Last season’s Premier League stumbled on a surprisingly effective solution to the problem of top-level football’s congested calendar. For years now, fans, players and coaches have been complaining of exhaustion - too much football, wall-to-wall football. But what if all the important competitive questions could be settled by, say, the end of March? Then everyone could sack off the last few weeks of the season and think about other things for a while.
Since Liverpool had effectively won the title with eight games to go and relegation had been decided even earlier than that, we find ourselves in the unusual position of not having seen a meaningful Premier League match in nearly five months. That long-forgotten feeling is called anticipation. We’re ready to go again.
What better example of the regenerative amnesiac magic of this sport than Manchester United, who finished last season in abject humiliation and yet go into this one feeling incredible about themselves? Maybe there is liberation in feeling the worst has already happened and things can only improve from here. In fact, United have believed the worst was behind them more than once in recent years, but this time it really is hard to see how the new season could approach the humiliations of the last.
It wasn’t just the lowest league position in more than 50 years, or losing the Europa final to Spurs, it was details like the sheer pettiness of some of the cost-cutting measures imposed by Jim Ratcliffe - like replacing the £100 staff Christmas bonus with a £40 M&S voucher - that made the club a laughing stock.
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Ratcliffe insisted at the time that without such measures, by the time United got to Christmas there’d be no money left to pay for bonuses or anything at all. Fast-forward a few months and the same club has just spent €240 million on a new front three. It doesn’t make any sense, but maybe Sir Jim divines at some level that football is ultimately about fantasy.
Desperate to boost a pathetic 2024/25 season tally of 44 league goals, United went for two of the best performers of last season in Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo. Mbeumo is widely regarded as a solid buy, Cunha perhaps more of a gamble, but unlike many recent United attacking signings (Rasmus Højlund, Joshua Zirkzee, Jadon Sancho) both players have already proved they can score goals in the Premier League.

The interesting choice is the new centre-forward, Benjamin Šeško, not least because of how his story intertwines with that of the team United face in the big Sunday game of the opening weekend.
The signing of Šeško was preceded by internal debate. Coach Ruben Amorim was said to favour Aston Villa’s experienced Ollie Watkins while director of football Jason Wilcox wanted the up-and-comer Liam Delap. It was the new sporting director Christopher Vivell who urged them to go for Šeško, a player he had signed before in his previous capacity working for RB Leipzig.
So, will the Slovenian with the giant vertical leap hit the Premier League like a young Fernando Torres - or the next Rasmus Højlund? The answer will have ramifications for the internal politics not only at Old Trafford, but at the Emirates Stadium too. Arsenal kicked the tyres on Šeško for nearly two years before deciding this summer to sign Viktor Gyökeres instead.
Gyökeres is a muscular power-forward who blasted everyone to pieces in Portugal: 97 goals in 102 games for Sporting says it all. But will he be able to bully the more formidable defences of the Premier League?
Maybe the most important question for the internal peace of the club is: can he outperform Šeško, whose admirers at Arsenal get the chance, thanks to United, to see how their preferred choice might have worked out. Will we see a repeat of the situation that played out at Liverpool after the summer of 2022, when Jurgen Klopp insisted on signing Darwin Nuñez despite club analysis suggesting Alexander Isak would be a better option? And how significant is it that Ruben Amorim, who coached Gyökeres at Sporting, was apparently arguing for United to sign Ollie Watkins and not his former player?

That Arsenal went for the peak-age Gyökeres (27) rather than the still-developing Šeško (22) tells you that the mood inside the club reflects the general impression outside: that the time for building is up and the time for winning is now.
This team is already built, full of players who have already played together for years but in many cases are still approaching their peaks, players - like William Saliba, Martin Ødegaard, Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka - who aspire to be considered the best in the world in their positions, but have not yet proved it by winning big trophies.
Fans are already complaining about Arsenal spending £50 million on Noni Madueke, a left-footed right-winger, when they already have two brilliant left-footed right-wingers in Saka and Ethan Nwaneri and another apparent prodigy of a similar type on the way in Max Dowman.
But the long-running number-nine issue has been addressed and Martin Zubimendi, who turned down Real Madrid and Liverpool to join Arsenal, is an outstanding addition in central midfield. Few teams have ever begun a season looking more primed for success. If Mikel Arteta still doesn’t know how to win the league with this team, then Arsenal will think they need to go out and find someone who does.
Arne Slot proved he knew how to do it at his first attempt. This time last year, previews like this were full of foreboding for Slot as he prepared to lead Liverpool into the post-Klopp twilight. In the event, they made winning the league look easy, helped by the collapse of Manchester City and the chronic sputtering of Arsenal.

Liverpool still had plenty of work to do this summer. Back in April, Jamie Carragher wrote in the Telegraph that he believed they needed six signings to stay among the title challengers in 2025-26. His demands included a left-back, centre-back, defensive midfielder, attacking midfielder, left-winger and striker. That was before Trent Alexander-Arnold confirmed he was joining Real Madrid, adding a new right-back to the list.
Carragher could not have expected the unprecedented aggression with which Liverpool have attacked the transfer market. Talk of Liverpool having no money has proved wide of the mark, with the champions embarking on a single-window spree that could approach €500 million.
The full-backs, attacking midfielder and one of the forwards have already been signed. If they get Alexander Isak they’ll have five, leaving a centre-back and defensive midfielder to fill Carragher’s prescription. But these last two would be back-up players: the really hard work of signing quality new first-teamers has already been done.
“If they get Alexander Isak” - a situation that would have seemed fanciful a few months ago, but is now looking more likely than not. The other sensation of the summer has been the struggle of Newcastle United to attract new players and the souring of the fanbase on the Saudi ownership that once seemed to guarantee a coming age of dominance.
It looks as though an unanticipated side-effect of Saudi Arabia’s ongoing takeover of world sport has been to relegate Newcastle, at one point the jewel of the empire, to the status of overlooked outpost.

The Saudi sports portfolio now includes golf, boxing, tennis, snooker, F1, chess, and Esports, with big plans afoot for cricket. They are the major sponsor of FIFA, recently funding Gianni Infantino’s Club World Cup, and continue to pour money into their domestic football championship. Newcastle’s chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan would rather hang out at UFC fights with US president Donald Trump than sit in the directors’ box at St James’ Park with Ant and Dec.
Senior executives have left without being replaced and an increasingly frazzled Eddie Howe has been left fighting to hold the club together with apparently little assistance from above. On Friday afternoon it looked as though Yoane Wissa might be about to join from Brentford, finally ending a demoralising run of rejections from striker targets. Still, Isak would take more replacing than that.
Wissa himself would take some replacing at Brentford, preparing for a new season under the Premier League’s first Dublin-born manager since Joe Kinnear. With Mbeumo already gone to Old Trafford, Keith Andrews might be going into his first game without both of the club’s 20-goal forwards from last season, not to mention the former captain, Christian Nørgaard, who has joined Arsenal.
Brentford, like Brighton, have the reputation of being an intelligently-run club who can peer into the football Matrix and reduce football’s chaos to smooth process. But unlike Brighton, who regularly change coaches and churn players, Brentford have enjoyed a long period of stability that has just come to an end. Thomas Frank was there nearly eight years, Mbeumo and Nørgaard were with them in the Championship, Wissa ever since they got promoted. They finished 10th last season and for Andrews to get anywhere near that would be a phenomenal achievement.

As for Thomas Frank in his new job at Spurs, it’s hard to judge how they will shape up, since Daniel Levy traditionally likes to do his transfer dealing late in the window. By contrast the new world champions, Chelsea FC, trade constantly throughout every window, with a confidence undented by their transfer account being some €900 million in deficit since the summer 2022 takeover.
In May, June and July when most Premier League teams had switched off completely, Chelsea came alive, winning the UEFA Conference League and then the Fifa tournament. It meant they had hardly any time off and managing accumulated fatigue will be an interesting challenge for the coaching staff. “Microdosing” training has been mentioned, which at least sounds more sophisticated than “doing less training”.

The other Club World Cup participants, Manchester City, are usually the default pick for Premier League title winners. How could it be otherwise when Pep Guardiola has won 12 of the 16 league championships he’s competed for in his coaching career?
But their disintegration last season means they start this one as something of an unknown quantity. Guardiola himself has been in recreational mood, donning swim shorts to kick a ball around with his players on Miami Beach and hanging out with Liam and Noel at the Manchester Oasis gig.
Guardiola is the same age now as Alex Ferguson was when Oasis released (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. It’s hard to imagine the 54-year old Ferguson in a United 1968 strip at Oasis’s famous Knebworth gig, or, in maybe a more equivalent comparison, chilling backstage with the Rolling Stones.
Neither could you imagine Ferguson giving an interview as thoughtful and introspective as the one Guardiola recently gave to GQ, where he reflected on the strains of top-level management and spoke almost longingly of the time after he leaves City when he intends to stop, rest, look after his body and, as his grandfather used to say, “watch the world like cows watching the train go by.”
Everything in sport depends on the mind, Guardiola insisted, repeating for emphasis, “everything”. We will soon see whether, 10 seasons in, his restless mind is still on the job.