McTominay for Mainoo among five things we can’t believe happened on the opening day last season

With the 2025/2026 season upon us, the opening day of the 2024/2025 season provides proof if it were needed that a year is a long time in football.

Here are five things we can’t believe happened only a year ago…

Scott McTominay replacing Kobbie Mainoo
Mainoo wasn’t quite ‘untouchable’ as he started at the base of Manchester United’s midfield in their opener against Fulham last season. Amid interest from Chelsea and financial constraints which were resulting in mass redundancies under Sir Jim Ratcliffe, no-one was. But he was The Future to a greater degree than the other two members of the trident of hope: Rasmus Hojlund and Alejandro Garnacho.

He still is in so far as Garnacho is the living, breathing antithesis of what Ruben Amorim wants to create at Old Trafford as the most unwelcome member of the current bomb squad, while Hojlund remains the ghost of the feast. But Mainoo, having been a beacon of light under Erik ten Hag after scoring in the FA Cup final and playing a major role for England at the Euros, now enters a season knowing any football he plays will be out of position under Amorim, who is currently desperate to source a new midfield destroyer who we suspect will limit Mainoo’s game time to such a degree that he will be pushing for the exit come January.

McTominay meanwhile, having been either the midfield bridesmaid at United – as illustrated by his six-minute cameo against Fulham a year ago – or one half of the widely deplored McFred axis, heads into his second season with Napoli as the Scudetto winner and Serie A’s Most Valuable Player, given the freedom of a city in which the love bestowed upon him has rarely, if ever, been trumped since the deification of the arguably the greatest footballer to ever play the game, Diego Maradona.

READ MORE: The ex-Man Utd team of 2024/2025 would crush Ruben Amorim’s sorry Red Devils

Alejandro Garnacho assist for Joshua Zirkzee winner
“What a big moment for Joshua Zirkzee,” said Gary Neville on commentary, after the £36.5m summer signing came off the bench to score the winner two minutes from time at Old Trafford. We all assumed that was the first of many after that introduction to Premier League football.

There was discussion after that game as to whether it was a “smart finish” or something closer to a lucky scuff, and there’s little doubt that the thousands of Manchester United fans who jeered Zirkzee off against Newcastle just over four months later plumped for the latter in hindsight.

He scored just two further goals in the remaining 31 games of his debut Premier League season, combining with Hojlund’s goalscoring woes to force United into spending £74m on a Benjamin Sesko this summer, with Zirkzee’s game time surely set to be further limited by the arrivals of Matheus Cuha and Bryan Mbeumo.

It was Garnacho who came off the bench to provide the assist, having done his typical busy dribbling thing to get Ten Hag’s side back into the game and give the cartel of United pundits plenty of ammo to claim ‘this will be his season’, while the hackneyed insistence that Marcus Rashford ‘isn’t a kid anymore and needs to lead this team’ was also rolled out.

Matheus Cunha on the bench
It says a fair bit about the management of Gary O’Neil that he opted for a three of Hwang Hee-chan, Jean-Ricner Bellegarde and Rodrigo Gomes – a right-back he fielded on the left wing – to operate behind Jorgen Strand-Larsen against Arsenal while Cunha sat on the bench for the first hour.

The Brazilian who would go on to smash their club-record departure by moving to Manchester United for £62.5m at the end of a season in which he would score 15 Premier League goals. Hwang, Bellegarde and Gomes got six between them. It would make more sense if Cunha has been a bit sh*t the season before, but he also finished that campaign as top scorer with 12.

Oleksandr Zinchenko starts
Having been one of Arsenal’s key players in his first season after arriving from Manchester City, Zinchenko should perhaps have seen the writing on the wall by the time his third season rolled around after the second ended with Mikel Arteta preferring to field Takehiro Tomiyasu out of position at left-back over the Ukrainian.

The £42m spent on Calafiori and the return to fitness of Jurrien Timber will only have added to those fears, though those concerns will have been assuaged greatly by him being named in the starting XI to face Wolves on the opening day. But that was just one of five Premier League starts, and three of those were at the back end of the season when Premier League title hopes were lost and focus had shifted to the Champions League, with the stratospheric rise of young upstart Myles Lewis-Skelly doing nothing to improve his standing and mood at the club.

And you get the sense that he doesn’t really know why he’s been sidelined – like he’s been ghosted by a lover whom he talked to about building a life together – as indicated by quite the harrowing excerpt from his recent autobiography.

“In pure personal terms, it was easily the worst season I ever experienced as a professional. A player who doesn’t play is nothing. Imagine this little boy who’s dedicated his entire existence to becoming good at one particular thing and then finds at 28 that he’s essentially no longer needed, that there are others who can do the job for him. It’s not a nice feeling.”

Jarell Quansah as Virgil van Dijk’s partner
Quansah must have wondered while sitting on the bench for all but three of Liverpool’s remaining 37 Premier League games after the curtain-raiser at Ipswich just what Arne Slot had seen from him in that opening 45 minutes before he was hooked for Ibrahima Konate that caused the Liverpool boss to strip him of his badge as Van Dijk’s centre-back partner and hand it to the Frenchman.

Liam Delap had made life difficult for him, but that proved to be a theme for Ipswich’s opponents throughout the season. They hadn’t conceded. It felt almost cruel at the time, but then, Slot will point to the title and the excellent defensive partnership which was crucial to that and shrug his shoulders.

We would suggest that the thought of Quansah playing under Ten Hag in a year’s time as he walked out at Portman Road would have been met with open mouths and giggles, but then there can’t have been more than a dozen people thinking the Dutch manager would still be in charge of Manchester United at the start of this season.