Manchester United are dominating the headlines but they are just one of six clubs at the bottom of the Premier League table looking nervously over their shoulders.

While the Championship is actually quite a fun league as a fan, it may as well be the financial abyss if you are a Premier League club’s accountant, and so they will do everything in their power to avoid it.

Sacking managers, big spending in January and plenty of other tools will be used but of those bottom six, who look the most likely at this stage for the drop?

6) Tottenham Hotspur
As much as the producers of talkSPORT will be disappointed, Spurs seem to have turned a corner.

Successive Premier League wins moved the club up to 14th and they have some favourable fixtures on the horizon. And compared with Manchester United, they have a manager that has proved successful in the Premier League before.

Roberto De Zerbi may not be an elite manager but he is good enough to get to 38 points with a squad that cost several hundreds of millions to assemble.

James Maddison will be a big loss and you do wonder where that creativity will come from but on paper, Spurs have a far superior team than other relegation candidates.

5) Manchester United
Yes, Manchester United are an absolute mess and yes Michael Carrick will likely get the sack, but it still feels very unlikely that the club will be in any real danger of going down.

You can point to the 15th-place finish in the 2024/25 season but that was heavily influenced by United’s Europa League run and let’s all be honest with ourselves, United are not making it far in the Champions League in their current guise.

They also have better players than pretty much half the Premier League, even though you could be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Sack Carrick, get a competent manager in and they will recover. It may not be up to the heights where they think they belong but it will be comfortably clear of the drop.

4) Nottingham Forest
Back-to-back defeats to Leeds to start the season had some questioning why Oliver Glasner had even taken the Forest job, but there has been a lot of improvement since then.

Unfortunately, Forest love nothing more than missing sitters.

They are fourth in the league for big chances but third for missing them having scuffed 20 of the 25 they have created.

And while that is enough to make Glasner look increasingly more frustrated on the touchline, you would rather be in that situation than be manager of a team that barely creates any chances at all.

For that reason, coupled with Glasner’s experience in the league, it feels like Forest will comfortably avoid the relegation battle come the end of the season.

They are very strong at the back with only Arsenal conceding less xG so far this season and have already drawn against Liverpool and Tottenham while beating Aston Villa away.

If the likes of Liam Delap and co. can just find their scoring boots, they should be fine.

3) Crystal Palace
Sean Dyche has already been linked to the job, which is when you know a club has one eye nervously on the drop.

Pierre Sage inherited a lot of problems at Palace, the kind of problems that meant Glasner was happy to do a sideways step at best to Forest.

Firstly, their back line was gutted. Maxence Lacroix went to Chelsea and Palace opted to sign Takehiro Tomiyasu and Axel Disasi as centre-back replacements. Daniel Munoz left to follow his old manager with Palace gambling that 21-year-old Anan Khalaili, signed from the Belgian league, would be an adequate replacement.

The result has been Palace shipping goals. The Eagles have conceded 19 with Sage doggedly sticking to a back-three system that he simply does not have the personnel for.

Meanwhile, Jean-Philippe Mateta tried to tear up his contract but last weekend formed part of a front three that has scored one goal between them.

Sacking Sage will likely be the route Palace go down but aside from the likes of Adam Wharton and Ismaila Sarr, the squad really isn’t very good.

They need to strengthen in January but if they are cut adrift by that point, the damage may already be terminal.

2) Sunderland
Sunderland wouldn’t be the first club to suffer from the Thursday-Sunday rigours of a Europa League campaign but the increased fixtures have come at a time when plenty of other areas are causing issues too.

The club was credited with possibly the greatest transfer window ever for a promoted side but the difficult second summer window proved far less effective.

After a seventh-place finish, Sunderland have not been a more attractive prospect for a long time and yet they could only land a trio of under-21-year-olds and 34-year-old Thomas Meunier. Kevin Danso, who was the reject of a Spurs defence that conceded more goals than Sunderland last year, was brought in on loan.

And it has been hard for Regis Le Bris to foster the same kind of attitude that they had last season. A loss to Ipswich on the opening day was the first sign that it would not be business as usual and Nordi Mukiele accused his own teammates of being “arrogant”.

Sunderland have done fine in Europe but their league form has suffered. Four losses in a row were finally ended by a 0-0 draw to Leeds but too many of Sunderland’s best players from last year have not reached similar heights.

The reason why it is so worrying is that there is now a fair question of whether this is their actual level and last season was an outlier rather than the other way around.

Meanwhile, there are also doubts over Le Bris, who previously faced reports of the sack before he earned European football, and midweek fixtures means he gets limited time on the training ground.

1) Coventry City
Coventry bought a lot of players in the summer but none of them matched the Premier League experience that Ipswich managed to secure and Frank Lampard would not be the first Championship-winning manager to struggle to adapt his style for the Premier League.

In the second division, Coventry were the sixth-highest scorers of all time with 97 goals and the fact they came spread across the team was an encouraging sign that they may be able to continue scoring in the Premier League, even at a reduced rate; but getting goals has been Coventry’s biggest problem.

They are now the joint-lowest scorers in the league and that has not been helped by their inability to keep hold of the ball. Coventry have had an average of 37% possession across their games this year, a tally only greater than Hull.

Lampard has already spoken of the Premier League ‘standard’ his team have to reach but plenty of promoted sides get further and further away from safety in their pursuit of that.

Sunderland at home next feels like an early six-pointer. Lose that and it is hard to see where Coventry get the points needed to survive.