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Arsenal and Utd shaking up football order

It’s the end of the world as we know it — and it’s extraordinarily good fun, writes DAVE KIDD.

At the halfway stage of the Premier League season, the state of the nation is a state of unprecedented flux.

Three of England’s four Champions League places look very likely to change hands.

Three fully-established top-flight clubs occupy the relegation places — West Ham, Southampton and Everton, an ever-present since 1954.

Fulham, Brighton and Brentford all sit proudly in the top eight, above Liverpool and Chelsea.

Arsenal and Manchester United could face off on Sunday as the top two in the league, with Newcastle tucked in behind them as if it’s 1997 all over again.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were meant to be continuing their duopoly — two truly great teams dominating the English game as they’d done for the previous five years.

And while the resurgence of Arsenal under Mikel Arteta and United under Erik ten Hag have been thrilling tales of the unexpected, neither would be sitting so loftily without the collapse of one empire and the alarming cracks beginning to show in another.

Suddenly, both Liverpool and City have lost a lot of what made them so great. Liverpool are no longer dynamic, manic pressing, never-knowingly-beaten “mentality monsters”. And City aren’t quite the pass-you-to-death, liquid-football, Barcelona-built model we are used to.

For Klopp, it feels terminal. For Guardiola, it is too early to say.

FOR DAVE KIDD’S FULL VERDICT, CLICK HERE