Welcome back, once again, to the new abnormal. For the best part of three decades the Premier League has been defined by its uncluttered power chords, beautifully slick in presenting itself as a place of endless growth, certainty, colour, a footballing cloud city, out there floating above the mess of the everyday.
But the world will eventually find its a way in. Et in arcadia ego. Here is a surprising Premier League fact: the last time the world’s most bombastic football league enjoyed an untroubled, uninterrupted 38-game season Raheem Sterling ended up being voted PFA young player of the year.
Admittedly, this needs to be balanced against the oddity of anointing a 24-year-old double league champion who made his debut seven years previously as the hottest young prospect around. But the 2018-19 season does seem increasingly distant these days, five long years since the Premier League kicked off without a cloud in the sky, with a sense of its own endless supremacy simply rolling on.
Some things remain essentially unchanged. That year Manchester City defended the league title on a final sunlit day in Brighton, José Mourinho was sacked in a haze of reassuring scorn and pettiness, this time by Manchester United, and all seemed right with the world. The following season VAR clicked in, a new TV rights deal promised more, better, bigger, louder for ever.
At which point things began to fall apart. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic turned the final third of that season into incidental music in a disaster zone. The following season was a closed set, ghost football in front of ghost crowds.
That disruption stretched into 2021-22, with its cancellations and firebreak scares. Last season was cut in half by a winter World Cup. At the end of which, as the new season prepares to clunk into gear, there is still a sense of something a little muddled and skittish, a strange brew of noises off, new tiers of power, something that wants to eat away at the edge of this thing just a little.
The Saudi Pro League may be no more than a sideshow for now, but one thing is true: for the first time in the Premier League’s lifespan we have a genuine new source of light and heat, somebody out there with deeper pockets and an even more visceral hunger for growth. This may be pop-up dictator-ball, but nobody outspends the Saudi Public Investment Fund, not even the Premier League’s own in-house branch.
Other existential threats continue to circle. The European Super League is still lurking like a dormant virus. It will be fascinating to see what happens when those two streams cross in some form, as they must at some point. The Super League needs teams and players. The Saudi project needs legitimate competition. Unlimited cash: meet unlimited greed. You two should get on.
For all that the Premier League still looks strong. Manchester City will remain obvious favourites to win what would be a fourth league title in a row. With good reason too: the best team in the world, best manager, best player under the age of 24. City’s midfield will be weakened by the departure of Ilkay Gündogan, one of the most underrated commodities in English football over the last 10 years, and the attack deprived of its grace note by Riyad Mahrez’s move to Saudi.
But it would still, with all due respect to that brilliant sky blue machine, be a desirable outcome for someone else to have a go at winning this thing. Arsenal’s recruitment of Declan Rice, Jurrien Timber and Kai Havertz, all early in the piece, looks like a significant act of team building.
Elsewhere the summer has been a little quiet on acquisitions. The biggest signings from outside the existing pool are Christopher Nkunku (albeit now injured) and Dominik Szoboszlai. There are also nine managers out there embarking on a first full season. Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester United and Spurs are all led by managers without a single really meaningful (apologies Mauricio, but, well) top-five European league title between them.
Not that this should be bar to progress. Erik ten Hag is a little closer to a team that feels like his own, with no Ronaldo wreckage to clear and an ownership that seems to be in a holding pattern. Chelsea have shed more than a dozen players and signed a few too, but have a proper manager now, with an off-season that has already brought approving talk of puke-soaked training purgatory. One of the good things about talent hoarding: you do end up with a lot of talent.
Tottenham already look like a gripping kind of mess, which is at least progress in one sense. Last season was anything but gripping. Liverpool have pared their midfield to the bone, where much will be asked of some new signings in an area that is key to the Klopp methodology. Newcastle will surely be even stronger, the coming power in the division, with a full season of Alexander Isak a dreamy prospect, Harvey Barnes and Sandro Tonali excellent additions. Aston Villa will also hope to carry over last season’s hard-running coherence.
At the other end of the table it is hard to see how Everton can avoid another year of running to stand still. Are Crystal Palace any good? Is Roy Hodgson really going to do this? Is the post-Wilf Zaha void a thing? Brentford are a supremely well put together team but Ivan Toney’s suspension could be a strange and disorientating thing. West Ham have the Europa League to process, and have lost Declan Rice, their best player.
Luton are the most fascinating new presence in a long time. Prepare for a surfeit of behind-the-scenes glimpses into the clanky stands, of pie-sampling reporters and heartwarming club staff montages. The Luton story is uplifting, their presence on this stage reassuring on issues such as pyramids, mobility, open access to that elite tier, the possibility, even now, of beating the bank. So far anyway. Staying in the league for a few years will be the real test of how easy it is to compete against that hard, non-negotiable financial hierarchy.
For now the Premier League can look straight ahead down the track at the prospect of an uninterrupted season, with just a few misgivings about external disruptors, altered gravity, coming powers. Perhaps the presence of some new money might even be a good thing, a chance to lance some of the entertainment-ball fluff, the CR7-as-eyeball-magnet culture, to clarify what it is that has in the past fuelled the English league, its ability, still, to provide a genuine and robust sporting competition.
Heritage and pedigree and the sense of an actual earthed and functioning football culture are the ultimate source of the Premier League’s annihilating riches, the thing it has been able to sell to the world for a quarter of a century. But it is a fragile balance, with a real danger of tipping too far the other way (also, just ask the rest of Europe how good the Premier League is for competitive balance).
A rare uncluttered season feels like an opportunity to build once again; and for now, at least, a run of clear road in what is an increasingly muddled and diffuse middle distance.
