EPL
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.
This was the FA Cup weekend when Plymouth Argyle celebrated jettisoning Wayne Rooney by beating Brentford, Manchester City made short work of Salford City, Newcastle United were given a scare by Bromley and Tottenham Hotspur needed extra time to beat National League side Tamworth.
Here we will ask if their defeat by Manchester United is the start of something really bad for Arsenal, whether there is a better way to financially reward the giant-killers and where Kyle Walker ranks in the list of Premier League right-backs.
Things are really not going to plan for Arsenal in 2025.
Sure, it started quite nicely with a 3-1 win at Brentford, but since then they were meek in drawing with Brighton & Hove Albion, embarrassingly impotent in losing the first leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final 2-0 to Newcastle, and then there was the loss on penalties to Manchester United in the FA Cup third round on Sunday.
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They can’t even blame referees for this one, having been on the good side of most contentious decisions. Maybe we should be praising Manchester United for their stout performance in holding out for an hour with 10 men after Diogo Dalot’s red card, but it’s hard to ignore that Arsenal seem to be in quite the funk at the moment.
Bukayo Saka is out for who knows how long, as is his replacement Ethan Nwaneri, Ben White is injured too and Gabriel Jesus — just after it looked like he was coming into some sort of goalscoring form — was taken off on a stretcher having injured his knee.
Maybe even more worrying than that is barely any of their fit players seem in form. Martin Odegaard is out of sorts, Gabriel Martinelli too, Mikel Merino hasn’t really got started and we won’t dwell too much on Kai Havertz’s afternoon against United, for fear of kicking a man while he’s down.
Liverpool lose to Nottingham Forest the night before. They’re looking good for automatic qualification in the Champions League. Maybe it’s better not to be in the FA Cup, given the fixture issues it could create.
But the signs aren’t great at the moment. It’s happening in probably the worst possible month, too: the inadequacies of their summer transfer window and not recruiting a proper goalscorer are being laid bare, so the clamour to fix that and spend some money in this window will grow and grow. Alternatively, maybe it could be the best possible month because they could actually buy someone to fix the problem. But don’t hold your breath.
At the moment, it’s a relatively brief poor run. The fear is that it could turn into something much worse than that.
When the 90 minutes were up, the instinct was to be delighted for Tamworth that they had held Tottenham to a 0-0 draw. An amazing result that would now be rewarded with a lucrative replay at the Premier League side’s stadium.
And then you remember that replays are no longer a thing in the FA Cup, and a Tamworth team that featured builders and clothes shop workers would have to play another 30 minutes against a team of elite professional athletes, bringing their chances of avoiding defeat down to near zero.
It is worth pointing out we probably shouldn’t weep too much for Tamworth specifically, given that they benefitted from this exact structure in the second round, beating Burton Albion after extra time and penalties. But this is illustrative of a wider point.
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It feels less than ideal that replays have been eliminated in the name of easing workload, when Spurs went on both post and pre-season tours (to Australia, and Japan and South Korea respectively) in the summer.
Football finance expert Kieran Maguire estimated that a replay would have been worth £850,000 ($1million) to Tamworth, a club that has only recently been able to make their manager a full-time employee. Money that could be the lifeblood of a grassroots team has been sacrificed so the richest can top up their giant piles of cash with another few spoonfuls.
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But it’s not quite that simple. First, the decision has been made and it’s not likely to be changed, so railing against it falls into the ‘old man shouts at cloud’ category. Second, fixture congestion is a genuine problem, and replays have gone in part because of the expansion of European competitions, which you can’t really blame the Football Association for. Third, extra time and penalties are often entertaining, as Arsenal vs Manchester United proved.
One way of fixing the problem is to change the structure of the FA Cup’s prize money. Tamworth will receive £25,000 for their third-round defeat, while their opponents pocket £115,000 for winning. Those amounts increase as the tournament progresses, so the team that wins the final in May gets £2m.
The winners do not need that amount of money. In the Premier League era, the FA Cup has been won by one of Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool on 28 out of 32 occasions. The last time a team from outside the top flight won it was in 1980. The prize money for the FA Cup is loose change for clubs that bring in north of £700m every year.
So why not spread the prize money out a little more evenly throughout the rounds. Even if you halved the amount for the winners, that’s an extra £1m into the pot for the minnows. Sure, it wouldn’t be £850,000, but it would be a more constructive use of the money.
Better yet, why not have some sort of reverse sliding scale, according to the status of the team that wins a game? Say, if you’re a Premier League team and you win a round you get £X, but if a Championship team wins the same game they get £X times two, down to a National League team who would get £X times five?
Sure, it’s not perfect and it would make budgeting tricky, but it would allow the big teams to get what they want — avoiding the indignity of having to play a much inferior team that they couldn’t beat for a second time — and distribute the money in football more usefully.
Modern football being the capitalist nightmare that it currently is, this will not happen. But it would be better for the game if it did.
If Kyle Walker has played his last game for Manchester City, it will represent a slightly odd exit for one of the key players in the most dominant team in Premier League history.
This isn’t the start of the break-up of the team that has won six of the past seven Premier League titles: Riyad Mahrez and Ilkay Gundogan left in 2023 (although a version of the latter has returned since), but Walker has been there since Pep Guardiola’s second season.
GO DEEPER
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His decline has been clear for a while and has been exposed on several occasions this season. Perhaps it would have been too much of an overhaul with Mahrez and Gundogan going that summer too but, in hindsight, it probably would have been better for all concerned if Walker’s mooted transfer to Bayern Munich had happened 18 months ago.
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But that should not obscure what a sensational player he has been for City — and England — over most of the past eight years. He has undoubtedly been among the best right-backs the Premier League has ever seen, and you could make a decent argument that he’s the very best.
None of the other candidates — Gary Neville, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Paulo Ferreira, Cesar Azpilicueta, Pablo Zabaleta, insert your own choice here — had/have quite the same all-round skills, able to defend as effectively as they can attack.
While he has never quite had the tactical nous or technique to be the inverted full-back who moves into midfield, his pace and defensive skills meant he could cover for John Stones, or whoever Guardiola chose to fulfil that role. He could cover so much ground that in most games City could afford to play three at the back without losing a huge amount in defence: N’Golo Kante was frequently cited as effectively being two players in one for Leicester City and Chelsea in midfield, but Walker did a similar thing in defence.
Latterly, his uncertainty going forward has led to him looking like he has the yips when it comes to crossing, and losing a yard or two of pace has meant he has been burned rather embarrassingly more times than is comfortable. Timo Werner absolutely rinsing him in City’s 4-0 defeat by Tottenham earlier in the season springs to mind, but there are many other examples of how his tactical brain has not quite come to terms with his physical limitations.
It does sometimes feel like people in England have not quite warmed to him: perhaps it is a corollary of playing for a broadly unpopular team; perhaps it is to do with his very public private life; perhaps people genuinely do not rate him. But we should not underestimate how good he has been.
It will be interesting to see how City adapt if Walker leaves, with AC Milan a possible destination. Prospective new signing Abdukodir Khusanov has been a centre-back to this point, but then again so was Josko Gvardiol. Does this mean Rico Lewis becomes a certain starter? Maybe Stones will be asked to fill in there. Perhaps Guardiola has some other tactical innovation up his sleeve.
But City will be saying goodbye to one of their defining players of this era. He will be missed.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
Nick Miller is a football writer for the Athletic and the Totally Football Show. He previously worked as a freelancer for the Guardian, ESPN and Eurosport, plus anyone else who would have him.

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