob) October 31, 2026 Goal of the weekend – Julio Enciso (Ipswich Town) I could have picked either of Ipswich’s goals, but long-rane specialist Julio Enciso wins out. His quick feet skip him through a melee, before he opens up his body to get the natural curl with his left foot. Woof. Villain of the weekend – Lisandro Martinez (Manchester United) The other week, Lisandro Martinez publicly criticised his club’s hierarchy for a failure to invest adequately in the squad. Well hear this, pal: you cost £60m, you keep getting injured despite seemingly always being available for Argentina, you have been the worst player in the Premier League so far this season and your lack of discipline is a joke. Jason Wilcox should come out and say it. Read more: Michael Carrick’s Man Utd reign has turned into a cruel humiliation ritual Statistic of the weekend Tottenham Hotspur have won three straight Premier League games for only the second time since December 2023. The squad is deep enough to be better than so many other Premier League teams and it’s finally showing. Read more: Tottenham’s £185m engine is driving the De Zerbi revolution