25 August 2026
Michael Carrick appears set for trouble at Manchester United, the top two already looks fixed, and either Newcastle or Aston Villa could finish above Spurs.
Our knee-jerk reactions from the opening weekend last season were a mixed bag. Here’s hoping for more of the same.
10) Erling Haaland will not win the Golden Boot
If only there had been some mythical and ominous warning for Haaland before he chopped off his trademark look on the eve of the season, apparently for no reason other than to irritate Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
As the Old Testament might have asked: are the Israelites better without Samson? Does he do enough off the ball against the Philistines?
That imbalance in the hair department alone was enough for Haaland to fail to score on the opening Premier League weekend for the first time.
The Norwegian had not gone without a goal in the first game of a season since his final campaign with Salzburg seven years ago. And for only the 11th time in his Premier League career, Haaland had at least five shots in a match and failed to convert any of them against Bournemouth.
August has historically been the striker’s most productive month before he regresses towards a still-ridiculous average, but this slow start has instantly ruined his yearly habit of setting a new benchmark for the best scoring start to a Premier League season, while also leaving Mick Quinn untroubled.
No player under Enzo Maresca has ever scored more than 18 goals in a single campaign. Haaland will still pick up a few when supplied by Rayan Cherki, but it may be wiser to target that mark and leave the Golden Boot battle to the Jack Hinshelwoods and Gonzalo Garcias of this world.
9) Mamadou Sangare is the signing of the season
In the summer of 2022, Chelsea bid £50m for Romeo Lavia. Chelsea trying to sign a teenager is not unusual in itself, but offering that much for a player Southampton had bought for £14m only two months earlier, after just five games, was extraordinary.
If no absurdly wealthy cartel comes along to tempt Brentford with a similarly immediate profit on Sangare in this transfer window of Premier League-proven excess, then it really should prompt questions about what exactly everyone is doing.
There have been seven Premier League midfield transfers more expensive than the club-record fee Brentford paid for Sangare this summer. Sandro Tonali was one of several who cost multiple times more, and yet the Italian was part of a midfield unit that the Mali international smothered and overpowered through clever positioning, sharp passing and relentless energy.
A £39m bargain should not really exist, especially not when that verdict is delivered so unanimously after a single match. But Jordan Henderson did the walking, pointing and shouting in that Brentford midfield so Sangare could cover ground endlessly and probably earn the club a nine-figure sale next year.
8) One of Newcastle or Aston Villa will finish above Spurs
Brentford beating Spurs at home was, in truth, entirely on brand. They finished 9th and 17th respectively last season, and 10th and 17th the year before. Taken in that context, both the result and the performance felt perfectly normal.
There is, of course, some necessary context, such as one of those clubs spending around £300m on its squad this summer and taking the other’s manager in the process. But, with hindsight, that only seems to add to the Spursiness of the whole thing.
Roberto De Zerbi has already been asked about the title, about his “big ambitions” in north London, and about how Spurs needed to “act like a shark” in the transfer market. Then this brave new era began with something every bit as bad, if not worse, than anything served up by Ange Postecoglou, Thomas Frank or Igor Tudor.
There will be further signings, and there has to be, with important players also due back from injury. But that result served as a reality check over whether Spurs can really reverse years of underachievement in a single summer.
They are not yet ready to dislodge the two clubs who have spent the last four years taking turns to smash through that Champions League glass ceiling.
Newcastle, one of Spurs’ main victims over recent months, looked much better against Liverpool — admittedly powered by the strongest hate imaginable. And only a fool would pretend to know what Aston Villa will do next, given they began last season with a five-game winless run before finishing fourth with a European trophy, while also qualifying for the Champions League after starting another campaign with a 5-1 thrashing a few years ago.
It is considerably easier to picture Unai Emery fixing that opening-day chaos than De Zerbi doing the same with Spurs.
7) Leeds will qualify for Europe
A pre-season hot take that has become rather less bold simply because so many people are making it: Leeds will qualify for Europe.
Nine Premier League clubs are involved in continental competition this season. It has almost become harder not to stumble accidentally into the Conference League. But the transformation at Elland Road after December, paired with what might well have been the best and most focused recruitment drive of any side in the division this summer, only reinforced the feeling that Leeds might actually be very good indeed.
And that win away at Nottingham Forest strengthened the belief that Leeds can sustain the consistent, aggressive excellence they showed in the second half of last season, while also landing often enough on the right side of fine margins to climb further up the table.
Their players are simply enormous, and there is only so much an opponent can do about that.
6) Brighton will win the Conference League — or qualify for the Champions League
Perhaps one day a middling Premier League side will stop misreading UEFA’s reason for creating a third-tier European competition — namely to give clubs from lower-ranked member nations a genuine chance to compete in Europe — and stop simply winning it because of the English top flight’s trickle-down economics.
The removal of the qualifying route that used to give failed Champions League or Europa League teams another shot after already failing in one competition, combined with the Premier League’s sheer spending power, recruitment strength and coaching quality, has made finishing around 8th probably the best indirect route to a trophy available.
Brighton have the squad, the manager and the structure to do exactly that, as shown by their thrashing of a depleted Aston Villa side and their early place at the top of the table.
The story was about how much Villa have lost this summer, but Brighton — long-time experts at feeding as vultures do — were themselves without £75m worth of sold players, as well as Big Six targets Carlos Baleba and Yankuba Minteh, and still had Georginio Rutter leading the line.
There is one slight and potentially very funny complication: Brighton are locked at 0-0 in a play-off with Tromso going into Thursday’s second leg, and they do not feel entirely incapable of a catastrophic collapse at the AmEx.
But even if that happens and denies them a rare chance at silverware, it would also clear enough room in the schedule to make a Champions League push realistic; none of the usual contenders have put forward especially convincing cases so far.
5) Liverpool matches will feature the most goals
They will not score the most, nor will they concede the fewest. But by the time May arrives, matches involving Liverpool will have produced more goals than those involving any other side.
At least one more addition is expected in an attack which, even if it is not especially cohesive or often even particularly good, remains fully capable of creating a goal from nowhere. It also still has a quarter of a billion pounds’ worth of creator and finisher ready to slot in once they finally arrive after signing 12 months ago.
That defence remains a mess of sorts, and Alisson behind it is no longer at the level required to rescue them consistently.
The midfield might as well be ignored, given Andoni Iraola and the transfer committee appear determined to do exactly that themselves.
And for a bonus point: Everton will win more matches than a Liverpool side that draws too many high-scoring games this season.
4) Arsenal will win at least two more trophies
It is not enough merely to predict that Arsenal will retain their Premier League title, even if they have never done that before and Mikel Arteta is trying to become only the fourth coach ever to manage it.
The champions won by a deservedly comfortable margin last season, have strengthened again and look completely uninhibited, while every plausible challenger carries doubts that simply do not exist in Arsenal’s world.
Winning the Community Shield conveniently keeps talk of a Quintuple alive well into the new year too. Even counting that, Arsenal have never won more than two trophies in a single post-war season. With the best coach and the deepest squad in the country, if not the continent, that should change soon.
3) Chelsea will be the closest challengers
It is rare for there to be such broad agreement over who will definitely win the title and who will definitely finish second. But the opening weekend, combined with events over recent months, does seem to have separated two clear pieces of wheat from a rather large pile of chaff.
There is also a significant gap between Arsenal and Chelsea. But the Blues look ready to keep the Gunners honest until about November before eventually reclaiming the Put The Pressure On trophy, even if they finish in double-digit arrears because Robert Sanchez exists.
2) One promoted team will stay up
After back-to-back seasons in which all the promoted teams went straight back down together, Sunderland and Leeds broke a trend that Burnley followed with very little resistance in 2025/26.
None of Coventry, Ipswich or Hull possesses the sort of infrastructure that obviously suggests they can copy either side by surviving comfortably, or even pushing beyond that — although, to be fair, neither did Sunderland or Leeds.
And the group of vulnerable Premier League clubs being run badly enough to drift into relegation danger is clearly smaller now.
But Hull look far more capable than first imagined, Ipswich have a useful side and a previously successful firefighter in charge, and Coventry are bound to get the basics right under Frank Lampard at least some weeks.
1) Michael Carrick will not last the season
What stood out most was the ease with which Hull protected a thoroughly deserved lead. The Tigers kept 11 clean sheets in the regular Championship season last year — fewer than nine clubs, including 20th-placed Blackburn — but they mid-blocked Manchester United into complete irrelevance on the opening weekend.
“The easiest thing to do in preparation was using some of the Milan clips, and Leeds the week before played a back three too, so that helped us with players where the systems looked similar,” said Hull assistant Dean Holden matter-of-factly, continuing a proud tradition of coaches publicly exposing Manchester United’s tactical shortcomings.
It went beyond that too, with Luke Shaw admitting: “As a group, collectively, we could prepare better.” That was for the first game of a new season. Against Hull. An opponent Carrick has now faced seven times, more than any other in his young managerial career.
It is deeply damning that a Champions League side did not seem to expect to have to defend set-pieces properly, and that Manchester United still appear to have little in the way of solutions beyond giving Bruno Fernandes the ball and hoping he creates something.
The second half of last season under Carrick was impressive, but the caveats were obvious: at most one match a week to prepare for, and a succession of small victories after taking over from one of the most baffling managers in recent Premier League history.
It turns out that what comes next may be slightly harder. Carrick would not be the first caretaker to struggle after being handed the keys, but he really should be the last.
