Man Utd, Liverpool, Spurs among those whose final pre-season teams revealed gaping holes
We are so close. We are so, so close to not having to caveat every feature with ‘yes, obviously, pre-season doesn’t mean anything’. But we are not quite there yet.
As the final ‘great workout for the lads’ were completed and all manner of spurious sponsor-named trophies won, there were still plenty of alarming holes revealed in an alarming number of teams.
Here are quite literally five players whose role in the final weekend of pre-season simply cannot be sustained across the entire campaign to come. There is still an awful lot of work to do in an awful lot of places.
Tottenham: Pape Sarr as a No. 10
Not ideal when your final game before a contractually obliged ritual humiliation against PSG ends in a 4-0 defeat to Bayern Munich and where you could fill at least three slots on this feature before even considering any other club.
Dominic Solanke’s injury is apparently minor enough that we can just about look past the fact Richarlison is starting up front for Spurs in big 2025.
Richarlison will be moved on if Spurs get the rest of the window anything other than catastrophically wrong, so expect to see him play 35 Premier League games this season.
We still think the more glaring problem in the starting XI in Munich concerns a player who clearly does have a Spurs future, just not in the position he’s currently being deployed. Pape Sarr is a fine young midfielder with a varied toolbox. We’re keen on him.
But he is not, and we suspect never will be, a creative No. 10. There are worse midfield threes than him, Rodrigo Bentancur and Joao Palhinha for sure, but there aren’t many less progressive ones.
In the absence of anyone notably prolific within the front three, it’s going to be a long and dreary season watching Spurs bash their head against brick wall after brick wall if they don’t come up with some kind of solution to the long-term absence of both James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski.
Savinho would be a start, for sure, even if he would join the ranks of Spurs attackers who prefer starting from wide rather than operating through the middle.
Brilliantly, Spurs are about to sign Alexander Isak, Rodrygo and Eberechi Eze so it’s all fine.
Liverpool: Waturu Endo as substitute centre-back option
Let’s all agree that there is very little wrong with Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konate as a first-choice central-defensive pairing, but both looked way off it in the Community Shield on Sunday.
And if Arne Slot was minded to do something about that it would be a thought instantly cast from his mind by a glance along a substitutes’ bench that revealed Endo as the closest thing available to another centre-back.
Liverpool have spent giant wads of cash making their title-winning team even better, with the current conspicuous exception of centre-back where Jarell Quansah’s sale is the only significant change.
They appear to be relying on at least one of Konate and Joe Gomez being available at all times, which doesn’t have a vast amount of historical data to support it. And even then it relies on the notion that a 34-year-old Van Dijk can simply be asked to play all of the football all of the time to a consistently excellent standard.
It’s been noted elsewhere, but Marc Guehi having such a fine game against Liverpool’s sparkling array of attacking options in a game where Palace frequently exposed Liverpool’s under-stocked defence might not actually prove to be good news for Palace in the longer term.
Newcastle: Anthony Gordon as centre-forward
It has not been a fun summer for Newcastle, with the worst part of a 2-0 defeat to Atletico Madrid in the coveted Sela Cup not even the fact they had little choice but to start with Anthony Gordon up front, but the sight of him hobbling off in the closing stages.
So now, among everything else they’ve got to contend with, they’ve gone from the frying pan of ‘Anthony Gordon is our starting centre-forward’ to the fire of ‘We must desperately hope Anthony Gordon is fit enough to be our starting centre-forward’.
The Alexander Isak situation is no good at all for Newcastle, very obviously, but it’s far from the only worry. Jamaal Lascelles was captain against Atleti, for instance. With all due respect, Jamaal Lascelles captaining Newcastle in 2025 would have been some way down the list of post-takeover ambitions,
Nevertheless, because we are sickos, we do want to see precisely what happens should Newcastle find themselves having to play an entire season with an attack made up of assorted flavour of tricky winger. Gordon, Harvey Barnes and Anthony Elanga has the look of an enormously fun, if not particularly effective, attacking trio, one where they’re all either constantly far too far apart or treading on each other’s toes and where Newcastle go from Isak’s elite goalscoring to finishing this season with Joelinton (9) as their top league goalscorer.
Manchester United: Casemiro in central midfield
Manchester United, we need you to be so serious right now. Please tell us your elaborate transfer masterplan, one that started with having to sack all manner of regular Joe Sixpacks while pleading poverty and then spending hundreds of millions of pounds on all manner of new players while recouping almost none of that in sales doesn’t also involve Casemiro as a starter?
We’re reeling so hard from the sight of this a week before the start of the season that we’ve barely even registered a front three of Mbuemo, Mount and Cunha. We do at least know United have taken steps to remedy that with the arrival of the big-jumping and occasional goal-scoring Benjamin Sesko, a man who definitely won’t be the latest not-quite-elite striker to be chewed up and spat out by the sheer ridiculousness of this particular Football Club We’re Talking About.
Chelsea: Robert Sanchez as goalkeeper
It’s now a new thing, it’s not even just a pre-season thing. But however much we may come to rationalise the idea that Chelsea’s insane transfer policy might in fact be perfectly suited to football’s insane world, we will never, ever allow it to become normalised that here lies a football club willing to spend half-a-billion pounds a year putting elite players on eight-year contracts yet continuing to entrust a really very important job indeed to a man who couldn’t keep Jason Steele out of the Brighton team.
Chelsea have loads of goalkeepers, because Chelsea have loads of footballers. It’s what they do. But how are we still in a situation where every single one of those many, many goalkeepers sits somewhere between ‘sh*tbone awful’ and ‘meh’ on the tried-and-tested goalkeeper-quality rating scale?
Of all the things we don’t really understand or even pretend to understand about how Chelsea’s transfer policy works, this is the thing we don’t understand the most. Especially now they have actual strikers.