Welcome to what has long been viewed, not always incorrectly, as the pivotal stretch of the Premier League season. In a two and a half week stretch between Saturday and Thursday, January 8, the English top flight will jam five matchdays into its schedule with the FA Cup third round to follow. Under such intense pressure, the truth of who teams are might just emerge.

Of course it really ought to have by now but for some of the biggest teams in England, recent weeks have thrown up intriguing but unanswered questions. Arsenal are wobbling but are they still the side that have been widely viewed as favorites to win the league? If not them, it couldn’t be Aston Villa could it? And what of Manchester United? They’re certainly not in the title race but who knows where they might be if they weren’t frittering away so many leads. Let’s dive into those topics below:

1. Are Arsenal still title favorites?

Take the temperature of the Arsenal fanbase and you would do well to find as much festive cheer as might be expected. Social media is rarely the most accurate barometer, but to take a lead off there you might believe that the title race is run, that all Mikel Arteta’s side can do is stagger to the finish line in the knowledge that Manchester City will eventually click and restore their supremacy. Then you might check the bookmakers, who won’t give you any price on the Gunners winning the Premier League that doesn’t start with a minus. You could then cross-reference that with prediction models such as Opta’s, which gives Arsenal a 65% chance of winning the league.

Everyone without a dog in the fight is convinced that it is one that Arsenal should be heavy favorites for. And yet they just lost at Villa Park. They needed a last gasp own goal to beat Wolverhampton Wanderers, tracking towards the worst Premier League team ever. That doesn’t seem like the form of title winners. Nor, of course, did Liverpool needing a late penalty to beat Southampton last season. Pep Guardiola put it best after a 3-0 win over Crystal Palace last weekend that was far more underwhelming than the scoreline might suggest. “When we won 100 points and all the titles, for the amount of things we achieved we had a lot of games like today,” he said. Even the very best teams have off days and this is not a season that will require centurion standards.

Arsenal have wobbled, that much is true, albeit only by the standards of title winners. Since the last international break, which they went into having been held at Sunderland, they have won three, drawn one and lost one in the Premier League. Their wobble, however, is eminently explicable. Injuries have hit them hard, the defense buckling just as the attacking numbers were trending upwards. Ben White has injured his hamstring, Jurrien Timber, Riccardo Calafiori and William Saliba have struggled with knocks but the most profound issue has been the absence of Gabriel, who Arteta said on Friday is “not too far” having returned to the training pitches from his thigh injury.

Gabriel is one of the best center backs in the world and his absence shines through in Arsenal’s defensive metrics. Prior to the November internationals where he went down, Arteta’s side were allowing opponents a frankly ludicrous 0.55 non-penalty expected goals (npxG) per game. Take their No.6 out and that trends to a 0.73, still the best in the Premier League by a vast margin. There are further issues up the field that stem from a team who miss their unbreachable foundations but the net sum of those is a five game sample size where Arsenal’s npxG difference is basically neck and neck with Manchester City. For the season as a whole the Gunners’ npxG difference is about 20% ahead of City’s. If Arsenal get back to the best version of themselves, they should win the league.

Of course they might not get back to the best version of themselves. Arteta has spoken with some nerves about the “really dangerous circle” of loading minutes on other players to mitigate for the absence of those with injuries, ominously warning that Saliba playing 90 minutes against Wolves was “buying tickets for another injury.” The biggest worry is that the raffle delivers their unlucky number. It might also be true that a style of play that has center backs holding the line on halfway and wingers tracking their full backs high and low puts undue pressure on Arsenal bodies — hence Gabriel’s thigh issue and Ben White’s hamstring visibly going in a chaseback at the weekend — but that seems intractable. Arteta’s system wins games. He just has to hope it doesn’t come at too great a cost.

Arsenal might have bought a gaudy level of depth, but the center backs who are good enough that they won’t look like a drop off when Gabriel is out are not going to want to warm Arteta’s bench for most of the season. The same is true of Saliba, Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice. Get and keep those players fit, using the squad to ease their minutes load, and Arsenal should be alright.

2. Are Aston Villa title contenders?

Sixteen games into the season, we are at the stage where the Premier League table shouldn’t be lying. And yet it is a tricksy sort, the EPL. It would have you believe that right now Aston Villa are serious candidates to win a first English league crown since Diana and Charles were readying themselves for a wedding and Bucks Fizz were sweeping all ahead of them at Eurovision. However, while we may not have any xG data to hand for the 1980-81 First Division, it is hard to believe it would have painted quite as troubling a title assessment of Ron Saunders’ as it does Unai Emery’s.

The headline number is that Villa, winners of 10 of their last 11 league games, rank 15th on npxG difference. Per game they are making chances worth 1.07 npxG and allowing shots worth 1.28. The immediate instinct is that these season wide numbers might change when you scrub out the first five games when the club were wracked with concern over their PSR position and grumbles over the dressing room. That is an indulgence that not every team should have afforded to it, but do so for Villa and it offers no greater explanation for why they are Europe’s form side of late. Over the last 11 games their underlying numbers are just about average.

Within that sample are some quite excellent performances, none more so than their last gasp win over Arsenal, but this has also been a team that can go 79 minutes against West Ham and take four shots. They won that game because Morgan Rogers walloped the ball from 35 yards and Alphonse Areola was beaten. That is the story of the Villa surge. The foundation of the Gunners’ title candidacy is their miserly defense. For Manchester City it is their ability to manufacture enough shots for the most deadly scorer in the game. Villa’s is a story of spectacular shooting from outside the penalty area. Has that worked for anybody else? No, but maybe it will work for them.

Probably not though. Even the best offenses in the sport can’t continually turn 2.3 xG into 11 goals, no matter the talent on their roster. And there is talent for Villa to call upon. Rogers is a prime example of this. Watch him leather one past Areola or see how his side-footed free kick at Elland Road seems to hang on the perfect trajectory and you could legitimately convince yourself he is a very good range shooter. You might want to see a bigger sample size but maybe we could give the youngster the benefit of the doubt and say there is something special there.

And the very best do tend to get out in front of their xG. Take Lionel Messi: the very best. Over here at CBS Sports we have access to 192 games the great man has played in the Champions League, Ligue 1, MLS and the World Cup, among others. In those games Messi has taken shots from outside the area worth 21.93 xG. He has scored 37 goals. That is a 60% overperformance by probably the greatest to ever do it. Since the start of the previous Premier League season, Rogers is 400% up on his xG outside the box. As is apparent in the table above, he’s not the only one. 

Of course two things can be true. Unai Emery can have a cadre of high quality ball strikers in Rogers, Emiliano Buendia and Matty Cash, to name but a few. That does not mean they have been transformed into 11 splash brothers, a side who can win the biggest prizes with range shooting. It is not as if Villa have unlocked anything different, or as if there have been any more than incremental adjustments by the coaching staff since their wobbly start to the season.

In due course the thunderbolts that have turned one pointers against Leeds, West Ham and Wolves into wins will fly wide of the post. If nothing else changes Villa will drift back to who they are, albeit with the advantage of having accrued a quite ludicrous number of points of late.

3. Do Manchester United have a problem holding leads?

It is a sign of pleasant progress for Ruben Amorim that his troubles at Manchester United have gone from the macro to the relatively micro. No longer must he answer whether his system can work in the Premier League or whether he has the charisma, patience and internal goodwill for football’s biggest rebuild job. Now the question is why when his team get into winning positions they can’t hold on. West Ham and Bournemouth have both stolen points from losing positions at Old Trafford this month, the stream of goals scored by the latter in one of the season’s outstanding games helping Manchester United to the worst goals record of leading teams. 

Fourteen goals have been conceded while United are ahead — Manchester City have the second worst record in that regard with 10 — and their overall goal difference of minus seven is again the Premier League’s worst. Then again at least some of that is explained by the vagaries of finishing fortune. Their xG difference when leading is almost exactly zero, they’ve just conceded more and scored fewer than the value of their chances.

There probably is no reason to panic about United’s approach when leading per se. Their problems in this regard are broader. Amorim’s team do not really control games that effectively whatever the scoreline. Though they see a lot of the ball United are avowedly midtable in terms of pass completion and their average attacking sequence lasts 8.4 seconds, below league average and a long way off the likes of Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea, all of whom keep the ball for an average of over 10 seconds. It is fair to say that United might be worse than most on this metric when in the lead. Most teams tend to keep the ball for less time when they’re winning — eventually it just makes sense to hoof for safety — but while the league averages a nine percent drop off, United’s is double that.

This might point to something within the squad’s psychological makeup that makes them less adept at sitting on leads but the reality might be more tangible. United concede when leading because they don’t control games and they don’t control games because in central areas possession is too volatile. No Premier League team has won the ball in the middle third than United’s 344 and only four have conceded it more than 300 times. When you have high-stakes gambler Bruno Fernandes and ageing ball-winner Casemiro as your double pivot, this will happen. Fernandes in particular is second in the league for possession won in the middle third and fourth for possession lost.

United might be an improved force, one tracking in the right direction over recent months under Amorim, but their defining force remains Fernandes (and rightly so). That means they will remain a team that can conjure something from nothing but who will also struggle to slow the pace and shut the game down.