Premier League best bets: a Middle East derby and a dark horse showdown

Welcome to Premier League Matchday 6, otherwise known as the First Weekend ACA (after City-Arsenal.) Did you enjoy the 2-2 draw they played out last Sunday? We certainly did. After last season's turgid 0-0 at the Etihad, it was fantastic to see those two teams go at each other with a little more intention.

There were too many highlights to list here—Riccardo Calafiori's bending wonder goal, John Stones popping up in the box like a hardened striker, Arsenal going full 'park the bus' for 45 bizarre, nail-biting minutes—but our favorite was Kyle Walker's man-marking strategy before Arsenal's second goal. Tasked with blocking 6'3" Gabriel Magalhaes, Walker decided his best move was to slap him in the belly before letting him run away without consequence. It was, shall we say, an interesting attempt.

As the dust from City-Arsenal clears, let's turn our attention away from the established top four—City, Arsenal, Villa and Liverpool—and toward the dark horse challengers snapping at their heels. This weekend offers up several fascinating clashes for the teams sitting from fifth to ninth, and wins for any of them could have them knocking on the door of the Champions League places. Where are the best bets for these quietly excellent teams? We think they're here:

Newcastle vs Manchester City. The strange world of modern soccer finance means that this match—a Northern affair between two traditionally working-class clubs—has become something of a Middle East derby. Newcastle, famously, is owned in part by a Saudi national investment fund; City is well into its second decade of ownership under key leaders from the United Arab Emirates. Forget about Newcastle versus City, because this match begs a completely different question: are you team Riyadh or team Abu Dhabi?
We kid. (Mostly.) This match should be interesting for reasons beyond sovereign wealth. We haven't covered Newcastle in this space yet, but the Magpies have quietly gotten off to a stable start in the league. A controversial red card in Matchday 1 stole most of Newcastle's headlines, but since then it's drawn with Bournemouth, smashed Spurs and Wolves and lost just once (to Fulham, a side we'll get to in a moment.) Ten points from five games is a perfectly respectable haul for a team that was spiraling out of control at the end of last season. Newcastle doesn't have much of a shot against City; it hasn't beaten it in the league since 2019. (Salomon Rondon was the player of the match in that one, and incredibly, he's still kicking around: he's a key part of North American champion Pachuca's attacking lineup.) So rather than looking for a results-based bet in this one, we're keeping our eyes on one of Newcastle's unheralded heroes: goalkeeper Nick Pope . He's a save machine who has turned out at least three goal-stopping blocks in each of his matches this season. Perhaps counterintuitively, Pope's save numbers increase when his team is losing—he managed eight against Fulham despite conceding three—so we think he'll make quite a few against City this Saturday. We're backing him to deliver six or more saves at +162.

Chelsea vs Brighton. The narrative around these two soccer teams could not be more different. Chelsea is the wasteful, transfer-addicted scourge of modern sport; Brighton is the clever, data-backed future of the game. But incredibly, both approaches seem to be delivering similar results. Chelsea and Brighton are just one point apart from one another and sit in fifth and seventh respectively.
It's easy and vaguely cathartic to hate on Chelsea; trust us, we get it. But we do feel like fans and journalists have made such a sport out of criticizing the Blues that they're missing the true picture this season. Anyone who has watched Chelsea this year knows that against all odds, things are starting to click. Nicolas Jackson is the second-most productive striker in the Premier League, while together he and Cole Palmer are the single most productive attacking duo. Jackson's stats are exceptional this season: he's second only to Erling Haaland on everything from goals to shots to xG. He's fabulous. We're backing him as an anytime goalscorer in this one at +175, but bettors looking for a bigger swing might want to back him as Chelsea's first goalscorer at +550.

Nottingham Forest vs Fulham. If you had asked us before the season started where these two would be in the table by the time this game rolled around, we would've guessed 18th and 15th. Whoops. These two have outperformed expectations more than anyone else in the league and are sitting pretty in 8th and 9th. And they're not there by accident: both have come out ahead in some pretty gnarly fixtures. Forest pulled off a wild 1-0 win over Liverpool; Fulham slammed the door on Newcastle 3-1. We've got our eyes on Fulham's ex-Arsenal pairing of Alex Iwobi and Emile Smith-Rowe as these over-performing sides prepare to face off. Both were stellar in last weekend's Newcastle win and appear to be in fine form. Iwobi is available to score or assist at +240; Smith-Rowe is available for the same bet at +220.