Arsenal regain title, Spurs less sh*t, and other Premier League assumptions that might be wrong | OneFootball

That’s the summer fun over, then. The World Cup with all its great many games at weird times of the day and night is behind us, ahead of us now only another Premier League season.

So, what’s going to happen in that, then?

We’re going to be generalising a lot here, but a broad consensus seems to exist around the following things, any or all of which we reckon could end up looking as daft as ‘Sunderland will definitely struggle’ last season. There’s a reason we have to go through the actual rigmarole of all the matches and that, rather than just deciding things in pre-season and saving nine months of strife.

This is, as ever, rigorously scientific and based off the following vital, ever-reliable and entirely malleable factors: general vibes, stuff we’ve read, bits and bobs we’ve seen on the socials, and also an attempt to turn the hours we’ve wasted idly clicking around next season’s prices on oddschecker into something vaguely constructive.

Arsenal’s title to lose

This makes perfect sense in a great many ways. They were, in the end, pretty comfortably the best team in the land last season, with Man City tripping over their own arse each and every time the opportunity arrived to see if the Gunners might be ready and willing to engage in some classic bottle-based japes.

They are also, absurdly, now the only known quantity at the top end of the league. The other five members of the Big Six have all appointed new managers this year. Three of them have done so just this summer, while another made a caretaker permanent.

Aston Villa still have Unai Emery, which is good, but are being picked off by the bigger boys. Newcastle still have Eddie Howe, which is bad, and are being picked off by the bigger boys.

So yeah, it does all point to Arsenal. They are the safest and most obvious pick for the title this year and a fairly solid favourite.

And yet, retaining the Premier League title is a famously difficult thing to do. The only Premier League managers to have done so are Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho before his tragic descent into meme.

Arsene Wenger never managed it even at the height of the pre-Jose United-Arsenal duopoly.

There’s a decent case to be made that conditions are no longer so tough for those attempting this task in a post-Pep, post-Klopp Premier League.

But watching assorted Arsenal players wearily reach the end of the World Cup at the end of a long and brutal season in the Premier League and Champions League was to wonder how much might be in the tank when the season starts.

William Saliba is broken, Declan Rice is absolutely spent and after the last couple of weeks, who knows where we’re at with Bukayo Saka?

It’s also been a challenging summer thus far for the Gunners in the transfer market.

They’ll probably be 17th to be honest.

Spurs will, at the very least, not be quite so sh*t

Talking of North London clubs who actually do manage to finish 17th. Should be pretty safe this one, but it should have been pretty safe last season and spectacularly, almost catastrophically, it was not. They were, somehow, even without the excuse of trying to win a trophy for once, even worse.

There was a giddy spell there where they really did look doomed to an unthinkable relegation, entirely unable to help themselves.

They were better after Roberto De Zerbi’s arrival, but from a staggeringly low base and we’ll never know how things might have looked had the fixture list not thrown them Aston Villa on the perfect weekend to be thrown Aston Villa.

This summer has been mental, though. Last season’s near miss seems to have sent the entire club off the deep end. It’s already been an unprecedented transfer splurge and it’s not done yet.

They’ve already rewarded De Zerbi for his rescue act by getting him a whole new defence and a whole new midfield. There’s likely to be at least two new attackers through the door to go with it.

It makes them entirely impossible to predict. The sheer range of outcomes for Spurs this season that would have to be filed under Perfectly Plausible is vast. You can argue among yourselves as to whether it’s more likely they’re top of the league in January or De Zerbi has already by then flounced off in one of his huffs after being denied a fourth £80m+ signing, but the key is this: you can totally see either of those things coming true.

And one thing we do already know for sure is that rival fans are worried. Mateus Fernandes and Sandro Tonali have gone from being the most sought-after midfielders in the league to obviously flawed and really quite rubbish since ending up at Tottenham, with similar if lower-key narratives emerging around Marcos Senesi and Jan Paul van Hecke.

It does make some kind of sense, because if they’ve ended up at Spurs then there must on some level be something wrong with them. But it’s still funny to see rival fans who were jonesing for their signature now entering full ‘never fancied her anyway’ territory, culminating in Manchester United fans clipping up videos of three misplaced Tonali passes. Out of the 70 passes he attempted. In a pre-season game. Against MK Dons. Behind closed doors at the training ground.

That’s where we’re at. That’s what Man United fans are doing. Trawling footage of Tottenham training-ground friendlies to prove themselves right.

How far they done fell; even if they are right, they just proved themselves wrong. Caring about Spurs at all is a cry for help, lads. Lads, it’s Tottenham.

Man United will be better than Liverpool

Again, based on the second half of last season, this is perfectly fair. Manchester United were much better than Liverpool.

But there are significant factors. Arne Slot was, by this point, completely stinking out the gaff with his odd tactics and visible frustration at discovering just how much the loss of Trent Alexander-Arnold had ripped the guts out of the excellent team he’d inherited in his first season and conspicuously failed to improve with several hundred million pounds the following summer.

United, meanwhile, were sauntering through spring playing easy mode, with one game a week and immaculate vibes maintained just by having a manager who was well liked rather a pathetically stubborn Portuguese slowly shrinking and transforming into a corn cob.

Michael Carrick’s interim role as Man United manager has duly and inevitably been made permanent, but despite leading the club to clearly better places he also lacks the transfer pull that even Ruben Amorim in chastened circumstances was able to call upon last summer.

We’re really not sure how many more top midfield targets Manchester United can get through before it stops sounding believable to insist they were actually who they wanted all along.

As for Liverpool, they are yet another massively unknown quantity this season. It’s been obvious for some time now that one of the Premier League’s larger beasts was going to be the experimental guinea pig for how Andoni Iraola’s bizarrely streaky results hold up under the glare of a big-club spotlight, and we now know that club will be Liverpool.

Iraola is, famously, on an 18-game unbeaten run as a Premier League manager that follows directly on the back of an 11-game winless run. Any repeat of that kind of nonsense will be far less easily tolerated at Liverpool than Bournemouth, obviously, where the identity of the run that attracts wider attention will be flipped.

Even that loooooonnngggg unbeaten run included a two-month run of draws; watch how quickly that becomes ‘haven’t won in five games’ rather than ‘unbeaten in nine’ when it’s Liverpool not Bournemouth.

But all that said, we do think they’ll be quite good. We do think that, while history clearly tells you promoting good managers from the Premier League’s middle-class to its elite rarely goes as hoped, Iraola looks the current manager most capable of defying that convention, and that most of last season’s big-money flops will be significantly better for the run.

Just as importantly – perhaps more importantly – we just don’t think United are going to look anything like as sharp now they once again find themselves with two games a week instead of all the lovely rest they got in the second half of last season.

Promoted trio = relegated trio

This feels like a significant one for the overall direction of the Premier League. There is a pretty widespread acceptance that last season was not vintage Barclays. A lot of it was just people not really liking Arteta’s Arsenal all that much, but it was a season that became far too much about set-piece wrestling and far too little about football.

What was undeniably great about last season, though, was that two of the promoted teams were very capable indeed. That created both a necessary Proper Relegation Battle after two consecutive up and down processions, and with both Sunderland and Leeds surviving comfortably in the end, some equally necessary alteration of the division’s teams.

Gone is the Settled Seventeen, with West Ham and Wolves (and so, so nearly Spurs) cast out.

Now we have to find out which was the blip. Was it the two seasons where everyone who came up went back down again, or was it the one where two of the three survived with plenty to spare?

The identity of the promoted teams does lend itself to last season being the blip. The three promoted teams are all individually odds-on to go down, and it’s no bigger than 2/1 for all three to do so. For comparison, it’s 28/1 that all three survive.

Hull do have the look of your classic ‘promoted too soon by accident’ and had underlying numbers that made them Championship relegation candidates, never mind Premier League. But then look at Sunderland last season…

Ipswich appear to have entirely stolen East Anglian rivals’ Norwich’s yo-yo bit from a few years ago where they would absolutely p*ss up in the Championship but then not even really try to survive in the Premier League, before the cycle all began again until eventually and inevitably gravity had its way. The main difference appears to be Norwich managing to do it with a lot less Ed Sheeran, which is to be encouraged.

And then there’s Coventry, back in the Premier League after a ludicrously long time in the wilderness and if nothing else guaranteed to have widespread media backing for as long as they keep faith with Frank Lampard. The flipside, of course, is that when and if they do get rid, they will be Bambi-killing villains whose relegation punishment will be eagerly willed on from that day forth.

They do all very much have the look of teams who could go down. But there are also plenty of candidates for Doing A Wolves among last season’s lower mid-table shod – especially with all that managergeddon from last season and this summer creating so much uncertainty.

Your Fulhams, Your Crystal Palaces and even the Bournemouths of this world can no longer be considered safe purely because of the familiar and impressive figure sat in the dugout.

It shouldn’t at the very least be a straightforward ‘straight back down’ procession.

And if not the promoted three, then Sunderland

The idea of second-season syndrome is a powerful one. Almost certainly more powerful than it should be.

Sunderland have not had a traumatic summer. They have not lost their manager, which immediately gives them one over a lot of their rivals as outlined above.

They didn’t even do that thing of having a conspicuously weak finish to a surprisingly good season. The opposite, if anything, finishing the campaign with four wins and two draws in their final eight games to end up seventh and qualify for Europe.

It’s undeniably true that those Thursday nights could become a burden if Sunderland make a slow start. But you do also have to listen to what you’re saying when suggesting that a big reason why a team might get relegated is the fact they qualified for Europe via their league finish the previous season.

Yet the pre-season relegation betting market is very, very clear: the favourites for the drop are Hull, daylight, Ipswich, Coventry, daylight, Sunderland, daylight, more daylight, several more days, Leeds.