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The 7 key questions to start the Premier League season

44612.jpeg 2025 James Gill - Danehouse

1 Are the Big Six (or at least some of them) back?

For the first time in a long time, last season’s Premier League lived up to the marketing spiel. Liverpool might eventually have claimed their 20th championship sufficiently comfortably to have spent the final month of the campaign on a valedictory tour, but prior to that, it was a season for the insurgent.

Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur finished in the bottom half of the table; Newcastle, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest all contested the Champions League spots. Bournemouth were the league’s form side for several months; Newcastle and Crystal Palace claimed the two main domestic cups.

History suggests that the league’s more traditional elite do not take kindly to this sort of insubordination.

They have duly spent three months cherry-picking players from the teams that threatened their comfortable hegemony: Brentford, Wolves and even Newcastle have been targeted. Last season suggested the Premier League was entering a more equitable, less predictable era. The summer suggests it may not hold.

2 Can Pep Guardiola rediscover his old magic?

They might have finished last season as an afterthought, but the great question mark this year hovers over Manchester City. Off the pitch, a decision on the 130 charges of various financial transgressions facing the club will have to come at some point; on it, the greatest manager of his generation is, finally, facing a new and genuine challenge.

Pep Guardiola has rebuilt teams before. He has refashioned them. But he has basically done so only from a position of strength. This time, he is trying to restore City from a position of (comparative) weakness. Being Guardiola, it is entirely conceivable he wins his first eight games and has the division quaking in their boots by October. But an early loss, an occasional misstep, and he may find that aura is a tricky thing to find twice.

3 Can Eddie Howe navigate stormy waters for Newcastle?

The challenge facing Newcastle this season was already steep enough: for all the success last season in the Carabao Cup and sealing a place in the Champions League, and the club’s growth under Eddie Howe’s management and Saudi Arabia’s ownership, they have yet to prove they can sustain campaigns in the Premier League and Europe’s elite competition simultaneously.

A nightmarish summer has made that seem even more onerous. Newcastle have missed out on most of their major targets, especially up front with Manchester United beating them to Benjamin Sesko, and now they face the prospect of either losing striker Alexander Isak to Liverpool or having to deal with their best player’s discontent after a fractious few weeks.

4 Is Viktor Gyökeres the final piece of the jigsaw for Arsenal?

The idea Arsenal lack cutting edge is so established that it is practically ancient: there is a scene in The IT Crowd built around the premise that their problem is that they “try to walk it in”. The terminology has changed over the years, but the root problem has endured: conventional wisdom has it that Mikel Arteta would have won a Premier League title as manager had he possessed a ruthless No 9.

Now he has one, in the form of Viktor Gyökeres, the Swedish striker who returns to England with the narrative of an avenging angel, determined to take his revenge against a league that once spurned him.

He represents a fascinating experiment: is football a simple game, in which a team that creates lots of chances and a forward who scores them are a perfect match? Or is something lost in the game when a successful side is reshaped to solve one shortcoming?

5 Where are we in Chelsea’s perma-revolution?

It feels a little like most of football has already forgotten the Club World Cup, but that is unlikely to be true of Chelsea as a whole or Enzo Maresca in particular. His side’s victory against Paris Saint-Germain in New Jersey in the middle of July was both the zenith of his tenure at Stamford Bridge thus far and, in many ways, his starting point.

A month or so ago, it seemed logical to look at Chelsea and see a coming force, a team who were finally starting to take shape. Joao Pedro, in particular, seemed to solve a whole swathe of issues.