Big Weekend: Arsenal v Chelsea, Aston Villa, Matthias Jaissle, Bruno Fernandes, Our League-coded Serie A | OneFootball

The third weekend of the Premier League season, and the first since a daft end to a daft transfer window, gives us our first proper heavyweight clash of the new campaign as two of the three plausible title contenders meet in a London derby.

But while that’s an obvious headliner, it’s far from the only point of interest in a set of games that could tell us an awful lot about what an awful lot of teams are going to be about this season.

Newcastle have to play someone sensible for the first time, so we’ll find out whether they’re actually good or if it’s just that Liverpool and Spurs are cack, for instance. We’ll get a clearer view of whether Aston Villa are having a crisis or just another rocky start to what turns out to be another fine season.

And Manchester United have to play an actual established Premier League team for the first time just as they get into two-games-a-week territory for the first time since losing the 2025 Europa League final.

It feels like a weekend that is going to cement or obliterate a good number of early-season narratives.

With due respect to the fine starts made by your Hulls and Newcastles, by the Leedses and Brentfords of this world, it looks at this early stage like there are three plausible title contenders this season and on Sunday we’ll see two of them.

Chelsea’s chances of going from mid-table shambles to Premier League title winners under a new manager in a single bound for the second time suffered a serious hit on deadline day, though.

It wasn’t the widely expected departure of Enzo Fernandez, leaving on the actual deadline long after Chelsea had tried to set a fake arbitrary one, but rather the failure to replace him.

It was a reminder that, even in this summer where everyone was Chelsea and Chelsea themselves were actually a little bit less Chelsea than before, that building a coherent and fully functional squad might be more of a factor than it was in the early wild west days of Clearlake, but still isn’t the primary goal.

Even if they have finally relented and agreed to give a manager an actual goalkeeper, despite the fact there is no money to be made from goalkeepers.

Chelsea’s chances of staying in the title race now hinge more than ever on that all-important absence of European action. It does give them a chance of getting through until January despite paper-thin midfield options. If by that point they have established themselves as serious title contenders, it’ll be fascinating to see how the winter window is approached.

Arsenal are definitely contenders. Grumblings about a sub-optimal transfer window have to be put in context: Arsenal simply had far, far less work to do than everyone else.

Part of the reason this summer was so absurd is that absolutely every other big club in the land is in the foothills of their latest regeneration, or revolution, or tearing everything up and quite literally starting again.

Arsenal didn’t need any such surgery. They have signed very good players to address a couple of small gaps, and beyond that were quite rightly only really interested in adding the absolute very best talent they could to an already title-winning squad.

The thing with having a squad that only a handful of players on earth can improve is that signing any of those players in any given summer is quite hard, actually. Arsenal were bold, but none of it quite came off. A shame, but it doesn’t change the fact they have the best and most coherent squad in the land and the clearest idea of how they’re going to do things.

It’s already clear in how these two teams have gone about winning their first two games of the season. In which of those two methods appears most sustainable.

Arsenal, who overpowered poor old Coventry and suffocated Aston Villa, easing to wins and already with another couple of clean sheets to their name.

And then there’s Chelsea, throwing haymakers and collecting wild and chaotic victories over Fulham and Brighton despite conceding as many goals in the process as shame-addicted, doom-addled Spurs.

Styles make fights as they say, and this should be a tremendous early-season litmus test for how the whole show could pan out this year.

Team to watch: Aston Villa

Feels like Hull is just such a trappy little fixture for Aston Villa now, given the teams’ respective starts. Villa, famously, have yet to muster a shot on target in a pair of defeats after another summer of chuntering complaints about the sheer unfairness of absolutely everything.

They made a ropey start to last season as well, and we all know how that turned out. The only thing Unai Emery is better at than winning Europa Leagues is making a mockery of doom-laden early-season prognostications.

Still, though. If Saturday evening passes with Hull still in possession of a 100 per cent record and Aston Villa still in possession of a zero per cent record, then it’s not hard to see how the mood might start to feel at a club that is developing a profound and, we fear, unhelpful sense that the world is against them.

We have little doubt everything will be fine in the end. As long as Emery remains in place, Villa’s floor is incredibly high even if this summer might have lowered the ceiling a touch. But there might be more awkward days to endure before they get to ‘fine in the end’.

Manager to watch: Matthias Jaissle

Fair play to the man, who is doing a brilliant job in near-impossible circumstances. The win over Tottenham will have been particularly sweet for Newcastle, but the most striking thing about it was the way it was Jaissle’s side, thrown together in a few weeks after the loss of vital players for the second summer in a row, that looked the more coherent, that had the clearest identifiable plan and philosophy.

Newcastle have taken on the fundamentals of Jaissle’s football far more swiftly than a Spurs squad full of hand-picked and eye-wateringly expensive Roberto De Zerbi ingredients.

That win on the back of a point against Liverpool that could so easily have been three has given Newcastle a far better start to the season than anyone – up to and including themselves, given the way Jaissle was talking after pre-season games – could have predicted.

The only lingering concern is that they’ve played two clubs who are going through their own largely self-inflicted chaos at the moment. Liverpool and Spurs are both very silly teams at the moment, half-formed and not quite with it as they adapt to new realities.

The fear, therefore, is that what on the face of it looks like two really good Newcastle performances has in actual fact been more a case of two desperate performances from their opponents.

We need to see Newcastle against a sensible team that aren’t their own worst enemies before we can make a proper early-season judgement of their status. Bournemouth will do nicely, then.

Player to watch: Bruno Fernandes

Rare indeed for the player to watch on the first post-deadline weekend not to be a newbie, but it’s hard to look beyond Bruno Fernandes here, and not only because both Manchester United and Everton rather bucked the trend in the closing days and hours of the window by not signing loads of new players.

Certainly in Everton’s case, that was not for the want of trying. It’s weird to look at an Everton team with four points from two games and feel like they’re at a crisis tipping point, but it does feel like they really might be. There is significant unrest among supporters about how that window panned out, and the loss of Iliman Ndiaye is a painful blow that simply cannot be fully salved by the loan return of Jack Grealish.

Meanwhile, and for all the wailing and gnashing about the lack of left-back cover, the striking thing about United is how they seem to be back to the old days already: a ropey, unconvincing side unless and until their talisman does something extraordinary to bail them out.

They’ve already lost to newly promoted Hull and fallen behind to newly promoted Ipswich. Luckily for them, Bruno Fernandes decided the latter would be one of the games he would simply win on his own. Three goals and an assist later, United ran out comfortable 5-2 winners to damp down any wild early talk of trouble.

And now he takes on one of his favourite opponents, having racked up 11 goal involvements (six goals, five assists) in 13 previous games against the Toffees.

Football League game to watch: Preston v Blackburn

The Championship at its most proper football with a Lancashire derby steeped in history but which now features a home team still searching for a first point of the new season after four games and visitors who aren’t faring that much better, with an eye-catching win over promotion hopefuls Middlesbrough more attention-grabbing still for being Rovers’ sole success thus far.

European game to watch: Juventus v Milan

Can’t say fairer than that for an early-season slice of Serie A, can you? Neither team are in the Champions League, both have made flawless starts to the new season, and this is now an astonishingly Barclays-coded fixture featuring all manner of familiar faces from up and down Our League.

Juventus already had Guglielmo Vicario, Lloyd Kelly, Douglas Luiz and Randal Kolo Muani, and could this weekend hand debuts to deadline-day loanees Pape Sarr and Nick Woltemade.

Meanwhile, Ruben Amorim’s Milan could hand a debut to Omari Hutchinson after his loan-with-an-option move from Nottingham Forest, while already having Samuel Chukwueze, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Pervis Estupinan, Fikayo Tomori and the timelord Luka Modric in their ranks.