Guardiola leaves, Newcastle appoint Maresca, Arsenal win Double and other football predictions for 2025 | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca rocking up at Newcastle, with Frank Lampard replacing him at Chelsea, has been forecasted for a 2026 which will end with Arsenal as champions.

Our predictions for football in 2025 were roundly awful so don’t panic too much about these.

10) Mo Salah leaves Liverpool

A temporary ceasefire was called in time for Liverpool to put together a season-stabilising seven-game unbeaten run, with Salah able to properly concentrate on helping finally deliver AFCON glory for Egypt.

The 33-year-old has managed to steer clear of those enticing mixed zones in Morocco, even after taking his nation to the last 16 by scoring two of their three goals so far.

That hour-long return against Brighton was pitched in some quarters as a sort of farewell and uncertainty does linger over precisely what the future holds for Salah, but a winter exit no longer seems an inevitability.

The point does, however, remain that a separation likely suits both parties after almost a decade together. Salah cannot really accept a lesser role on the biggest wage at a club which has not outgrown one of their greatest ever scorers and players, but is attempting to move away from his attacking autonomy.

9) Leeds are relegated

It seems a bold call to make about one of the Premier League’s form sides, a manager and squad which navigated unbeaten a hazardous December path through five opponents currently placed 11th or above.

Dominic Calvert-Lewin also literally cannot stop scoring; at this point it is ruining the lives of his family and friends.

But is this formation, approach and attitude change really sustainable enough to carry Leeds and Daniel Farke through the next few months? And is a six-point gap so substantial as to sufficiently safeguard them from the drop?

This might be the new normal for Leeds and Calvert-Lewin – and there is a point to be made about whether West Ham and Nottingham Forest can generate enough vague competence to punish any slips either way – but the history of this club and coach does suggest a reversion to the mean is impending.

8) Someone reappoints a former manager in a massive and hilarious panic

Feel like pure shit, just want the inherent managerial precariousness of the 2022/23 season back.

It was perhaps the greatest time to be alive, when a ludicrous number of clubs panicked to the absurd extent that it ended with Sam Allardyce, Dean Smith, Ruben Selles and Ryan Mason in gainful employment.

The best part was in how some of those fearful teams reacted by not necessarily drunkenly calling their ex, but instead skipping back a few relationships to land on someone they were with a couple of decades ago and who has moved on and settled down with someone else since.

Leicester literally considered reappointing Martin O’Neill and only the daftest of footballing institutions would consider such a thing in the 2020s.

There is a sense building that we could see something similar soon. Our favourite picks? Roy Hodgson rocking back up at Crystal Palace in a post-Glasner haze; West Ham bringing Slaven Bilic back to replace Nuno Espirito Santo, who embraces another Championship promotion push at Wolves; Mauricio Pochettino falling into the Spurs job after the World Cup; and Nottingham Forest realising they have sacked everyone before deciding to go around again, starting with Steve Cooper.

Oh, and obviously Jurgen Klopp: Liverpool caretaker manager.

7) Chelsea bring back Frank Lampard

One of the likelier examples of a mistakenly rekindled relationship might well emanate from West London. It’s not like Chelsea and Frank Lampard haven’t accidentally fallen back into bed with each other before.

That 11-game, single-win interim spell from April to May 2023, in which a bar systematically lowered by Graham Potter was dragged towards the core of the actual Earth by a shell-shocked Lampard purely because Todd Boehly wanted to make Mediawatch look stupid, should never be forgotten.

Both club and manager have changed since. Although Chelsea haven’t really, considering Enzo Maresca is on the brink of leaving in the middle of a season the Blues started by being crowned world champions, purely because he made a comment he simply does not want to properly clarify and would instead prefer to continue digging a hole directly out of Stamford Bridge.

Lampard certainly seems to have grown from his most recent experiences at Chelsea. He has guided Frank Lampard’s Coventry City to the top of the Championship with promotion in their hands. But it was ultimately only ever a rebound and one agitated call from Boehly in October will be enough to end that beautiful union.

6) Enzo Maresca takes over at Newcastle

It will be interesting to see what Chelsea’s succession plan consists of, considering Maresca has more than three years left on his contract and has, for all intents and purposes, felt forced out despite being precisely the sort of malleable coach the Blues seemed to want post-Pochettino.

Perhaps Champions League qualification and a couple of trophies strengthened Maresca’s character and resolve to the extent he started developing ideas above his station. And maybe a hierarchy whose football acumen remains under intense scrutiny is going to be appointing a fifth manager in three and a half years of ownership soon.

Maresca has his faults but can walk with his head held high into most jobs as a result of his work. Eddie Howe is approaching what feels like the end of his Newcastle road, and would provide compelling testimony to how much more control the Italian might expect to exert on Tyneside than at Stamford Bridge.

5) Erling Haaland breaks his own record

The long-running joke is that ‘only Salah’ was once a ubiquitous preface to most football stats. It appears to have been usurped by ‘only Haaland’, but also specifically for stats involving, well, only Haaland.

For example, only Haaland (in 2022/23) has ever scored more goals before the turn of the year in a Premier League season than his tally so far in 2025/26. He is competing with himself at this stage.

And halfway through the campaign, he is more than halfway to matching his record of 36 for most goals in a Premier League season. With his longest drought in 2025/26 to this point lasting two matches, only Haaland seems to be in the mood.

4) Pep Guardiola leaves Manchester City

But performative passive-aggressive praise is draining and four years of nitpicking Haaland’s latest hat-trick has taken an inevitable toll on Guardiola.

The outlook is far brighter than this time last year, when the entire project seemed to be unravelling at a rate even 115 upheld charges would struggle to match. That run of one win in 13 games was brutal.

Guardiola withstood that, even signing a contract extension towards the start of it, to oversee a new Manchester City chapter which doesn’t half resemble the last in terms of putting together ridiculous winning runs which no-one notices until it’s too late.

That really must be exhausting, however, and recent speculation over his future might build to a crescendo of his departure after a decent enough decade.

3) Ruben Amorim lasts another year at Manchester United

Having already declared he “would do 75% of things different” if given another go at his first year in charge of Manchester United, it was entertaining to see Amorim revert to his old ways as soon as the apparent gimme of a home game against Wolves presented itself.

That he and Manchester United made a hash of even drawing with one of the worst teams in Premier League history only added to the dark comedic undertones.

There has been undoubted progress for a club eyeing the Champions League rather than the Championship, but there will come a time when those in charge of the decisions at Manchester United start to wonder whether this was all worth it or indeed the only viable route back.

They are fully invested in Amorim and willing to forgive his faults, seemingly at least in part because he himself speaks so candidly about them while Jason Wilcox and friends maintain a vow of silence.

Amorim, in the meantime, will continue to hone his Solskjaer-esque knack of spacing out his wins and defeats perfectly to keep the boom-bust cycle going.

2) England lose in the World Cup quarter-finals – but Thomas Tuchel stays on

For a more specific prediction, we go to Tuchel himself:

Perfect. A brave, valiant shoot-out defeat to Brazil in the last eight after coasting through the groups and past Mexico it is.

Tuchel has proven to be a very good England manager, negotiating the myriad issues it presents and growing into the role with impressive authority. But he knows as well as anyone how fickle tournament football can be, even if he has already shown that this is a short-term arrangement which ought to be extended.

1) Arsenal win the Premier League and Champions League

Their standing at the top of both tables heading into the new year should not be too heavily emphasised; Liverpool enjoyed such a command this time last season but were then immediately eliminated from the Champions League by eventual winners Paris Saint-Germain.

There was even a mild wobble or two in the Premier League and domestic cups but the Reds were deserved champions long before the end.

Some but obviously not all of that was ultimately down to the lack of a competent challenger, as Arsenal themselves continued to trip over their own feet while everyone else imploded.

Arsenal will be kept honest by Manchester City until the very end in the Premier League, and there is little point forecasting their journey in Europe.

But this is a wildly strong squad and increasingly mature coach, both of whom have sustained enough blows and learned the requisite lessons to start pulling through when it matters.

And predicting Arsenal will win both the Premier and Champions League in 2026 does make it far easier to accuse them of bottling when they don’t accomplish something few teams ever have.