Big Weekend: Liverpool v Man City, Roberto De Zerbi, Michael Carrick, Viktor Gyokeres, Forest
We’re honestly not sure we’ve ever been more excited for the return of the Premier League.
It was always likely to be a bit like this after a three-week break. But quite a lot has happened during that three-week break, hasn’t it?
It’s a very different Premier League that returns. And we honestly don’t yet have a clue how any of it is actually going to feel.
Game to watch: Liverpool v Man City
Has there ever been a bigger, more eagerly anticipated Premier League game than this? At such an early stage of the season, we reckon you’re going back at least to Old Trafford in October 2004 and Arsenal’s attempt to make it 50 Premier League games unbeaten. And we’re not even sure that wins.
This is going to be huge, obviously, but there’s also just utter uncertainty about what any of it is going to feel like.
The atmosphere is going to be incredibly hostile. The fixture list has played a blinder by sending Man City to Anfield of all places for their first game after the interlull revelations.
But what is this actual football match going to feel like? Because there’s a non-zero chance it is in fact completely meaningless. There is a non-zero chance Man City get expelled from the league at some point over the coming months and this match never actually happened. Not just never actually happened in the way every Manchester City match since 2009 never actually happened, but literally and entirely expunged from the record books in a 19-team Premier League season.
It’s even more than that, though. The City news breaking so early in the international break and containing just such entirely absurd numbers when detail started to emerge has given the whole thing an abstract quality. It was too far removed from actual matches. The numbers involved too impossible to imagine. The implications of every hypothetical punishment too surreal to truly contemplate.
We wonder, by the way, if that last part wasn’t part of City’s entire thinking all along. That the sheer scale of their cheating was, in their minds, their safety net. They obviously thought they’d never get caught, but we wonder if they also – perhaps still rightly – believed that even if they did they could never be properly punished because the implications of it are too vast for the Premier League to wrap itself around.
But all the talking and pontificating stops, briefly, on Sunday. Manchester City will be back playing football. We’ve got no idea what it’s actually going to feel like or look like when they actually once again appear on a football pitch. And, the fates have decided, the perfect football pitch.
We would not be remotely surprised to see this one end in a 5-0 blowout because one team simply cannot handle the pressure or the situation or the occasion. We just don’t have a single clue which team that might be.
Can Man City really form a worthwhile us-against-the-world siege mentality when so few of the current players and staff have so little real connection to the club’s now questioned success? This is such a new team we’re not sure that’ll really work.
But equally how do Liverpool cope with the fact that, for one day only, never to be repeated, they have been handed the thing they crave and believe is their birthright. Because for the first and last time, it actually is true: This Means More.
Managers to watch: Roberto De Zerbi and Michael Carrick
And the day before Liverpool take on the Elephant In The Room in what we really do think is going to be a far more surreal occasion at Anfield than people have yet twigged, there’s El Sackico at Old Trafford between Manchester United, who are dreadful, and Tottenham, who are worse.
Not to labour the point, but it is absolutely wild how this game has just disappeared from the public consciousness over the last fortnight. On another timeline, we’ve talked about little else than this hilarious pair of idiot clubs for the last 10 days.
As it is, everyone’s only going to remember it’s even happening at about 5pm on Saturday. What a treat.
These two managers are currently almost neck and neck at the head of the Sack Race, and have managed a solitary Premier League win between them in 10 attempts.
Michael Carrick is finding the real world of Manchester United management predictably far harder than the demo mode with all obstacles removed that he enjoyed in the second half of last season.
De Zerbi, meanwhile, grows ever more rattled and hot of head by his expensively assembled New Spurs and their complete inability to play De Zerbiball. He got far more out of what was on paper a far weaker squad in the desperate times of last season when he compromised on his principles and went for a more arm-round-the-shoulder approach.
He might have to learn from that. And Spurs are also at some point going to have to stop desperately trying to second-guess themselves when it comes to injuries. Spurs have been in a near permanent state of injury crisis for the last two seasons, and seem to have self-fulfilled themselves into a third by, if anything, being too protective and careful with players who just still get injured anyway.
The upshot are situations like the Pedro Porro one, where he’s not only now unavailable due to injury but Spurs barely saw him before the injury anyway because they were too scared to pick him.
It is a club where fear now rules. Almost everything about Spurs is now governed by that one destructive emotion. Even their summer spending was motivated by the dread fear of another relegation battle. And what of Spurs and De Zerbi now? Well, you fear for them. You really do.
Team to watch: Nottingham Forest
United-Spurs isn’t even the only Sackico event on the weekend’s schedule, not that you’d know it.
Palace v Forest looks every bit as much of a relegation six-pointer as the Old Trafford miseryfest and, while we don’t think any of the four managers involved would actually be sacked quite so soon on the back of a defeat, you also can’t rule anything out.
And you most obviously and especially can’t rule anything out where Mr Marinakis is involved.
Forest’s problem in the early (only?) days of Oliver Glasner’s reign has been putting the ball in the net. Only Coventry and Spurs have scored fewer Premier League goals this season.
Palace’s problem has been keeping them out. Only Chelsea(!) have conceded more.
Something has to give there, and while it probably won’t be terminal there are enough doubts and whispers about both managers to leave whoever comes off second best in this one stuck second in the Sack Race behind only whoever’s come off second best at Old Trafford.
Player to watch: Viktor Gyokeres
We still await confirmation on the precise state of Arsenal’s assorted post-lull walking wounded, but it appears unlikely Kai Havertz will be fit to face Leeds by Saturday lunchtime in an eye-catching game to kick off the most eye-catching of weekends.
On a normal Premier League weekend, Arsenal v Leeds would make a perfectly compelling Game to Watch. The champions looking to bounce back from a startling and worrying defeat last time out to end their own unbeaten record, and having to do so against a team still enjoying their own unbeaten start.
As it is, it barely scrapes into the thinking at all.
Despite the injuries, it’s been a very good interlull for Arsenal. There’s that new Mikel Arteta contract, and let’s be fair it’s pretty rare for a team to actually win the Premier League title during the September/October international break like Arsenal have just done. And not only because it’s the first time that’s been one international break instead of two.
Again, with so much going on it’s been a largely unremarked upon element of it all that if City are handed any on-field punishment before this season is done – and the alternative is for the entire season to become a ridiculous, for want of a better word, sham – then Arsenal are the 2026/27 Premier League champions. Because nobody else is going to do it, are they?
So congratulations, then, Arsenal. But it would probably be good to get back to winning ways and all that in this first game back, for the sake of appearances, and for that they might well need something from a man who has yet to start a Premier League game this season and is just one of the huge list of people who might have had more of a spotlight upon them had this turned out to be any kind of normal international break.
He’s found form for Sweden, at least, with four goals in four games over the last couple of weeks.
And he did score twice in this fixture last season as Arsenal romped to a 5-0 win back in August 2025. But an awful lot has changed since then. For pretty much everyone.
Football League game to watch: Southampton v Portsmouth
Absolutely fair play to the Championship for serving up a Temu version of Liverpool v Man City as Tonda Eckert and his merry band of binocular-wielding scamps take on sympathetic local friends and neighbours Portsmouth.
European game to watch: Barcelona v Getafe
Because frankly, if in doubt, Barcelona are always the European game to watch for as long as they keep up their current absurd goalscoring habits.
They’ve already scored 31 La Liga goals this season (only three goals fewer than the two Madrid teams, currently second and third top scoring teams in the league, combined) and opened their Champions League campaign with five more against Feyenoord.
That’s 36 goals in eight La Liga and Champions League games so far this season. They’ve already scored five goals in four separate matches, and that doesn’t include the cheeky seven they stuck past Racing Santander. Athletic Bilbao are the only team to keep them down to even two goals this season.
Getafe have conceded only seven goals this season and listen, fair play, if they’re still going at a goal a game on average there after the weekend then it’s a job well done.
