We know you’re all currently big canoe slalom and BMX fans, which is absolutely fair enough, but seriously guys – the Premier League is back in a couple of weeks. We need to be ready.
Here, then, are some early predictions of what’s going to come around in the latest instalment of Our League and its associated nonsense.
Man City to finish first (again), Arsenal to finish second (again)
Okay, we’re winning no points for originality here but it does feel like there’s a more clear-cut Big Two than there has been since Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were at their very best.
City still look very much the likeliest winners to make it five in a row and that remains the case even when you factor in the real but slim possibility that this is the season when some punishments start being handed down for their alleged antics.
And actually we expect them to win it more comfortably than in either of the last two seasons in which Arsenal have made such impressive and concerted nuisances of themselves. It would be no surprise to see both teams fall back a bit from last season and our current expectation is that Arsenal’s drop-off will be the greater.
We’re applying the logic here that states competing with the overwhelming heft of City is so exhausting that it can’t be managed three times in a row.
But we must also consider that Arsenal can probably afford to drop off from the last two seasons and still finish second. Doubts swirl around all the other contenders in a way they simply don’t about City and Arsenal who are, in simplistic terms, carrying on along an already successful path.
United have stuck with a manager who even when it went right in his first season took them only to third, Liverpool have a new manager facing what might just be the impossible task of following Klopp, Chelsea have decided to rip it up and start again with a new manager yet to take charge of a top-flight team, Aston Villa would have to kick on significantly from an already high mark, Newcastle have even more ground to make up and Tottenham are still resolutely and determinedly Tottenham.
There are no fancy rewards for saying City will win the league or that Arsenal will finish in the top two, but combine the two in a straight forecast and you get what seems a perfectly fair price given what they’ve done over the last two seasons and the doubts around absolutely everyone else’s ability to challenge.
Alexander Isak to win the Golden Boot
There’s a great big prolific Norwegian elephant-robot in the room for this one, but nobody needs ‘Haaland will win the Golden Boot imvho’ predictions in their lives. We’ve already been obvious enough above.
But Haaland’s dominance of the book and an undeniable dearth of genuinely prolific genuine strikers leaves some eye-catching prices around for everyone else and plenty of each-way value.
Isak should be approaching his peak at 24 and is now very much among that small group of prolific strikers of which the Premier League can boast. He scored 21 goals last season, 11 of them in Newcastle’s final 12 games, and there’s plenty of reasons to suppose he can match or surpass that.
First, that fast finish is encouraging for believers in momentum, but there’s also the fact that these returns came in what was, overall, a disappointing campaign for Newcastle. It’s reasonable to expect them to improve on 23/24 and thus for Isak to do likewise.
Similar arguments can absolutely be made here for your Cole Palmers, but there is with the Chelsea man the first requirement of confirming he is no one-season wonder. We’re enormously confident he’ll do so, but at similar odds to the Swede we know which one we’d favour. One last little thing in Isak’s favour is the absence of European football for Newcastle this year; it’s not a huge factor but if it’s going to have any impact on his Premier League minutes at all it’ll be a beneficial one.
Russell Martin to be first manager to leave
The Sack Race market is a fascinating one currently, skewed at the top by Eddie Howe’s possible departure for England and riddled with uncertainty from there down.
But an inexperienced proponent of possession-based football leading a team into the Premier League didn’t go well for Vincent Kompany last time out, and his Burnley team were far more convincing in going about promotion than Martin’s Southampton.
Martin also unavoidably lacks the star quality that so bewitched all at Burnley – and almost everyone in the media, and then inexplicably Bayern Munich – thus blinding them to his flaws.
There are heaps of contenders here – from possible relegation scrappers, to any one of the Our League novices taking on jobs from Brighton to Chelsea to Liverpool, to the incumbents with questions to answer at United and Spurs – so any shout here is a speculative one. But it’s not hard to envisage this one spiralling out of control quickly for a manager whose team face Newcastle, Man United and Arsenal within their first seven games.
Liverpool to finish outside the top four
Liverpool exist to make mugs of pre-season predictions. Stragglers when title challengers are predicted, proper contenders when everybody overlooks them.
In large part, that’s down to a Jekyll-and-Hyde effort over the last five years, in which they’ve amassed (most recent first) 82, 67, 92, 69 and 99 points. It’s a pretty clear pattern, and one that points to this being one of the tricky seasons and that’s before we even get into the fact that for the first time in nine years Liverpool embark on a Premier League season without Jurgen Klopp calling the shots.
Whether a new manager makes it more or less likely that the current pattern remains intact for one more season is an interesting philosophical puzzler, but the previous Barclays record of those managers who’ve tried to follow the legends isn’t exactly encouraging for Liverpool here.
They did still finish in the top four when managing only 69 points in 2020/21, and with doubts over the credentials of all outside the Big Two it’s possible that could happen again, but at the prices available we’d rather side with Slot underwhelming rather than overachieving.
READ: Somehow, Liverpool may now be the Premier League’s biggest unknown quantity
Crystal Palace to finish in the top half
It’s markedly odds-against which is fair enough based on Crystal Palace’s proud history of finishing between 11th and 15th, but seemingly at odds with the brilliant way they finished last season and the relative dearth of opposition they would needto match or better last season’s 10th place.
Oliver Glasner has gone unpoached this summer, which feels important. We’d back the Austrian to come up with a swift solution for the loss of Michael Olise, especially if Eberechi Eze can be kept from the clutches of his assorted suitors.
But even if Eze were to depart, we’d still like Glasner’s chances of steering Palace through the mid-table morass.
Real fans of ‘carrying last season’s run-in form into the start of the next’ might even want to consider going Full Leicester with this one, but alas the days of 5000/1 quotes for such things are in the past. Not even this season’s Leicester are 5000/1 now, which feels like a rare missed opportunity for banter from the more whimsical of the nation’s bookmakers.