Arsenal p*ss it, managergeddon, Spurs nonsense, Palace 12th – 10 kneejerk predictions for next season | OneFootball

That’s the 2025/26 Premier League season in the books, then.

It was an odd one in many ways. Very hard to predict how it would all pan out – or at least that’s what we’re telling ourselves to make us feel slightly better about how bad a job we did of predicting how it would all pan out.

Now you might think we’d learn from that humbling experience. But we haven’t in previous years and won’t now.

So here are 10 instant, kneejerk predictions for exactly the things that will definitely happen next season.

Arsenal absolutely p*ss the league

History tells us that retaining Premier League titles is extremely difficult. Before Pep Guardiola made it look p*ss-takingly easy, the last man to manage it was Sir Alex Ferguson in 2008 and 2009. The only other manager to do it in the Premier League is Jose Mourinho in 2005 and 2006.

But Mikel Arteta should join those names and do something that not even Arsene Wenger could manage: retaining the Premier League title with Arsenal.

We’re not suggesting this is a particularly outlandish claim at this time, because it does amount to ‘best team in country to be best team in country’.

But the sheer rarity of it makes it notable nonetheless. Arsenal won the title by a fittingly wide margin in the end, seven points separating them from a City team that even after the seemingly seismic victory at the Etihad never seemed truly convinced they were going to actually do it. Although we are entirely comfortable with pinning the entire blame for City’s late collapse over the closing weeks of the season on the bottle guy.

Point is, City couldn’t in the end really compete under Pep Guardiola, the greatest manager of the age. Now they must do so under a manager who has twice successfully self-fulfilling-prophesied Chelsea out of mid-season title contention.

And they’re still the likeliest/only challengers to Arsenal supremacy once you start flicking through the other challengers. Which brings us to…

At least two of Alonso, Maresca, Carrick and De Zerbi gone by February

As well as either a) Arne Slot or b) Arne Slot’s replacement if indeed Liverpool do now decide to grow up, stop trying to look performatively classy and all Not Chelsea about things, and just do the obviously necessary this summer.

Rationale for our primary four all straightforward enough.

Xabi Alonso is a good man with a handsome beard, but his entire managerial reputation is built upon that goodness and handsomeness and one admittedly spectacular season in Germany. The Real Madrid gig swallowed him entirely whole, and he now embarks on a job at the oddest football club in the world. Could that go completely askew in a matter of months? Always.

Enzo Maresca is a good coach, but he absolutely reeks of Moyes as he sets about the genuinely impossible task of replacing Guardiola. We can’t fully explain our reasoning for this bit, but we also think being a literal Pep lookalike makes it even harder in very real if intangible ways.

Michael Carrick has spent the interim portion of his Man United career on one-game-a-week beginner mode, a time full of easy wins both literal and figurative after replacing Ruben Amorim, who had by the end entirely lost the run of himself and decided Kobbie Mainoo was the root of all evil.

Carrick had the absurd luxury of being Manchester United manager at a time when nobody was reminding him that this was Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About.

Now he faces being Manchester United manager with a proper Manchester United fixture list and proper Manchester United expectations and very little experience of any of that – as a manager, at least – to call upon. Throw in the more gobsh*te elements of the Class of 92 willing him to fail for some reason, and it’s easy to see how it goes tits skyward.

Roberto De Zerbi really does need no further explanation. But you can have it anyway. He’s a brilliant, volatile and emotional manager, a sufferer of no fools who will swiftly combust if his demands are not met.

He’s already talking about wanting his new-look Spurs squad to be ready and in place for the start of pre-season, a thing Spurs have literally never, ever done. Given that, and thinking about what else a desperate set of chancers must have promised him when begging him to please come and keep them up, it’s entirely straightforward to see that relationship exploding into a million tiny pieces. Quite possibly before the season even begins.

The Media try to get Frank Lampard one of those jobs

Even though Coventry are 19th and below both other promoted teams in the table. None of that is Super Frank’s fault of course.

And Thomas Frank

They’ll be, if anything, for me, Clive, even more desperate to get their second favourite Frank back in the show.

Quite how staggeringly bad and unsuited and confused he was by the Spurs job has already been entirely memory-holed by a press pack still carrying an awful lot of water for a manager who serves as the most potent of all reminders that you really can get them on your side forever by just being polite to them and making them feel special and important.

You’re already seeing revisionism, notably from one particular journalist who is, we assume, also president of the Thomas Frank Fan Club and who continues to peddle his favourite line that his miseryball stylings were somehow the fault of ungrateful fans. Fans who De Zerbi has been quick to hail for their unstinting support of a team that, frankly, hasn’t much deserved it this season. Funny, that.

No, Frank’s doom-spiral and the astonishing amount of time it was allowed to go on for before he was put out of our misery has been struck from the record. Spurs were in a relegation fight entirely and solely because of the undeniably perplexing and disastrous appointment of Igor Tudor. That is now the official, approved version of events.

And if you think that surely no other club is going to go for Frank after his Tottenham disaster, you must remember two things.

One: Lads, it’s Tottenham. There remains an understandable but still we think quite misguided idea that failing at Spurs isn’t really failure, because Spurs are Spurs. It’s dangerous thinking that can lead you to, say, appoint Ange Postecoglou and have to sack him seven weeks later because you’re suddenly in a relegation battle and have forgotten entirely how to win.

But second and more importantly, you have to consider that the heavy spadework of Frank’s reputational reset will already have taken place during his Spoke Well, I Thought appearances as a BBC pundit during the interminable World Cup we’ve all got to get through before the joyous return of Barclays.

You won’t be able to move for ‘Class act, hope he gets another Premier League chance soon’ blue-tick social-media musings from Very Thoughtful Journalists after his half-time analysis of New Zealand’s low block against Iran. Henry Winter’s version of it will somehow amount to 800 words yet contain not one viable piece of additional information.

Spurs to do… something f*cking mental

We genuinely can’t decide now. Are they going to be third in what does appear to be an entirely open season playing full-fat De Zerbiball instead of the needs-must survival version that still turned Spurs into a far more compelling football team than either Frank or Tudor managed, despite being forced to feature truly uncomfortable levels of Randal Kolo Muani?

Or will an idiot club think they’ve got away with it, learn nothing whatsoever for a second year in a row, and end up actually getting themselves relegated this time having lost De Zerbi to one of his trademark hot-headed flounces after being told he doesn’t need another forward in January because Mohammed Kudus is only three weeks away from his injury comeback now and will be Like A New Signing?

We don’t know, although we do have an inkling as to which one we think is more likely. But what we do know is it will definitely be one or the other.

Someone completely rogue in the top five

It nearly happened this year thanks to Bournemouth ending the season on a casual 18-match unbeaten run.

And there are just too many question marks now hanging over too many clubs and managers who might expect to be in the mix. Arsenal and Villa are now the only halfway hefty clubs in the league at the high-performing business end of a process they have trusted. Everyone else is either once again embarking on a new journey, or continuing against their better judgement with one they and everyone else has lost faith in.

You’ve got an added curveball for next season with unusual teams in Europe and thus some European regulars not involved. Never underestimate how significantly that can reshape a season.

Someone from the bottom half of this season’s table – and not even the cheat options like Newcastle or Spurs – will be top five next season.

Hull the new Sunderland

Sunderland have repeatedly and thoroughly mudded xG on their way to seventh in the Premier League, while Hull were an even more extreme example of this very modern football phenomenon on their way to a sixth-place Championship finish and now promotion via the most absurd play-offs ever staged.

We don’t pretend to understand how Hull have done it, but we know deep in our bones that a team capable of just brazenly defying underlying stats carry far more transferable skills to the top flight than more obviously ‘good’ ones.

A 50-point season incoming for the tricky Tigers, albeit maybe not quite as extreme as ending up in the actual Europa League like the maverick Mackems.

Difficult Second Seasons

Sunderland and Leeds beware. There has been great and understandable and righteous giddiness about how well that pair have done this season, especially on the back of two years where all the promoted teams went straight back down again without putting up any kind of meaningful fight.

To have two of the three promoted teams do so much more than that has been a welcome breath of fresh Barclays air.

But if you go all the way back about four years to a time when teams getting promoted and then being quite competent was normal, you do see some cause for concern.

Leeds themselves know all about this. After promotion in 2020, they freewheeled to ninth in the 2020/21 Premier League season playing some absolutely lovely Bielsaball. The following year they finished 17th, only securing survival on the final day, before going down with a whimper 12 months later.

That was also around the time of even more dramatic nonsense from Sheffield United, promoted in 2019, ninth in the Premier League a year later with 54 points to their name, dead last the following year with a mere 23.

And we have to say, it’s still seventh-placed Sunderland we worry more about here than 14th-placed Leeds.

They do still seem to have the flimsier foundations and definitely less solid data underpinning their remarkable season.

And while we really don’t want to go full Buzz Killington and call Europa League fixtures a burden because it’s a wonderful thing for Sunderland to be in that competition… Sunday-Thursday-Sunday is a burden that has dragged down bigger beasts far more used to its brutal rhythms.

Crystal Palace to finish 12th with 45 points

It’s all change at Crystal Palace this summer, possibly on the back of a second straight trophy-winning season after never bothering with any of that gaudy malarkey for very nearly 120 years.

The end of the Oliver Glasner Era leaves huge uncertainty at the club. Nah, only joking. Of course it doesn’t. It might nip the whole ‘winning trophies’ caper in the bud but that’s about it.

Crystal Palace will still finish 12th or thereabouts because Crystal Palace must always finish 12th or thereabouts. Even this glorious, silverware-snaffling version of Crystal Palace still never, ever forget the real Crystal Palace fundamentals and you have to respect that.

This is a club now on a 13-year streak of finishing between 10th and 15th in the Premier League. Nobody else has ever managed to do that for more than five seasons in a row before accidentally becoming either good or bad and spoiling it all.

Ed Sheeran to gatecrash a Portman Road post-match interview

To the widespread delight of a star-f*cking panel who will instantly and entirely ignore the Premier League manager they were talking to moments before.

Funny to look back now and realise that Ruben Amorim was doomed from that very moment in his first week as Man United manager, but doomed he unmistakably was.