Title tilting, relegation fighting, global megastar controlling: A pre-season target for every Premier League club

The return of the Premier League is now just a week away. Frankly, it can’t come soon enough. The World Cup was bloody ages ago and people are so desperate for football’s return that alarming numbers of them appear to be caring about pre-season results. Which is always a cry for help.

There really isn’t long to go now, guys. It’s nearly here. We’ve nearly made it.

This also means it is the very ideal kind of time to give every single Premier League club a target for the season ahead. History tells us that Premier League clubs are mainly silly sausages who just refuse to listen to our quietly excellent advice like ‘win the Premier League’ or ‘don’t get relegated yeah?’ but we didn’t let that stop us last season and won’t this time either.

 

Arsenal: Win one of the Big Two

Because that is simply the sphere in which Arsenal now operate. The Manchester City sphere where anything other than winning one of the two big trophies feels like a letdown.

We’re not harsh enough to make winning the Champions League a must-hit target for anyone. Too much has to fall into place, there are too many moving parts, and just too many other teams involved.

But it seems fair to call that Arsenal’s overriding aim for the season. Having got the Premier League title drought out of the way, correcting what remains a woeful continental record for a club of Arsenal’s heft becomes the next albatross to shed.

It’s not just the total lack of a Champions League or European Cup title that jars but the European record in general. Arsenal are English football’s third largest and third most successful team. But in Europe they don’t even crack a top three among London clubs. And that’s just plain nutty.

Their season-on-season progression in the Champions League now reads QF-SF-RU so yeah, we would strongly advise Mikel Arteta and the lads to just carry on along that path and win the bloody thing this year. You never know, someone else might even take care of PSG for them along the way this time. Villa, probably.

But winning the Premier League works as well. Let’s not pretend it wouldn’t. If Arteta can do it, he would join Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola as the only managers to have retained the Premier League title. It’s a handy list, and while Arsenal fans are resistant to the idea that they are big favourites to do so it’s also true that they are precisely that.

They haven’t had a perfect summer but it’s hardly a catastrophe either, and they were already comfortably the benchmark everyone else was trying to reach. Already the team everyone else was quite forlornly chasing.

With uncertainty swirling around all their major rivals the chance really is a golden one.

The fly in Arsenal’s ointment may be post-World Cup fatigue. Sure, everyone is affected by it to some extent but the Gunners undeniably more than most. They had multiple key players involved until the very end, and several of those were already among the more exhausted coming into that tournament.

The World Cup has also cost them the services of William Saliba for an as yet unknown period of time. A major setback for sure.

It does feel like an awful lot comes down to how Arsenal start. They are the Man City now. They don’t need to streak clear in late summer and early autumn. They don’t need to be the frontrunners necessarily. If they can at least stay on the shoulders of the leaders through the first half of the season they are now the team that knows they can sprint away to the finish line.

And if they don’t do that? Well, in a roundabout way, it might just help them win the Champions League, a tournament PSG have shown twice already that if you’re good enough then you don’t really need to worry yourself too much about what happens in the early weeks and months of the competition at all.

And Arsenal are good enough.

 

Aston Villa: Decent CL run and getting in there again

Aston Villa are a perfectly balanced football club these days with a chip on both shoulders. But they’re also an excellent team under perhaps the best coach in the league.

They continue to defy Premier League and European gravity, even if the constant dark insistence that both the Premier League and UEFA actively hate that fact is beyond tiresome now.

Yes, everything’s rigged against you. No, we don’t know how they’re allowed to spend all that money either… no, it’s not fair is it when you have to sell some of your players. Why don’t we sit you back down, yeah? How about a nice cup of tea?

Whatever the actual levels of chagrin Aston Villa cause to the bigwigs and the suits, however many off-the-books meetings are held in shadowy, smoke-filled rooms to discuss how the pesky upstarts can be stopped – and to be fair, it’s probably more than they bother with for Newcastle who are apparently just far more capable than Villa of taking care of this by themselves – the fact remains that Villa do just keep getting better and that is enormously impressive.

They are without doubt the Premier League’s biggest punchers since Spurs muscled their way into the old big four with but a fraction of the resources Man City had to do it.

We’re really not sure Villa got enough credit last season for qualifying for the Champions League twice. Finishing fourth or winning the Europa League would both have constituted enormously successful seasons; doing both was a stunning achievement for Unai Emery and his men.

And there really is no reason now to expect that momentum to be lost. They’ve had what looks to us a textbook ‘trading club’ summer. Cashing in massively on a top-line asset thanks to the largesse of the dafter, larger clubs and spending shrewdly on some adroit and exciting new signings.

Another run deep into the knockouts of the Champions League seems entirely reasonable to expect, and we’d back Villa for a top-eight finish in the league phase there if the draw is even halfway kind. They’ve had a European quarter-final at least in each of the last three seasons, and another is very possible.

Domestically, there seems no reason to expect anything different from Villa this season from the formline that has taken them to fourth, sixth and fourth again in the last three campaigns.

Especially when so much uncertainty exists elsewhere. Sure, it’s very likely that some of the Big Six beasts with question marks hanging all over them right now prove to be better than Villa. But some of them will almost certainly prove to be significantly worse as well. We just don’t really know right now which ones will fall into which camp.

The key for Villa is that it doesn’t really matter who precisely falls which way.

 

Bournemouth: To be this season’s Brentford

Inspirational manager gone. Key players gone or injured before they could be gone. Concerns that just being one of the well-run B teams won’t be enough on its own in those circumstances under a manager with no previous experience of Our League.

That was Brentford last summer, although the overall picture for sure looked far bleaker there than it does for a post-Iraola Bournemouth now. Brentford were absolutely fine, and Bournemouth remaining absolutely fine as a new manager establishes himself would do nicely.

Along with a cheeky little Europa League run in a competition where English sides do have a truly formidable record since the format change cast out any Champions League failure clubs. Of the four English clubs to play Europa League football over the last two seasons, two have won the thing and the other two were knocked out only by the other English club.

There are three English clubs this season, and a very convincing argument that Bournemouth are the best placed of any to go all the way.

 

Brentford: 2025/26 redux

No notes here at all. Just do 25/26 again, lads. You made fools of us all. Rarely if ever has a club starting the season under such obvious You Fear For Them, You Really Do conditions made such a mockery of said conditions.

 

Brighton: Win the Europa Conference League

Tits to everything else, frankly. If you’re a firmly established, well-run Premier League football club that just celebrated your 125th birthday but have not one major trophy to your name, then a season where you find yourself in the Europa Conference League presents an opportunity that simply must not be squandered.

The Conference was introduced to give Europe’s less wealthy leagues a competition they could actually win. It hasn’t worked out like that, turning out instead to be a vehicle by which the rich leagues’ less wealthy clubs have a competition they can actually win.

Three of the five titles have been won by English clubs. Forget Chelsea for a moment and consider the other two: West Ham and Crystal Palace.

Given the additional reward of a Europa League spot that comes with winning the Conference – and Brighton would absolutely have a chance of winning that in 27/28, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves – then really, unless the Premier League season has gone disastrously badly or startlingly well, then by the time 2027 rolls around European glory really should be the focus.

 

Chelsea: Decent title tilt culminating in Champions League return

Hope you’re ready for the sheer molten bravura of this take, but Chelsea should be really, really good this season. They’ve bought incredibly well, and have brought in perhaps the most sought-after young manager in the game to pull the whole thing together.

In a season with no European football, allowing a laser focus on domestic matters, Chelsea could and should be challenging right at the top given the doubts and distractions and greater workloads everywhere else you look.

Counterpoint: this is Chelsea, and nothing at Chelsea is ever as it seems. It could obviously just be crap again.

But it just shouldn’t be. A Premier League where uncertainty and the unknown abound everywhere you look could play perfectly into Chelsea’s hands. They’re used to it. They’re used to starting every season wondering whether the vast number of new signings will gel into anything vaguely approaching a cohesive whole, or whether the new manager is really all that, and whether he’ll still be there when the music stops in May.

What is for several other clubs this season a daunting if exciting step into the unknown is something that at Chelsea they simply call ‘August’.

We’re not about to pretend BlueCo have ripped up their Player Trading Facility playbook and decided to run Chelsea as a football club again, but there has undoubtedly been a shift since the appointment of an elite and uncompromising manager in Xabi Alonso, one who will push back against egregious nonsense rather than just be enormously grateful for the opportunity to put ‘Chelsea manager’ on his LinkedIn.

There have been plenty of transfers that fit into Chelsea’s existing strategy. Even the headline nine-figure move for Morgan Rogers isn’t out of character for Chelsea given his age and profile. And of course there’s been the mandatory waving through of a previously completed deal for a Strasbourg player that must have featured some intense and difficult negotiations. Bonus points for the fact said player is World Cup pantomime villain Valentin Barco.

And the usual speculative, low-risk and high possible reward signing of some younglings has gone on as per, with the explicit understanding now that the high reward is about making a profit on them rather than the idea they might actually benefit Chelsea’s first team.

But there have also been lots of transfers of an entirely different type. That don’t fit the existing pattern of Chelsea’s post-takeover business at all.

In Maxence Lacroix they have signed someone who is a good centre-back but isn’t going to be raking in profits on any spreadsheets in years to come. The only possible and alarming conclusion to reach is that he’s been purchased to strengthen the actual football team rather than a balance sheet. Which is disconcerting, really.

And that’s before we even start on signing proper actual veterans in Danny Welbeck and Jordan Henderson. Welbeck has very much proven at Brighton that he still absolutely has it and could be one of the shrewdest bargain buys of the summer at a club that doesn’t really do that kind of thing.

As for Henderson, well, you just never know when there’s an advertising hoarding that will need jumping over or some cones that need putting out. But there’s a valid argument that as well as a proper coach, the thing this confused, confusing, disjointed and lopsided collection of footballers needed to make it an actual working squad was the presence of some Good Pros around the place.

They have that now, along with one of the best midfields in the league (possibly with Martin Zubimendi to come) and a defence that should be far less pathetic than last season’s with the addition of Lacroix and the return of Levi Colwill from long-term injury.

Winning the actual title itself still seem like a stretch target – although if there’s one Premier League club with previous for going from mid-table embarrassment to champions in a single bound under an inspirational new manager it’s Chelsea – but they really should be there or at the very least thereabouts.

Proper transfers for a proper manager and no pesky European football to get in the way? Blue really might be the colour.

 

Coventry: Survival

Let’s not overcomplicate this one. Be Leeds. Be Sunderland if you possibly can. Just don’t be any of the other promoted clubs from the last three years. Easy. But will they listen? That’s the question.

 

Crystal Palace: A quiet return to Old Palace

Palace have just had the best two years in their history. We don’t expect 2026/27 to join them in the annals of great Selhurst seasons.

We’re not quite at Fear For Them, You Really Do levels, and they’ve made an interesting and potentially brilliant choice to replace Oliver Glasner after his transformative reign.

But it’s also very easy to see how it could all go horribly wrong for Palace this season given the scale of the change.

It’s a shame to have to lowball their upcoming season after what’s gone before it, but one of those classic Crystal Palace seasons where they finish 13th with 40-49 points and no real serious flirtation with relegation seems fine right about now.

The more positive way to look at it is to paint it as trying to make sure their league position is secure enough that they can devote the final few months of the season to trying to win the Europa League a la Tottenham 24/25. And before you know it they might yet even have their best season of the lot to show for it.

 

Everton: To live in interesting times without being careful what they wished for

When we were doing the Mood Rankings last week we got to Everton and realised they were the one Premier League club to which we’d given not a second’s thought throughout the summer.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be nice, the quiet. And it could all work massively in their favour. There is something to be said for being the steady, known quantity in what is a transitional season for so many clubs that it amounts to a transitional season for the Premier League itself.

Until they popped up to do a genuine madness alongside Crystal Palace and complete an actual almost-never-spotted swap deal that sends Dwight McNeil south and brings Brennan Johnson to the Hill Dickinson, they really hadn’t done anything to catch the attention in a summer when almost everyone else has been busy going various shades of mental.

It really shouldn’t be the case that ‘Haven’t changed their manager, preferring instead to stick with the one they appointed over 18 months ago!’ marks you as an outlier, but that is the point we’ve now reached in a Premier League gone nuts.

David Moyes is, absurdly, the seventh longest-serving incumbent among the 20 Premier League clubs this season. Among clubs who’ve been in the Premier League that whole time he climbs to fourth behind only Mikel Arteta, Unai Emery and Fabian Hurzeler.

A low-key summer doesn’t mean a bad one. We’re dizzyingly unsure who’s got the best out of that swap deal that has finally thrust Everton back into the wider consciousness. But the fun thing about it is that for both Palace and Everton it feels like ‘Well, it can’t really be worse than what we had’.

The rest of Everton’s business looks fairly canny to us. Christian Norgaard could figure on all manner of top bargain lists, while last season’s loans for Tyrique George and Merlin Rohl have been made permanent.

The best of the lot, though, could be the snaffling of Hayden Hackney from Middlesbrough for a fee that makes him almost entirely risk-free.

There’s some solid recent support for the merits of the Championship-Premier League pipeline for young English midfielders.

We’re not saying Hackney is another Adam Wharton or Alex Scott, but we’re definitely not saying he isn’t. He was one of the best players anywhere in the second tier last season and deserves his chance.

So it’s impressive stuff. But quietly impressive stuff. No-nonsense stuff. And it all begs the question of what success actually looks like for Everton this season.

Is it as simple as just another ultimately boring season like 25/26? That felt acceptable, initially because there are obvious on-field complications that come from making the move to a new stadium but in the end because of how very far from boring the season became for certain clubs at or above the Everton level.

We’re really not sure simply existing will cut it for another season. It does feel like we’re whirling round the Everton cycle quite rapidly towards the point where they start to crave something more. To yearn again for excitement.

We understand it. We don’t even disagree with it. But we worry about it. Because the thing with Everton is that what generally happens when they grow understandably weary of the quiet is that the eventual noise is usually of entirely the wrong sort.

It’s usually of the very noisy and very unpleasant relegation fight sort. Of the smug Ollie Holt columns about being careful what you wish for sort.

We have a sneaking suspicion that Moyes could be a live outsider in this season’s Sack Race. He probably won’t win because one of the several thousand Premier League clubs with a new manager is going to make a terrible start and hammer the panic button, but we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see ennui take hold of the club if it starts to look like another dull mid-table-safety season.

We always try to avoid admonishing fans for wanting more. It’s absolutely correct that mere Premier League survival shouldn’t (always) be enough for Everton. But when it’s Everton we do always worry for them.

Because what comes after the quiet just never seems to be the right kind of noise does it?

READ MORE: Everton are rare beacon of stability but is that really enough?

 

Fulham: Survival

It will probably all be fine, but we do also worry about Fulham. We might even fear for them. Marco Silva’s has not been the most high-profile departure of a long-serving Premier League manager this summer, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be enormously significant.

Fulham have become reliably mid-table steady eddies in the last few years, but all that does inevitably feel at some risk given the departure of the manager responsible, as well as a couple of key on-field architects.

The Cottagers are one of just many clubs we suspect might be quite grateful that they are where they are in this particular season with this particular crop of promoted teams rather than last year’s.

 

Hull City: Don’t give Derby reason to hope

The good news for Hull is that this is pretty much where we were at with Sunderland this time last year: just be better than the worst Premier League team of all time.

Thus, the only logical conclusions here are a) we know nothing and b) congratulations on your qualification for the 2027/28 Europa League, Hull City.

 

Ipswich: Don’t allow Ed Sheeran to gatecrash any post-match interviews

Is it facetious or glib to suggest that Sheeran’s infamous post-match interruption after a 1-1 draw against Manchester United in Ruben Amorim’s first game was the point where it all went wrong for Ipswich last time they were here?

No, it is not. They’d just taken five points from three games against Leicester, Spurs and United and were on the cusp of achieving escape velocity and bursting out of the bottom three.

Then along came Sheeran. Ipswich lost five of their next six, never again made it out of the bottom three and eventually limped home a distant 16 points from safety.

It was also the beginning of the end for Amorim, if you think about it.

Ipswich! Control your global megastar please!

 

Leeds: Top-half finish

Stretch target is stretchy, but they’re talking a good fight and are coming off the back of an excellent summer. Every chance to properly re-establish themselves as a proper Premier League team this season, one in which they should at the very, very least be far too powerful for the latest trio of promoted clubs.

They shouldn’t be in relegation danger and should thus be free to focus on being rather more, especially after the way they closed out the 25/26 season. Once you get yourself clear of the very worst dregs of the league, you really don’t have to then do a huge amount to be better than a lot of other teams and hack your way through the thick foliage of the mid-table morass to emerge blinking into the top-half sunlight.

Leeds, a club who have made it clear that mere survival is the baseline rather than limit of their ambitions, can absolutely do just that.

 

Liverpool: Champions League qualification

What we like about this fairly standard baseline Big Six club target is that it could look very silly in either direction very quickly indeed.

We would absolutely not be at all surprised to see Liverpool’s new manager suddenly get a tune out of all the good players the previous manager couldn’t get to work and for the club to end up right in the white-hot heat of the title race.

We also wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them win only one of their first six and be forced into a desperate managerial change before the year is out.

And what we really love is that this precise same scenario is true of about five different clubs.

It’s been said before and will be said again, but it really could be the most tremendously fun season of nonsense we’ve ever seen.

 

Manchester City: Win the Premier League

Can’t ever really go lower than this for Man City. Even with a new manager and all the uncertainty that brings.

If Arsenal are indeed too weary, too riddled with fatigue to make a fast start then Man City are uniquely positioned to take advantage. Specifically because they are Man City. Arsenal would feel reasonably confident about reeling in anyone else if they have to, but seeing City heading off anywhere towards the distance would hit different.

A lot here depends, obviously, on the new manager. We rate Maresca as a coach, but our lingering concern over him is a tendency he showed at Chelsea to err on the small-time. Whether it’s managing expectation or an attempt at self-preservation, he did manage to successfully talk them out of a couple of title-race-adjacent situations.

We hope not to hear any such talk from him this season. No talk of transition seasons even if he would actually be kind of right to say it. We can already almost hear him point out that Guardiola couldn’t win the title in either of his last two seasons at City.

He mustn’t do this. Just as we mustn’t allow our heads to get hot and set course for Mars over scenarios that are at this time ones we’ve invented entirely in our own heads to annoy ourselves.

 

Manchester United: Prove second half of last season wasn’t a fluke born of its unique conditions

We’re a lot less sure of Manchester United than others seem to be. A lot less convinced by the undeniably impressive form they showed under Michael Carrick over the second half of last season.

It all just seems like Easy Mode stuff to us. One game a week. No real pressure. Multiple easy gains for a manager for whom just not being the cartoonish mule-like caricature Ruben Amorim became was enough.

But what we do have to be clear about here is that we’re not saying it was definitely a fluke or a mirage. We’re just saying we worry that it might have been. If it wasn’t and Man United are actually a good side and Carrick actually is a good manager, then it’s happy days.

So there’s your season target. Prove that. If they do, then who knows where that might end given that what is undeniable is that the second half of last season does, absurdly, give United more proof of concept about the set-up they’ll carry with them into this season than anyone else in the Big Six bar Arsenal.

 

Newcastle: Survival with some dignity

A Tottenham-level desperate last-ditch escape won’t cut it, but it really might get that dicey – or even worse if any of the promoted trio turn out to have anything at all of the Sunderland or Leeds about them – for a team that’s had the guts ripped out of it this summer and whose new manager has already admitted cannot possibly be ready for a season that starts a little over a week from now.

Alarmingly easy to imagine how a bad start could snowball and make last season’s vague disappointments look like a golden age.

 

Nottingham Forest: Try not to sack any more managers

You’ve got a really, really good one now yeah? And a really capable-looking squad. Let’s see what happens if that really, really good manager and really capable-looking squad can have a whole entire season together. Imagine that.

This is perhaps the silliest and most far-fetched of all these predictions.

 

Sunderland: European tour to remain fun and exciting adventure rather than worrisome burden

We get a sense with Sunderland that Second-Season Syndrome is almost being willed into existence. That there’s a danger it becomes self-fulfilling.

It’s obviously been a quieter summer than last, but that was inevitable – desirable, even.

But they do look slightly short of numbers for a four-competition season that they surely couldn’t have anticipated this time last year. The potential for the Thursday-Sunday slog to become extremely draining if nervous glances over shoulders start to be required in the Premier League is clear. So… just don’t let that happen. Don’t be looking over your shoulders. Stay well clear of all that unpleasantness.

Very good and very obvious advice that a surprising number of clubs have inexplicably ignored over the years.

 

Tottenham: Roberto De Zerbi still manager at season’s end

Pre-season is always an exciting time of uncertainty and hope and fear, a time when all the myriad possibilities for the next 10 months lie in front of you and there’s no certainty yet about which path will be yours.

But this summer has, if anything, for me, Clive, almost a bit too much uncertainty about too many clubs.

Spurs might be the toughest of the lot to call. There are lots of other clubs we find hard to predict this season, but with all of those we still feel like we have a fair idea of what would constitute a passing-grade season.

For Chelsea and Man United, for instance, it feels very much like Champions League qualification is an obviously reasonable target. Doesn’t mean they’ll achieve it. Doesn’t mean they won’t surpass it either. But it feels about right.

Same with a team like Leeds. Kicking on from how they finished last season and on the back of a good summer, nudging themselves right up into the middle of the pack or perhaps just inside the top half feels like it constitutes real and measurable – and above all acceptable – progression.

But what’s a successful season for Spurs? We honestly don’t really know. Based on last season, they’re relegation battlers and not very good ones. Based on this summer, they’re genuine contenders. So which is it?

Even just ‘somewhere in the middle’ doesn’t really cut it. Would Spurs actually be happy with finishing, say, ninth this year? They probably ought to be, but we don’t think they would be.

Yet anything more than that feels like it’s asking a lot of a team that’s finished worst of the rest in the last two relegation fights, albeit by a very long way in the first of those.

So we’re going to cheat. We all know Roberto De Zerbi to be two things. One, a very good football coach. Two, a combustible character quick to anger when things don’t go his way, whether that’s on the pitch or in the transfer market or a little from both column A and column B.

Ergo, if he’s still Spurs manager when the season ends, then almost by definition Spurs have had an acceptable season. By his standards at least, and those seem like as reasonable a benchmark as any at this time.