Slot sacked, Arsenal win league, Man Utd champions of Europe, Pep walks – 10 early predictions for 25/26
With this Premier League season all squared away alarmingly early, with not even outlandish mathematical theoreticals to cling to about the title or relegation.
Nobody outside the clubs involved is doing a remotely convincing job of pretending to care about who qualifies for Europe, and we find ourselves with simply no choice but to let our thoughts idly drift to next season and what might happen then.
These are just 10 of those things, and they are all absolutely 100 per cent guaranteed nailed-on certainties.
Arsenal win the league
The key to this is our long-standing obsession with what we’ve just this minute decided to call The Premier League Title Challenge Rule of Three.
This Rule contends that no team can survive three consecutive forlorn title bids without breaking themselves both physically and mentally.
In 2022/23, Arsenal were title challengers. In 2023/24, Arsenal were title challengers. In 2024/25, there was the incident with the pigeon. But were Arsenal actually title challengers?
We’re not being dicks about this, it’s a genuine question, and our genuine answer is that no, they were not. And that’s actually very good news, because it means they can challenge next season instead, rather than being all bust up and broken and having to waste next season recovering from the stress of it all.
Think about the last couple of seasons. Think about the emotional energy Arsenal poured into those title bids. Our views on the dreary fun-scuppering side of the Celebration Police are well known, but there was still some kernel of a point in there; every Arsenal game became a cup final in which either victory or defeat was greeted with wild and draining outpouring of emotion. For good and for bad.
This season – this league season, anyway – has had its share of moments like that, most pointedly after the 5-1 win over Manchester City, but it’s not been the same week in, week out stress of the last two years.
It’s been clear for months now that Arsenal would not win the league, and their focus has slowly but surely and correctly shifted across to the Champions League. Sure, Mikel Arteta has said all the right things about momentum and doing their bit, but with second place pretty much nailed down it was basic common sense that Arsenal’s primary objective drifted toward the continent, where they stand three eminently winnable games away from the ultimate prize.
Those Real Madrid games, and the giddy thrill of humping seven goals past a bewildered PSV, that have carried the emotional heft for Arsenal in recent months. But those games come around only every few weeks. It’s nothing like as draining as turning the Premier League into 38 cup finals as they have for the last couple of years.
With no title challenge and both domestic cup competitions also off Arsenal’s schedule by early February, they have had a far less taxing second half of this season – mentally and physically – than in either of the last two.
What the collapse of Man City and the rest concealed for so long was that this has been Arsenal’s fallow league season all along. Had City not imploded, had Chelsea appointed a proper manager in the summer, had Tottenham and Man United not been absolute basket cases, they might have been scrapping for fourth place and it would have been obvious.
The greater regression of everyone else has meant that even a resting Arsenal have been better than everyone else in the Premier League apart from the division’s one actual top-tier side this season.
And the glass-half-full interpretation of that for Arsenal is that it gives them greater hope of being able to go again next time. The Rule of Three. Accept our interpretation of this year’s events, and next season becomes year one of a new set. And at a time when there has never been more reason to doubt the ability of everyone else to go with them if they get it right.
It’s not even like it’s hard to see what Arsenal need to do, either. Buying a striker seems like a good starting point. Keep hold of all the current stars seems both eminently sensible and profoundly achievable. And then just don’t have an injury crisis. Three ticks for those and they’ll p*ss it. Maybe.
Arne Slot sacked with Liverpool nowhere after two injury setbacks
Liverpool have been outrageously impressive this season but we still can’t quite shake the idea that there’s a distinct element of lightning being bottled that will be hard, perhaps impossible, to replicate.
Repeating the extreme serendipity of Jurgen Klopp’s old guard being so perfectly complemented by Arne Slot’s more thoughtful approach and his brilliant work finessing that midfield into something so wonderfully better than the considerable sum of its existing parts feels like a big ask, and that’s without factoring in Liverpool’s undeniable good fortune with injuries this season.
There’s honestly no sour grapes about this. Well maybe a very small number of very slightly sour grapes. It just feels like a lot has come together entirely perfectly to make what was on paper a very, very good Liverpool team into an entirely unstoppable one. And we just don’t think it will happen again, not so easily anyway.
But ‘Brilliant team to be slightly less brilliant’ butters no reckless early prediction parsnips in these parts. We go big or we go home.
So we say this. Trent Alexander-Arnold leaves. The years finally catch up with Mo Salah and Virgil van Dijk, a colossal pair of modern Liverpool greats whose tiny cracks of mortality at the back end of this tiring season will inexorably expand with another year’s effort in the legs. At least one of that powerhouse midfield trio gets a significant injury that leads to altogether too much Wataru Endo.
And Liverpool end the season with less than 70 points and a new manager.
READ: Arne Slot, Liverpool next: No manager lasts long after winning Premier League in first season
Gareth Southgate’s Tottenham will be quietly and sensibly but soullessly eighth
Ange Postecoglou doesn’t make it to the end of May as Spurs manager, which is less a prediction and more a statement of obvious soon-to-be fact.
You almost have to marvel at the fact here we have a manager of Spurs – Spurs, for goodness’ sake! – who has contrived a position where he could entirely feasibly deliver them a trophy after all the years of jokes and ribaldry and yet absolutely everyone now agrees even that should not be enough to save him.
The problem for Ange is there are such easy go-to examples in recent years of clubs who should have gone with their first instinct and got rid of a trophy-winning manager but had their cold-eyed certainty ruinously pricked by the shiny delights of a rogue trophy win.
David Moyes at West Ham is far more Spurs-adjacent than Erik Ten Hag at Man United, even though Spurs fans might not like that fact. But both are valid warnings from extremely recent history for Daniel Levy.
We realise that it’s not really Spurs’ fault that the current top 10 in their next manager market is a completely unhinged and incoherent ‘Yes, those are absolutely 10 football managers’ collection. Spurs can’t control who people are backing, after all.
But that incoherent list, with Xavi and Scott Parker and Mauricio Pochettino and Max Allegri and a whole gaggle of managers whose only connection is that they have finished above Spurs with fewer resources, doesn’t exist in a vacuum either. It’s incoherent because Spurs are incoherent.
There is no indication they know what they want in their new manager, only that they almost certainly do want one. So people guess for themselves, and before you know it BANG you’ve got Xavi as second favourite.
Levy has a long history of lurching from one managerial style to the next in his outrageously lengthy list of managerial appointments, so our best guess is that he goes for some kind of anti-Ange. Our dread fear for Spurs is that he will settle upon Gareth Southgate.
Lovely Gareth. He won’t be rude to the reporters, will he? He won’t play absurd gung-ho football that ends in constant defeats, will he? No. He’ll have Spurs very quietly and very sensibly eighth, with a whole roster of very sensible Fleet Street columnists lining up to tell Spurs how they should be grateful for the stability and sensibleness Southgate has brought to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium as his team scores 42 goals and concedes 38 while also enjoying an entirely unconvincing run in one of the cups which ends when in the semi-finals they are at last required to face someone actually competent.
The season will be declared by all a great success and significant stepping stone but as Spurs are placed back on some kind of even footing but it will be utterly devoid of life and joy. Southgate will be sacked the following November with Spurs struggling in 14th after 12 games. He will be replaced by Russell Martin.
Man City finish second as Pep Guardiola walks away
The rebuild City began back in January continues apace in the summer as the club move unsteadily into the post-De Bruyne era.
They’re broadly absolutely fine, with none of the utter dizzying incompetence of their late 2024 meltdown, but by the time the November international break rolls around with City second but nine points adrift of Arsenal it becomes clear that the road back to their previous place atop English football is a long and bumpy one.
Rumours begin circulating that Pep Guardiola is having doubts about the whole caper and after a limp Champions League last-16 exit he goes Full Klopp and announces this season will be his last at City.
They stumble home as distant and unconvincing runners-up as the tributes to Guardiola pour in, while a small but vocal section of Liverpool fans get a bit strange about the whole caper and try to make it all about them as they yell at clouds about why Klopp’s Farewell Tour was so obviously and inherently superior.
The promoted teams all get relegated
Look, we’re all for having a bit of fun and being quite outlandish but we do want to make sure we get at least one right and don’t look like a complete arsehole when Liverpool win the league by 20 points and Arsenal finish in the bottom half.
So let us play the very safest of cards. Well done for getting promoted, Leeds, Burnley and yet to be identified sacrificial play-off winner. But you know the law now. You all have to go back down without threatening the 30-point mark. Even you, Leeds. Especially you.
READ: Will the Premier League consider drastic measures to give promoted clubs a chance?
Nottingham Forest revert to the mean
A first foray into the Champions League since their brief but glorious years as the European Cup’s dominant force takes its toll as Forest soon find themselves lost in the mid-table pack.
But it’s still job done for the club, who still sit loftily above the relegation fray despite it all having firmly established themselves as part of the Settled Seventeen at just the right moment in the Premier League’s development to ensure they have to do something really stupid to mess that up.
Yer Da was right all along about them being one of the Proper Premier League teams, wasn’t he? Even when they had only been in the Premier League for about four of the first 30 seasons? Classic Yer Da behaviour. They’ll be renaming it the Premiership next.
As for Forest, their eventual 11th-placed finish sits comfortably in ‘nothing is f*cked’ territory as nobody any longer even pretends to remember or care that they broke all the rules to stay up when they first got promoted while now waving goodbye to yet more promoted idiots who tried not to do that and have got themselves all completely and massively relegated once again.
Europa League holders Manchester United win Champions League, finish 17th
Everyone agrees that Manchester United’s wild comeback from 3-0 down with 73 seconds remaining in Bilbao to beat Bodo/Glimt 4-3 thanks to Harry Maguire’s headed winner in the ninth minute of added time is surely the greatest in United’s history and makes That Night In Barcelona look like a load of old sh*t.
Having thus enjoyed a third season of becoming an objectively worse football team but ending the campaign with ever bigger and better prizes to show for it, there is only really one way 2025/26 can go for United.
The only logical next step on a path that goes Carabao, FA Cup, Europa League in the trophy cabinet and third, eighth, 15th in the Premier League is for these logic-defying Red Devils to march to a fourth Champions League title – on the back of a series of unlikely late comebacks, naturally – while tumbling even further down the league.
Only so much further they can fall from 15th now promoted teams are legally required to just bugger straight back off again, of course, and they duly end the season one place but 19 points above the relegation zone.
Chelsea axe Maresca, appoint new manager on one-year contract
Giving all the players eight-year deals but having manager on one-year contracts that they barely survive is just another example of how clever Chelsea are as their ingenious policy of permanent caretaker managers and a mere billion-pound transfer spend propels them all the way to seventh place in the table.
They are disruptors, they are not bound by the conventional football wisdom that restricts you so. You simply will not and cannot understand how clever it all is, actually.
Crystal Palace finish 12th
Again, got to take the easy wins where we can find them in amongst all this other fantasyland guff.
There will be times next season where Palace look like one of the best two or three teams in the land. There will be times when they look like their entire understanding of what football is has been learned from one conversation with a sugar-addled toddler who accidentally caught five minutes of Baller League when trying to watch Paw Patrol.
They will go 10 games unbeaten. They will go seven games without a win. They will get 49 points. They will not be in serious danger of relegation. They will not meaningfully flirt with Europe. They will finish 12th. They are Crystal Palace and they are inevitable.
Bournemouth, Wolves, Brighton and Brentford all spend time in the Possible Champions League Places; none qualify
The ease with which the Premier League’s combined European efforts this season has secured a fifth Champions League place for next season takes full hold of the English football consciousness as 2025/26 rumbles up to full speed.
Reflexive mentions of ‘top four’ are now replaced with ‘top five’ and while initial care will be taken to ensure that fifth spot will always automatically be referred to as a ‘possible Champions League spot, of course’ it will slowly but surely become the new normal and just assumed that it definitely will be one because the Premier League is the bestest and we did it easily last time, didn’t we?
All sorts of interesting and new teams will occupy that fifth place at some point or other before it ends up just being Newcastle or Villa who having been in the competition a whole two times recently will no longer be deemed interesting or novel enough to care about.
England will then not get a fifth Champions League spot anyway.
