What makes a good Premier League season? And will we get that in 26/27?
We’re only three weekends into the new Premier League season. Surely that’s far too early to decide whether it’s going to be any good or not?
Yes, yes it is, but in the immortal words of Barry from EastEnders: We’re gonna do it anyway, we’re gonna do it anywaaayyyyyyy.
Here, then, are 10 things that make for a good Premier League season and whether we’re on track during this campaign.
Proper title fight
Obviously the main one, and obviously a significant concern at this time. Not every title race has to be AGUERROOOOOOO or It’s Up For Grabs Now but it shouldn’t be easy in September to identify the overwhelmingly probable winner of the league title.
There’s a caveat here, of course, that a year ago there were just as many people going “Well, it looks like the defending champions are just going to win it again then” after a strong start to the defence of their title.
But in hindsight there was always a skittishness and an unsustainability to Liverpool’s start to last season, all seat-of-the-pants clinging to the fading momentum of the previous season and last-gasp winners.
What looked at that time to be the Hallmark of Champions was just a side that was no longer actually that good getting away with it for a bit. As ever, occasionally not playing well and still winning is a Hallmark of Champions. Routinely having to win while not playing well is just a sign that you’re not actually playing very well and isn’t particularly sustainable.
All credit, though, to Liverpool for sacrificing themselves for the greater good and not just running away with the league title last season, knowing that would have been boring.
But right now it doesn’t look like Arsenal are as community-minded, the ruthlessly efficient pricks.
All this talk of Liverpool and Arsenal and It’s Up For Grabs Now has also made us think how weird it is that – if you don’t count 24/25 as you shouldn’t because it wasn’t actually a race – there has never really been a Premier League title race involving Liverpool and Arsenal.
In semi-related news, we also have a long-held theory that the best Liverpool-Man United dynamic isn’t for them to be in a title race against each other but is instead when one of them is really good and the other is at least slightly sh*t. Doesn’t remotely matter which way round. The Premier League has obviously been blessed with many spells of United good, Liverpool sh*t in its earlier years and the reverse more recently. We’re not at all confident we’re getting it either way round this season. And not because they’re both good, just to be clear.
READ: Premier League winners and losers: Arsenal, Arbeloa, Araujo, Ipswich, Vuskovic, De Zerbi
Proper relegation battle
The other obvious necessity. And the news here is much more encouraging. This one should be absolutely fine. After a couple of grim fallow years where all the promoted clubs just f*cked straight back off again with nary a whimper, Sunderland and Leeds did splendidly last season and saw off two of what was just starting to look like an immovably Settled Seventeen.
Wolves were so bad that they were clearly done for very, very early and it rarely looked like Burnley were doing anything but continue their grimly and existentially pointless yo-yoing existence, but just one relegation place having genuine uncertainty over its destination until the end of the season is enough if the race is sufficiently attention-grabbing.
Especially when the realisation slowly dawns that it’s going to become a scrap between two big teams. Already seems mental looking back that West Ham, a club that had been a Premier League club for 30 of the competition’s 34 seasons, were the plucky little guys everyone was rooting for in that scrap.
And, even more ludicrously, there’s every chance we get the exact same scenario again this season with, say, a Newcastle or Aston Villa cast in the West Ham role because…
Big club in crisis
It doesn’t have to be Spurs. But it does seem like it’s pretty much always likeliest to be Spurs. We do still think Manchester United have huge potential in the sphere of big-club slapstick pratfall farce this season, but let’s not overcomplicate things at this time. Spurs are our obvious best bet here. Again.
They had a genuinely extraordinary transfer window, one that begun with them making bold and decisive statements that, while in many cases are already starting to look like they might have been duds, were at least undeniably and powerfully un-Spurslike in their big-club confidence and swift execution.
And yet by the end of the window they were still desperately scrambling around for anyone else’s cast-offs and going full Timo Werner. Love that for them.
We fully expect, by the way, to be able by around December to be able to make a coherent argument that Mykhailo Mudryk was their best summer signing because it is the history of the Tottenham.
Upstart promoted club
Once you start listing the things that make a Premier League season tick, you start to see how they’re all linked, how one begets the other.
Think about it. Spurs and Man United were both (domestically at least) mired in hilariously bleak crises in 24/25, but the lack of jeopardy brought about by the sheer levels of incompetence displayed by the three promoted/relegated clubs had a significant dulling effect.
We vividly remember back then people being annoyed at how even one competent promoted/relegated club would’ve been enough to give us Spurs and United in a genuine relegation scrap.
Spurs, relentless people-pleasers that they are (note: not the people that actually support Spurs, who must never be allowed joy or happiness for more than around a fortnight or so once every four to five calendar years) provided just that the following year.
But it would have all been for nought had it not been for the efforts of Sunderland and, to a lesser but still meaningful extent in every way, Leeds.
Leeds’ competence was not just less pronounced less early than Sunderland’s, it was also just less surprising. There was always decent reason to believe that Leeds could buck the recent trend for promoted clubs. They were never really upstarts. Just… starts.
Sunderland, having scraped through the play-offs with a squad they’d cobbled together from assorted Football League spare parts, started the season with the words ‘Derby County’ echoing through every pre-season preview. They were a different beast altogether, and they have been followed now down that path by Hull.
Which is great news for absolutely everyone. Apart from Fulham, who are this year’s Wolves, and whichever one of Newcastle and Villa turns out to be this year’s West Ham, and most obviously Spurs, who are this year’s Spurs.
Managergeddon
We unapologetically love the managerial merry-go-round. The more manager sackings the better. Now, when we say stuff like this we sometimes get comments about how it’s not nice to enjoy people losing their jobs, to which our reply is simple: obviously that’s true when you’re talking about the real world.
But football managers are not part of the real world. They are part of football, which is a whole other thing altogether. Yes, it is very bad when ordinary people lose their jobs because it can and does have devastating effects on their lives and their family’s lives.
When a Premier League football manager loses his job, something that is baked in to that intrinsically absurd existence, they get given several million pounds. And then another job soon after.
Unless they were so staggeringly bad in so many astonishing ways that no other clubs will hire them, in which rare instances they simply get jobs on Match of the Day instead.
So no, you don’t have to feel guilty at all about enjoying Managergeddon. Logically, a season and summer of managergeddon like the last 12 months should prompt an equal and opposite reaction. Logically, a year where two-thirds of the Premier League change their manager should be followed by a time of relative calm.
Happily, that’s not how this works at all. The fact there’s a whole bunch of new managers just makes it even more likely that there will be more managergeddon this time as assorted clubs realise one by one that they’ve made a terrible mistake. Again.
There is no logic in the world of managergeddon. Just glorious, stupid chaos. And you can already easily identify at least six Premier League clubs who will probably change manager this season. Many of whom only did so in the summer.
Manager veers wildly off piste
Again, very much linked to the above is this one. But you simply can’t have a great Premier League season without a manager losing their mind somewhere along the way.
Sometimes it can just be a new manager coming in who is in some way inherently ridiculous. A Nathan Jones or a Liam Rosenior, for instance, who just constantly give good press conference due to the absurdity of the stuff that just comes tumbling out of their mouth at all times.
That’s fine, it works.
But far, far better is when an established and even beloved manager snaps and loses it. Kevin Keegan, god love him, will be forever the go-to here. But you’ve also got Rafa Benitez’s facts. Or Jose Mourinho, the world’s most disrespectful human, demanding respect. Or Antonio Conte pulling his very expensive hair out at the sheer unfixable futility of Tottenham Hotspur.
Alas, we’ll surely never again get the guaranteed fireworks of having a highly combustible and emotional Italian manager in charge of a club as relentlessly addicted to embarrassment as Tottenham, so we’ll just have to take what we can get this season.
Emergence of a Michu-style cult figure
Remember that brief but glorious period of Barclays history where a Michu became as much a part of the comparative landscape as an area the size of Wales? Great, great times. You could have covered an area the size of Wales with all the references to how many Michus Club X could have got for what they spent on Player Y.
Alas, it soon faded from use because despite the very best efforts of the Premier League’s top boffins in their secret underground lair, attempts to clone Michu failed. Which meant there was only ever one of them, rendering the dream of giving teams the genuine option of deciding whether to get themselves one Paul Pogba or 50 Michus never became a reality. There was also the problem that the one actual Michu also turned out in the end to not actually be that good.
But we imagine the technology has improved a bit now, meaning that when the next Michu comes along it will be much easier to create enough of them to go around.
Especially as the exponential growth of transfer fees means that a Michu-style bargain is now spending £40m on Mamadou Sangare, so even for the most egregiously flashy of big-spending clubs this summer you only need about three of him.
Fun
Necessarily vague and ill-defined but absolutely crucial. What is fun football? We’re not sure we can define it, but we know it when we see it. Or, more pointedly, don’t.
Last season wasn’t fun, was it? Not really. The football wasn’t fun. The best team in the country weren’t at all fun. The fun there was to be found was rooted in incompetence, which can absolutely be a big part of the fun, but does really need the opposing counter-balance to really work.
The early signs this season are very encouraging. We think this season is going to be a lot more fun and a lot less mechanical as Premier League football lurches into a new era. Even Arsenal themselves might be watchable this season, based on the Chelsea performance. Huge if true.
A pantomime villain
Can be almost anything, this. A particular tactic, a particular manager, a particular player. Or chairman. Could even be a pundit. Just someone or something that just comes along and boils everyone’s p*ss and sends heads to Mars on a regular basis. Even if it’s actually largely benign or insignificant. Especially if it’s actually largely benign or insignificant.
Though neither benign nor insignificant, Mr Marinakis is the obvious current holder of this title and by far the likeliest to deliver the goods this season. His logical next move now has to be completing one of the three or four manager sackings he’s got lined up for us this year while a game is still in progress.
But it doesn’t have to be him. Could be almost anyone or anything. One way or another, we’re almost certain we’ll end the season being able to tick this box.
The only caveat – and it’s a significant one – is that it absolutely cannot and must not be in any way related to VAR, because absolutely all VAR chat (even in the vanishingly rare event of such chat being even-handed and fair and taking place in good faith with correct application of relevant terminology) is just f*cking dull. It’s not biased against your club. Or in favour of that club. Grow up.
Erling Haaland breaking the fourth wall
Most of these have been pretty vague and wide-ranging for obvious reasons. We’re talking in generic terms here about what makes a Premier League season good. But Erling Haaland absolutely Fleabagging the sh*t out of a camera lens has been our favourite thing about football for a good couple of years now, to the extent that we can no longer even conceive of truly enjoying a Premier League season without it.
