Chelsea and Man Utd in bottom three: Ranking the Premier League pre-season moods
Yet another new Premier League season is almost upon us.
And, frankly, we might never have needed it more than right now.
But let’s put the ongoing collapse of society as we know it to one side and rank the moods around the 20 Premier League clubs, shall we? It’s all we know.
20) Everton
The Toffees simply not being allowed nice things now extends even to kits, with hummel replaced by Castore for this season. Something quintessentially modern Everton about moving to a laughing-stock manufacturer at the precise moment everyone else has abandoned them.
Sure, it’s quite funny, but we are experts here and can tell you that actually football clubs only do this when they are very distressed.
Some entirely above-board and only coincidentally mutually beneficial player trading with Aston Villa has undeniably left Everton the worse off in terms of playing staff, and that really is only to be expected given the two clubs’ current polar opposite trajectories.
At the moment it’s not yet clear precisely what further unpleasantnesses await Everton this season as another purported takeover fails, only that unpleasantness of some kind or other appears to be the one thing that can be entirely guaranteed at Goodison.
At least the new stadium looks good. Grimly fascinating to see what goes catastrophically wrong with it over the months ahead, because something assuredly will. It is the history of the Everton.
19) Chelsea
Head into another new season riddled by stupidly unnecessary self-inflicted uncertainty.
Summer activity has been plentiful once again, but almost none of it particularly convincing. And none more so than the arrival of Enzo Maresca as manager in place of Mauricio Pochettino, who got the boot just as he seemed to be getting his head around the current insanity of this football club.
The new manager has worked with some of the very best around but there’s no getting away from the fact he has absolutely no experience of taking charge of a team at this level while the constant churn of the player pool doesn’t appear from the outside to be getting any real distance closer to coherence.
Even the Cole Palmer coup starts to look like a fluke at a club that simply throws so many balls at so many coconuts that it is bound to win the occasional goldfish.
Then there are the outgoings, with Trevoh Chalobah and more significantly Conor Gallagher essentially forced out for ‘pure profit’ PSL reasons. There’s something very Modern Football about the best way for clubs to correct their financial missteps being to cash in on the very players fans will have the greatest attachment to: the academy lads made good.
And nowhere does that fit better than at Chelsea, a club that has lost its way and lost its sense of purpose. Whatever you thought of the Abramovich Years, at least Chelsea knew what they were about then.
Pre-season has also been dreadful. It might not mean a thing – it almost never does – but it feels like it matters more when it’s all you’ve got to go on, and when it appears to be confirming all the worst fears about starting a process anew after how long it took to start getting that right last time around.
18) Manchester United
With an uneasy alliance now in place between manager and suits, United have at least displayed some promising signs of financial prudence and intelligent thought in their transfer policy this summer, while Leny Yoro’s arrival shows that even with a leaky roof, Old Trafford still has plenty of pull for a generation of players who’ve never known Man United in their all-conquering pomp.
The fans seem pretty optimistic all things considered, but there’s a desperation to that optimism that belies its shallow brittleness. We get it. The Glazers were quite rightly detested and now they’ve gone United fans sort of have to convince themselves things will be better otherwise what’s the point of any of it?
Currently does look like Sir Jim Ratcliffe might also be terrible at this, though. A different kind of terrible. A micro-managing fussy office manager kind of terrible, but still terrible.
We’ve already outlined why the current performative bout of United optimism feels really quite strikingly misplaced here.
The main reason, though, is the very real fear that the drawn-out vote of confidence handed down to Erik Ten Hag ends up being just more time wasted. And even if everything goes as well as it possibly can for them this season – which it already isn’t after some pre-season injury setbacks – it’s hard to see how they can possibly drag themselves any higher than third unless one of the top two has a massive and unexpected collapse.
Third as best-case scenario shouldn’t really ever sit well with fans of a club that didn’t finish lower until the Premier League’s 22nd season.
READ: Ranking 10 Manuel Uguarte alternatives for Man Utd on likelihood of Old Trafford move
17) Nottingham Forest
Hmm. Feels at this stage like a season that could go wrong, doesn’t it? Were it not for Eddie Howe’s England links then Nuno Espirito Santo would be favourite in the Sack Race and as a general rule of thumb you don’t really want to be going into the season with your manager favourite in the sack race. Suggests all is far from rosy.
Were a bit lucky really that the bottom three last season were so poor, allowing them to ride out their own struggles and points deductions with a bit to spare. Would need to be very lucky to have such a relatively easy ride again this season. Wouldn’t entirely rule it out, mind, given the standing and travails of the promoted trio, but the alarm bells are, if not yet ringing, certainly being prepared.
We fear for them, we really do.
16) Southampton
The new Burnley, is our concern here. And if anything they’re actually a lot more Burnley than Burnley were, or at least what everyone decided Burnley were in hindsight.
There was a lot of retrofitting chatter after their season went tits so entirely up that said Burnley’s problem was that they were a footballing side who had been promoted a year too soon. It never really sat right given the way they had steamrollered the Championship the season before, but it feels a far more apt description for an easy-on-the-eye Southampton side who came up through the play-offs after finishing in fourth place and nine points adrift of the automatic promotion spots.
They’ve been handed a tough early fixture list that involves a lot of very difficult games – Newcastle, Man United and Arsenal inside the first seven games – with some early high-pressure six-pointers against Forest and Ipswich. Could get real ugly real fast, and we’ve already made an early shout for Russell Martin to be first manager getting the Spanish archer this season.
15) Leicester City
The bookies make Leicester whacking great odds-on favourites for an instant return to the Championship. Maybe it’s just all the memories of what Leicester have done in recent years, but we simply can’t accept it’s quite so gloomy as that. They should never have got themselves relegated in the first place, got promoted by winning the Championship and we’re not at all convinced top-flight newbie Enzo Maresca is such a great loss as manager, while they appear to have made an entirely competent and relatively low-risk call on his replacement.
The loss of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall is likely more significant, but this remains a Leicester squad and manager that should at least be capable of survival and as last season showed that’s all anyone can really ask or expect in the first season back.
14) Liverpool
Definitely need a big signing of some kind to settle the nerves, but pre-season wins over Arsenal and Man United do feel fractionally less insignificant than your standard pre-season meaninglessness.
A lot of that is because it’s Arsenal and Manchester United Football Clubs We’re Talking About, sure, but a lot of it is that it’s really all we’ve got to go on.
We still don’t really have any idea what to expect from Arne Slot’s Liverpool, and just the idea of Liverpool not being Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool is enough to make us nervous, never mind the club’s actual fans.
They did fade a bit towards the end of last season and there was a pretty clear sense that Klopp had overachieved in keeping a team in transition as involved in the title race for as long as they were.
Slot-Klopp isn’t quite in the same territory as Emery-Wenger or Moyes-Ferguson but it does feel close enough to niggle away at the back of the mind ahead of a season where Liverpool are taking us all on a journey into the unknown, especially as it is now five years since they managed to put together two good Premier League seasons in a row even with Klopp at the helm.
13) Wolves
Avoided what looked certain to be a season of strife and peril last season and will be very happy with another of those please and thank you.
We’re one part interested to see what a Gary O’Neil team looks like when he actually has a pre-season to do stuff to two parts disappointed he won’t spend his whole managerial career as a short-term firefighter saving the most improbable situations and then moving to the next disaster every nine months.
12) Brentford
Would want to avoid any hint of last season’s minor flirtation with the relegation scrap, and have made an early move to offset the potential loss of no-look content king Ivan Toney to any of the bigger beasts by snapping up Igor Thiago, who was prolific in the Jupiler League and Europa Conference last season for Club Brugge.
Already plenty of encouraging signs that Brentford have the attacking firepower to cope with the loss of Toney, who in truth did little to light the place up upon return from his eight-month ban in January.
Thomas Frank spent a good chunk of the summer Speaking Well, I Thought during the Euros where he finished a narrow second to Ange Postecoglou in the current Premier League manager pundit rankings, and there does remain a non-zero chance that one of the big clubs casts an eye at Brentford’s thoughtfully impressive manager if their own season shows signs of going belly up.
But really that’s life for the Brentfords of this world. You should probably be happier about the idea of big clubs liking your manager than the alternative, frankly. No pun intended (an absurd lie).
11) Brighton
Still feels just about like a club and a fanbase who, despite great enjoyment of the new heights they’ve hit recently, can take a glass-half-full ‘well if 11th in the Premier League constitutes a bad season then we’ve come a heck of a long way’ kind of approach to it all.
Still, though. They really were awful sh*t for an awful long time in a season that started with such huge promise both domestically and in Europe.
Now starting again under another new manager, and also now doing so without Pascal Gross which it turns out somewhat to our surprise is something we weren’t remotely ready for. Certainly the most significant German Premier League staple we’ll have to get used to not seeing every week this season.
10) Fulham
The Premier League’s most mid-table team of the last couple of years will most likely be at it again this year and thus have to take a mid-table place here befitting that status.
Marco Silva’s work at Fulham can be filed under ‘quietly impressive’ but the concern for him and his future career prospects might be that it’s probably getting quieter, and the volume will only increase if/when it starts going wrong.
For a good deal of the summer it’s felt like it could be. The departures of Joao Palhinha and Tosin Adarabioyo were not shocks, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of losing two such key players from the spine of the team.
The Cottagers took a little while to get going on the recruitment side, but have started doing some pleasing work now. Emile Smith Rowe is an eye-catching deal that could go either way but the potential upside there is vast for a player who really was quite unfortunate to just miss the boat on Arsenal’s transformation from banter to behemoth.
And the return of Ryan Sessegnon to his rightful home after five trying years at Tottenham is a right crowd-pleaser that could well end up on all kinds of bargain of the year lists. Easy to forget that both those incomings from north London are only 24 as well.
Definitely moves to improve the mood, those.
9) Newcastle
Could do without England sniffing around their manager and being out of Europe altogether is a bit of a bummer just a year after getting back in the Champions League and then very quickly back out of it again.
Far from alone in having transfer activity that doesn’t exactly grab by the bollards, but have made what appear to be a couple of shrewd defensive acquisitions with a long-term view in Lloyd Kelly from Bournemouth and Lewis Hall from Chelsea.
Lingering fustration at poxy pesky rules annoyingly delaying their simple fairytale plot of world domination aside, things don’t look too bad for Newcastle right now. They’ve managed so far to bat away unwanted attention in their key assets and would reasonably expect a significant improvement on last season’s seventh-place finish if all goes to plan.
8) Tottenham
We had no idea whether they were going to be any good last season and a year into Project Angeball we’ll be honest we’re none the wiser. Last season was split into two distinct sections for Spurs, who started the season looking like title contenders and ended it a wildly inconsistent mid-table side with myriad flaws. Although the net result of all this was a perfectly satisfactory fifth place, they were quite a bad side for a lot longer than they were a very good one.
Their summer is yet to really ignite, although Archie Gray already appears like a very smart and versatile acquisition who appears certain to be joined in the first-team squad by fellow youngling Lucas Bergvall, acquired to much fanfare in January from under the noses of Barcelona.
Spurs have a lot of really quite exciting footballers doing really quite a lot of exciting things and we truly hope they can be actively good for a bit longer this time around. But that squad does look a couple of players light even though we welcome the belated yet undeniably determined attempts to accept when mistakes have been made and cut losses.
As with last season we genuinely wouldn’t be surprised to see them in third place or ninth when the music stops, and couldn’t even begin to tell you which of those outcomes is actually the more likely.
7) Manchester City
Fined a couple of million quid for 22 offences that had nothing to do with any financial rules, not that it stopped the nation’s headline writers having their fun. Not to make light of two million actual pounds, but if that’s the most serious punishment handed down to City this season then another storming campaign is very much on the cards and there would be absolutely no reason to expect anything other than a fifth Premier League title in a row.
‘What about Pep?’ remains for now at least a question to worry about next summer rather than now, heading into a campaign where City will once again be favourite for every competition they enter and will almost certainly win at least one or two of them. It’s a hard life.
6) Ipswich
Another compelling data point for the theory that sometimes the best way back into the Premier League from the Championship is to first fall out of the second tier and get back in the habit of winning at the lower level.
It’s a tactic fraught with risk, but Ipswich aren’t the first team to find the second tier suddenly less of a grind after getting promoted back into it. And now they’re back in the Premier League for the first time in two decades and have kept hold of their inspirational young manager Kieran McKenna.
If Southampton are this year’s Burnley, then Ipswich are clearly the new Luton. Which makes Leicester Sheffield United and perhaps explains why everyone’s apparently so miserable about them.
5) Bournemouth
Got to be feeling pretty happy, haven’t they? Losing Lloyd Kelly to Newcastle is a blow but their summer transfer business has continued the job of adjusting the age profile of the squad. Players aged 31, 25, 29, 29, 29, 31 and 37 have left, with the new arrivals so far being 19, 20, 21, 25 and 27.
It all points to the long-term plan Bournemouth put in place last season with the bold, risky but undeniably successful decision to replace Gary O’Neil with Andoni Iraola and go down a new direction. Funny how nobody is telling them to be careful what they wish for now, isn’t it? West Ham taking all the heat on that score now having committed the crime of replacing a British manager with a foreign one just because they think he might be ‘better’ at being ‘a football manager’. Pfft.
4) West Ham
Have to be slightly wary because the ‘careful what you wish for’ telling-offs are already written for a fanbase that has upset the Hammers mafia in the UK press by not being sufficiently enamoured by David Moyes playing grim if occasionally successful sufferball with some of the Premier League’s most appealing attacking talent.
It’s absolutely fine and correct to dream. To wish for more. It’s what supporting a football club is all about. It doesn’t really matter in the end if those dreams fade and die.
And that’s where we are now. West Ham fans can approach a season with not necessarily full-blown optimism but at least the excitement of potentially seeing something new, of not knowing precisely what kind of fare will be served up.
There’s also the arrival of Niclas Fullkrug, which is absolutely our favourite transfer of the summer so far. It’s so West Ham we’re annoyed we didn’t think of it ourselves.
The Hammers obviously have a great record when it comes to signing strikers, and you can absolutely see Fullkrug as a ‘never got the hang of Our League, did he?’ merchant who leaves after one season with three goals (two of them in the Carabao) from 37 appearances. But you can also picture him bringing that big-man energy to the Barclays in thrillingly exciting fashion.
And that’s the point of West Ham right now. There are plenty of teams where the uncertainty is a concern about their season. For West Ham right now, that uncertainty is what makes it all worthwhile. And why even if it does go horribly wrong neither they nor any other fans should ever be careful what they wish for.
Wishing is very often the best we’ve got.
3) Arsenal
Steady as they go for Arsenal, who are once again setting about some solid transfer business and can point to some pretty serious doubts and question marks around all the major theoretical rivals apart from one. Which is kind of the problem, isn’t it?
But we’d still like to see them pull off a real big coup of a signing, partly because we are extremely greedy and only very rarely sated, but also because it does still kind of feel like they need it.
We remain in something approaching bewildered awe at the speed with which Arsenal have gone from a running joke to established closest/only rivals to the City juggernaut. It’s only been two years. And while Arsenal fans may grow weary of ‘bottle-job’ smears and find themselves having to constantly defend their players and fans’ right to celebrate nice things that happen, it’s always important to keep in mind just how different a place those attacks come from now compared to 24 months ago.
2) Crystal Palace
Palace’s outrageous, near flawless, run-in under Oliver Glasner’s canny leadership was one of the stories of the closing stages of last season, and while the loss of Michael Olise will hurt, there really is no reason to think Palace can’t carry the momentum of that run-in into the new season.
Probably not quite so spectacularly, but they might finally get 50 points at least. Certainly look well capable of another top-half finish at least and possibly more if Eberechi Eze can be kept from the clutches of Man City or Tottenham or Arsenal.
1) Aston Villa
Some inevitable PSR-based heartache has led to some sales but that’s hopefully dealt with now and Villa can get on with the importance of enjoying their first campaign in the Champions League while also looking around the two-thirds of the Big Six (or five of the rest of the Big Eight if you prefer) and, frankly, see no reason why they can’t do it all again next season.
We don’t expect Villa fans to particularly care – and nor should they, frankly – but it strikes us as a bit of p*sser (however minor in the grand scheme) to finally get a go at the Champions League at the precise moment UEFA decide to absolutely ruin it in pursuit of a few more coins.
Really, though, Villa’s rise over the last two years is even more extraordinary than Arsenal’s. It’s no exaggeration to say Unai Emery took over a team set for a relegation fight and turned them into European qualifiers and now even more. It’s a good time to be a Villan.