Everton Bite Back: The Table Doesn't Lie

Thierno Barry scored the only goal. Everton won. Ipswich finished with ten men. The scoreline is simple enough, and simple is often how the most interesting stories begin.

What is happening at Everton is not a fluke. Five Premier League matches into the 2026-27 season and Sean Dyche's side — or whoever it is running that dressing room now with the conviction of a team that has something to prove — sit fifth in the table, unbeaten, with a win over a side reduced to ten men and the quiet confidence of people who stopped caring what you thought of them. That last part matters. Everton spent the better part of three years being everyone's cautionary tale: financial catastrophe, points deductions, relegation scares, a stadium saga that became a national punchline. That they are now putting results together with this kind of solidity is not a sporting miracle — it is what happens when a group of professionals decide that narrative is not their problem.

Barry's goal was the difference against Ipswich, and you can already feel the question forming in the back of every pundit's mind: is this real, or is it the soft start of a fixture list that hasn't quite bared its teeth? The honest answer is that it doesn't matter yet. What matters is that Everton are doing the one thing that the league table genuinely rewards — they are not losing.

Elsewhere, Liverpool travel to Bournemouth with a squad that reads more like a hospital register, Andoni Iraola counting eight absences before the match has even kicked off. The Reds need the three points, but Bournemouth under Iraola are not a side that administers mercy to the injured and distracted. The Spaniard has built something genuinely awkward to play against on the south coast — relentless, high-energy, allergic to the kind of passive defending that well-staffed Liverpool sides can usually punish with a single clinical move.

And then there is the transfer window's long echo. Even though the summer window has closed, the conversations haven't. Barcelona's Joan Laporta — a man who treats press conferences the way some people treat social media, as a place to settle scores — has taken another swing at the Julián Álvarez situation, sniping at Arsenal's failed pursuit while the player himself sits perfectly content at Atlético Madrid. Meanwhile, Mykhailo Mudryk, who cost Chelsea £88 million and has delivered roughly £8 million worth of football, reportedly preferred a move to Arsenal before that deal happened. That one sentence tells you everything you need to know about how Chelsea's summers sometimes unfold: they get the player who wanted to be somewhere else.

Over ten billion euros spent this summer. The table after five games still shows Everton fifth. Football's great equaliser: the scoreboard has no memory of the transfer fee.