Back in the game: here comes the Premier League again
We go again. Thirty-three days after Gianluigi Donnarumma pawed away Bukayo Saka’s penalty at Wembley, exploding not just England’s fragile pretensions to supremacy but our fleeting illusions of national unity, here comes the riposte. The return of the
Premier League to our multiple portable devices marks a return to English football not as we would dreamily like it to be, but as it really is: flawed and fierce, fuelled by personality and narrative and billionaires and gambling sponsorships, intensely tribal, consumed by petty arguments and – whisper it – the envy of the world.
This is, perhaps, no longer a fashionable sentiment to express in some quarters. To some, the Premier League – with its 24-hour media saturation, its faint whiff of exceptionalism, its greed, its bombast, its vast unaccountable power and entrenchment of financial inequality – represents everything wrong with the sport. Moreover, there are times – say, while watching Brighton 0 Fulham 0, or yet another feted but fetid early-season stalemate between two title contenders – when the Premier League’s rolling hype machine feels as much curse as blessing.
But there was a reason that the odious European Super League could exist without Germany, could exist without France, but was dead from the moment the English clubs walked. The Premier League may not have the world’s best footballer or its biggest stadium. But it provided more players at Euro 2020 than anywhere else, more players to the recent Copa América than the domestic leagues of Argentina or Brazil. The manager who finished 10th last season was snapped up by Real Madrid. For all the Premier
League’s waste and ruin, its basic star magnetism – a hive of high-end playing and coaching talent drawn from the widest possible pool – is unarguable. That its six biggest clubs were content simply to rip all that up remains an act of unforgivable deceit.
Above all what characterises the Premier League is this sense of stickiness, the feeling that every part of it matters to someone somewhere, that every game is, in its own small way, a global event. There are even people in London who have no idea where Brentford is. But on Friday night, when they host Arsenal in the opening game of the season and become the 50th club to host Premier League football, the name of this little west London suburb will be beamed all over the world, lent the sort of heft and resonance that only really football can offer. Brentford – the place, and the club – will never be quite the same again.
As well-run and well-drilled as Thomas Frank’s side are, the manager’s first priority will be to stay afloat in a league where every weekend throws up fresh and frightening challenges. They have plenty of quality of their own – Ivan Toney and Bryan Mbeumo up front, Mathias Jensen and Sergi Canós in midfield – but above all they will have to do a lot of defending.
Of the three promoted sides, Brentford’s defined style and relative novelty factor probably give them the best chance of staying up. Norwich are superficially similar to the squad relegated two seasons ago, but wiser too, and the Kosovan Milot Rashica is an exciting replacement for the departing
Emiliano Buendía. Watford have reinvented themselves again under interim manager Xisco Muñoz (all Watford managers are interim managers) and arrive with the best defensive record from last season’s Championship.
Crystal Palace’s bold experiment under their new coach, Patrick Vieira, could legitimately go either way. The same might be said for Newcastle, whose novel approach of doing nothing at all may just come back to bite them. Burnley’s trademark compact style just about worked last season, but against better-rested, better-drilled sides, a thin and ageing squad could finally discover its limits. At this embryonic stage, these six look like the likeliest relegation candidates.
And yet a note of caution should be sounded at this point. There is so much that we still don’t know about this season: not simply in terms of personnel and pre-season form, but the basic contours of what the 2021-22 Premier League will look and feel and sound like. The full-time return of fans – still contingent on external variables such as government bungling, viral variants and a potential winter fourth wave – will restore the noise and colour and emotional depth so sadly lacking during those anaemic lockdown months. It should also restore the home-team advantage that was so startlingly reversed last season, when away wins outnumbered home wins for the first time in English top-flight history.
In this respect and others, this season should provide a vivid point of contrast. The luxury of an actual pre-season, with no World Cup in summer 2022, will afford most teams a higher physical and tactical ceiling. This could benefit high-energy counterpressing teams such as Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester City.
Then we come to the other Covid-flavoured shadow hanging over the summer: money. Outside the elite, clubs are weathering their straitened circumstances in different ways. Leicester have strengthened again and should challenge for the top four.
Another summer of turmoil at Tottenham has seen Nuno Espírito Santo installed and, still no clarity on the future of Harry Kane; Everton are trying to consolidate under Rafael Benítez without any real idea of what exactly they want to consolidate. West Ham’s sixth-placed finish last season may soon begin to feel like a faint pandemic memory, like queueing outside Lidl or clapping for the NHS. Brighton could be a top-half side if they reinvest the £50m they got for Ben White in a decent striker, which they probably won’t. For the 13th season in a row, meanwhile, Arsenal remain all potential.
And so to the title race, which should be a four-handed affair, with the curious caveat that all the contenders look a striker light. City have needed to replace Sergio Agüero for a couple of years, yet their purchase of Jack Grealish suggests that Pep Guardiola’s dream of winning the quadruple with a team of 11 attacking midfielders remains very much alive. Chelsea’s top scorer in the league last season was Jorginho with seven, which explains their pursuit of Romelu Lukaku. Liverpool will try to flog their front three of 29-year-olds through another season, a strategy that will work handsomely right up until the moment it doesn’t. Manchester United are the only club who definitely look stronger: perhaps a touch over-reliant on a 34-year-old Edinson Cavani, but with Jadon Sancho and Raphaël Varane plugging two of their problem areas, second place is the very least they should expect.
It has become something of a cliche to describe the return of football in terms of catharsis and escapism, perhaps even a sort of soul food: the familiar and comforting buzz of rancour and piledrivers and Martin Tyler and bickering over electronic offside lines (which will be thicker this season, whatever that means). This has always been something of an elision; there is arguably no sport that so eloquently expresses our ugliness as a society (racism, chauvinism, waste, avarice, unregulated capitalism). Perhaps all we can really say, before the start of another breathless race to May, is that this has been the game for as long as we’ve known and loved it. It will thrill us and move us, bore us and break our hearts. Premier League, we hate you. We’ve missed you. We’re glad you were gone. We’re glad you’re back.
West Ham's sixthplaced finish may soon feel like a pandemic memory, like queuing outside Lidl or clapping for the NHS