Top 10 things that make us giddy about Premier League return and Man City’s tour of shame

We’ve almost made it. In four short days, we will have Premier League football to get angry about again.

It is with something approaching enormous relief that we can tell you that we are probably only around 100 hours away from a VAR controversy. We quite literally cannot wait.

But this is no ordinary post-interlull Barclays return, is it? This one has an elephant in the room that could feasibly crush us all. This, thanks to an unprecedented combination of events, might actually be the best Premier League weekend ever and also kind of the worst.

Here are 10 things we’re looking forward to this weekend, only half of which are specifically about them.

Man City’s Anfield welcome
It’s just going to be very funny, isn’t it? We understand that it’s all very serious and that Manchester City are very naughty boys and we fully support the rest of the Premier League’s ‘fire them directly into the sun’ policy.

But it is still quite funny that any actual sun-firing for City – possibly reduced to firing them directly into the moon on appeal – is still quite a long way off.

City’s own determination to drag the whole affair out as long as possible condemns them. Their surely futile determination to drag the process out long enough that they can in fact avoid altogether being fired into any extraterrestrial entity from any kind of space cannon means they must instead endure the football equivalent of parading naked through the streets of King’s Landing while Hannah Waddingham walks behind saying “Shame!” in a Very Serious Voice.

The news breaking so early in an extended interlull, and the sheer scale of City’s malfeasance being so distractingly off the charts, means that there hasn’t yet really been full focus on just how f*cking mortifying the next few months are going to be for City everywhere they go.

We assume there’s going to be a very swift switch in focus towards this once the international formalities conclude, and the fact City’s first game as pariahs and the biggest cheats in the history of English football is at the other club most conspicuously screwed over by said cheating is so delicious it simply has to be fattening.

The songs
It’s possible we may eventually tire of fans singing “Champions of England, you know what you were” at City by the time their actual punishment is revealed. But Sunday will not be that day. Anfield will be the first but also among the most passionate grounds to eviscerate City on their tour of shame, by which point of course everyone else at all the other games will already have gleefully done so as well.

It’s going to be glorious, especially when Gary Neville makes constant pointed reference to it on commentary when Sky would probably rather not have it repeatedly noted that they have spent absolutely insane amounts of money to cover and hype what has turned out to be a sham product for a really quite extended period of time.

You’ll never see anything like this ever again? We never saw it at all. AGUUEEEERRRR…. oh etc.

Man City mentality
It wouldn’t actually matter where Manchester City were playing this weekend – although obviously it’s very good that it’s both away and at a ground of one of the clubs they’ve most conspicuously wronged. Wherever they played it would be a fascinating spectacle and psychological experiment.

There’s been enough evidence during the internationals that some of their players are a touch distracted, and who wouldn’t be? All their achievements are being questioned, their futures suddenly starkly uncertain.

We may never find out for sure but it would be interesting to know precisely how your Elliot Andersons and Enzo Fernandezes feel about being signed by a club that apparently knew in the summer all this was about to go down.

How do they feel about everything now? How do they feel about this club? Those who’ve already had the experience of winning things will have a more sky-blue-tinted view. Be more protective of what they’ve achieved.

We’ve seen it with players and managers past and present. Joe Hart, an intelligent man who had up until this point proved himself a smart and astute pundit, is now desperately insisting that it’s all fine and that there’s no way he could have been lied to by some cheats, actually. Pep Guardiola has gone from saying he would no longer be friends with Man City’s owners if they’d deceived him to giving them unswerving support.

You’d imagine current players of long-standing feel something similar. What they’ve achieved at City still means something to them, even if it no longer means anything to anyone else. They will still desperately want to believe. It’s easy to imagine how City could adopt a kind of siege mentality of ‘us against the world’.

But it’s also a lot harder for them to do that when so many of their key players now are relatively new to the club, as is the manager. They’ve spent most of their careers being the world. Are they really fully committed now to being the us?

READ: Enzo Maresca deserves Man City apology not Al Mubarak, Soriano evasion

Liverpool mentality
Incredibly, Liverpool actually do now have the chance to do something that, despite their own proselytising and magnificent, successful history, they’ve never actually done ever before.

For the very first time ever, Liverpool have the chance to record a win that genuinely does in fact Mean More.

Imagine that. Imagine your whole schtick being that you are somehow different to, better than, any other football club, that fans who support other clubs simply don’t realise or understand that supporting Liverpool is a deeper and more meaningful experience than theirs because reasons.

And imagine, for one game only, that actually being the case. It’s bigger than any cup final, because cup finals can always come round again. Sunday is a pure perfect storm one-off, never to be repeated. Liverpool really won’t be walking alone.

We can already see in our mind the coverage of Liverpool’s players warming up and a pundit and it is probably Roy Keane in voiceover telling them earnestly to treat it like any other game. But how can they possibly do so?

How will it actually feel watching Man City play football?
We’re genuinely intrigued by this, because we honestly don’t know how we’re going to feel about it. On a fundamental level, what’s it going to be like to watch Manchester City play football between now and the time punishment is handed down?

Will it feel real? Will the elephant in the room crush even giant Erling Haaland under its £900m feet? Will it be funnier if City fade away in a swirl of distracted defeats against a series of teams for whom this fixture has just become a cup final, or is it funnier if they carry on crushing all before them in an ultimately pointless f*ck you of a title charge that everyone kind of knows doesn’t really mean anything?

What we will say here is that if, as we suspect, it doesn’t feel very real somehow, that the whole vibe is weird and unmoored, that the Premier League will deserve it.

We’ve grown increasingly weary over the last fortnight or so of just how much time the Premier League has spent patting itself on the back.

How much time spent going “Ladies and gentlemen, we got them” and how little time spent self-reflecting on just how City came to be in a position to cheat everyone else to the tune of nearly a billion quid over close to a decade, about how the whole house of cards only began to fall because of a rogue hacker, and how even now any punishment the Premier League sees fit to hand down will come against pressure from the UK government because the league really did kind of let state-ownership of football clubs happen back there because it had all pound signs spinning round its eyes.

El Sackico
This really might be the best weekend of Barclays we’ve ever had, you know. It was kind of guaranteed to be a good one, but circumstances have taken it to a new level.

It was always going to be the first weekend back after a mid-season international break only previously matched by the one for an actual World Cup back in 2022. It always had Liverpool-Man City and Man United-Spurs on its schedule, so it was always blessed with a couple of really decent games for supporters and hate-watchers alike.

But nobody could have ever dreamed just how big those games would become. Liverpool-City is now surely the biggest Premier League game ever played at this stage of the season, given everything.

Yet on any other weekend, there would be absolutely no question that the standout fixture is a Man United-Spurs game between two clubs who a fortnight ago thought they were in crisis but have just discovered what true crisis actually looks like.

Both these teams have looked just awful this season. Both look genuine relegation candidates on the evidence we’ve seen so far. Both look mentally fragile. But while for both these clubs “Championship football next season” might still seem like an unthinkable catastrophe, it now longer seems quite the worst-case scenario it did relatively recently.

Whatever else happens, nobody is saying that we might actually have to completely destroy one of these grand old clubs forever for the greater good – perhaps even the survival – of the game itself.

Well, some people are saying that, but they are Spurs fans talking about their own club and they deserve our sympathy and support in these troubled times.

So yes, this is a game between two struggling giants that has been put in perspective over recent weeks. City’s plight might turn out to really benefit one or both of them, lift them from their doom-and-gloom and remind them that it really could be worse.

For now, though, it’s still a proper El Sackico of an occasion, a match featuring a ridiculously expensively assembled side that is way less than the sum of its parts under a volcanic manager ready to erupt and another put together on the cheap, cobbled together from spare parts and hope under a manager who seems like a decent cove but somewhat out of his depth.

Again, on any normal weekend in any normal season, the fact these two have done some kind of Freaky Friday identity swap and are both suffering dire consequences would be the biggest story in town.

What about Chelsea?
That’s going to be fun as well, isn’t it? Chelsea stepping back on to a Premier League pitch with overwhelming There But For The Grace Of God energy.

The general Premier League mood is now City v Everyone – or at least City And Some Fans Of Clubs Who Also Want To Be Able To Cheat Their Way To The Top Table Please v Everyone.

But where do Chelsea fit into that neat little dichotomy? Nowhere, is where. The greatest trick Man City ever pulled is making everyone nostalgic for the good old days when buying the league required only the cheeky scampery of mischief-making disruptor Roman Abramovich and the stolen mineral wealth of a nation.

They were gentleman scammers. The finest crooks the Premier League’s ever had. We’ll not see their like again. Let’s have a little clap for Chelsea.

Arsenal v Leeds
We just think this one will be neat.

It’s an interesting game between two interesting teams, isn’t it? Champions looking to put right an irritating pre-lull wrong they’ve had a few weeks to stew over against an upwardly mobile team that, having got through season one after promotion is making a concerted and impressive effort to kick on. That used to be enough, didn’t it? That used to be all you needed from some Barclays. Two decent teams with contrasting styles and a keen sense that what’s likely to happen will be quite good.

Barely a footnote this weekend.

Relegation six-pointers
Not one, not two, but three relegation six-pointers on the fixture list this weekend. That’s a heady October brew.

If we were going to quibble, we’d argue that Crystal Palace v Nottingham Forest is definitely a game that should have been scheduled for March when it might have its most potent six-pointer energy. Although we’ll concede that there’s a risk there that Palace have by that time already had the necessary and inevitable 10-game run where they get 21 points that comes every season somewhere along the way to lift them clear of relegation danger and into the calm, familiar waters of 13th.

There’s also Fulham v Ipswich, of course, which does still feel quite six-pointery despite a very solid start to life back in the Premier League from an Ipswich side that has for now entirely eclipsed Norwich as East Anglia’s premier yo-yo club.

And obviously the aforementioned United-Spurs misery-loves-company affair at Old Trafford.

Weirdly, Hull v Everton is not a relegation six-pointer, and we’d have placed very decent money on it being so before a ball was kicked.

Some other teams
There are also some other games featuring some other teams, where they will all gather together and sing songs about Man City. Football truly does unite us all in the end.