What do we need to make the top four?

With the midwinter Qatar World Cup throwing up an unprecedented black hole in the domestic-football diary, the schedule after Christmas has been utterly frantic, especially for the teams still involved in cup competitions, like Manchester United.

The result is that, with just six weeks of the campaign to play out, we still have no idea who will win the title, or the identity of the three top-flight sides that will be demoted to play Championship football in 2023/24.

Perhaps the wildest fight, though, will centre around European football, with the likes of Newcastle United, Aston Villa and Brighton & Hove Albion still harbouring top-four hopes.

The Reds are currently well-placed to secure a position back in the Champions League for next term, but Tottenham are hot on our tails while Liverpool won’t quite have given up the ghost yet, despite a below-par season by their recent lofty standards.

Here, ahead of United’s trip to relegation-threatened Nottingham Forest, we take a look at the overall top-four picture – how many games does each competing side have left and what’s the maximum amount of points they can secure?

We’ve also enlisted the help of two former Reds in Wes Brown and Dion Dublin, plus club journalists Sam Carney and Joe Nelson, as they predict the outcome of our remaining games and which they think will be most important…