Stay with us for this one, okay? What if – just hear us out – pre-season results actually mattered and provided a decent body of evidence from which to extrapolate outcomes across the entire season?
Imagine that. Now clearly that is a nonsense premise.
You’d have to be some kind of idiot to believe you can just knee-jerkingly predict how the 25/26 season will pan out based on the results and performances from some friendlies. Here then are our knee-jerk predictions of how the 25/26 season will pan out based on the results and performances from some friendlies.
Chelsea win the league
You can argue among yourselves if you like about whether the Club World Cup was a pre-season tournament or an important and proper one, but the key point is that it doesn’t matter for this particular jerk of the knee. Chelsea won that, so if it counts as pre-season then great. And they have since won both the actual definite pre-season games they’ve played after a belated return to action.
You simply cannot argue with that formline. And games against Bayer Leverkusen and Milan also leave little room for level-of-opposition fun-policing. Really all you’re left with here is the dreariest pre-season-excitement curbing of all: “Yes, but they are at very different stages of their preparation.”
Enough with that dreary if often accurate talk. The title is pretty much in the bag for Chelsea at this point.
Liverpool be too entertaining for their own good
What on earth has happened to Arne Slot’s slick and all-conquering title winners of 24/25? They’ve apparently been replaced by a social experiment where he sets out to discover what a football team would look like if they were Spurs, but good. Which has already been done by Mauricio Pochettino in 2016/17.
In six pre-season games, Liverpool have scored 22 goals but conceded 11 – with 10 of those conceded goals coming in the last four after they’d seen off the collected might of Preston and Stoke with only one conceded.
They looked all shades of vulnerable against Palace in the Community Shield and then made a complete bollocks of the penalty shoot-out.
They are going to be gloriously fun to watch and surely the division’s entertainers. But the most fun team to watch is only very, very occasionally the champions, and Liverpool, having spent all that money on all these exciting attacking players and still trying to add a very exciting if surely not particularly necessary Alexander Isak to that heady brew while relying heavily on the shaky notion of at least one of Ibrahima Konate and Joe Gomez being fit and available pretty much at all times.
And we’ve not even touched on our most extravagant jerk of this particular knee, which is that the football has left Virgil van Dijk. He stunk Wembley out good and proper against Palace.
Hugo Ekitike to prove himself Liverpool’s greatest palindromic player of the Premier League era
It’s not all bad news for the defending champions, though. Not by any means. Hugo Ekitike is going to form one of the key planks of the Liverpool entertainment value this season, and in the process bring together in harmony the two warring tribes in the debate over who is the greatest palindromic player to play for this grand old club in the Premier League era.
The Ozan Kabak and Sheyi Ojo factions who have fought for centuries will come together in a previously unthinkable peace to unite behind their new god.
We also like to think that whoever decided to give Ekitike the squad number 22 knew exactly what they were doing.
Crystal Palace to win whichever European trophy they end up in
Only Nottingham Forest can rival Palace for a pre-season dominated by off-field machinations. Palace have had to spend it fighting to keep hold of things they believed were already theirs: star players, Europa League spots for winning the FA Cup. That kind of thing.
But while that’s all been extremely stressful and left little chance for actually bringing in new players, they showed again at Wembley that what they do have is pretty, pretty, pretty good. They are punching with this manager and the fact he’s still there despite the sands shifting beneath his feet is key.
The Community Shield is not a real trophy, obviously, but Palace did once again display an enormous amount of bottle to go with the skill as they hit back from a goal down twice to draw with Liverpool before downing them in a very, very funny penalty shoot-out.
Pre-season results had been mixed before that, but there was more good than bad. We can’t quite back them to do anything extraordinary in the Premier League, because ancient Barclays lore requires them to finish 12th every time.
But a club that absolutely never did trophies are now proving themselves to be mentality monsters when there’s some tin (real or otherwise) up for grabs. Whether it’s the Europa League or the Conference League they end up in we couldn’t possibly say at this time. Only a fool attempts to predict things. But what we will say is that whichever competition they are in, they will win it.
Mikel Arteta is sacked
There is no hiding place for Mikel Arteta this year, not now he has a Proper Striker for year six of The Process.
But pre-season has been slightly fraught for Arsenal, with it sometimes looking quite hard to determine what exactly the Gunners’ plan has been in any particular game or what they’ve been trying to get out of it.
Contriving to lose meekly to a deeply uninspiring Tottenham in a rogue pre-season game that pretty much forces everyone involved to actually care whether they like it or not is a worry. Arsenal have not shown anything that looks like the stuff of champions on the pitch this summer, and anything less than winning one of the two big titles surely cannot be enough for Arteta and Arsenal to continue.
The promoted trio will be absolutely fine
Two wins apiece for all three members of everyone’s expected relegation fodder. It’s rapidly become accepted wisdom that staying up is essentially impossible for promoted teams these days, but based on the rock-solid evidence that pre-season absolutely always provides for the 10 months to follow there are definitely at least three worse and/or more stupidly and obliviously self-destructive teams than Leeds, Burnley and Sunderland at this time.
You fear for Wolves, you really do – but we’ve been here before
It’s a tale as old as time. Wolves end the season on a downward trajectory. The summer doesn’t go according to plan. The next season starts in harrowing fashion. They sack the manager sometime around the November international break. They sign some Portuguese or at the very least Brazilian lads in January. They finish 13th.
It’s not quite true to say that is what happens in every single Wolves season, but it really does feel like it.
That they even contrived to end last season on a slightly duff note is an achievement in itself given they’d won six games in a row before finishing off the campaign by taking just a single point from their final four games.
But the summer has been textbook You Fear For Wolves territory, with five defeats to go with a pair of draws against the awesome might of Burnley and Stoke.
Nottingham Forest’s season has already peaked
Absolutely top of the list of those who must hope that pre-season really does mean absolutely nothing, because on the field it’s been absolutely harrowing for a club that has nevertheless also spent the summer winning both a Europa League place and a new contract for Morgan Gibbs-White.
Alas, those will prove to be Forest’s two biggest wins of the entire season. Not everyone will revel in Forest’s struggles, but Tottenham and Palace fans absolutely will. Leading football bantologists fear an outbreak of ‘Warra trophy’-based social media posts the like of which we have never encountered before.
Tottenham are the most boring team in the league, eventually making them extremely interesting
Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or Daniel Levy what became of the £60m he was going to spend on Morgan Gibbs-White.
There was a wild and giddy 24-hour period there where it really did look like Spurs, having bantered their way into the Champions League in such extraordinary and unrepeatable fashion, were actually going to behave like a Champions League club. They spent big money on Mohammed Kudus and were Here We Go-ed for even more on Gibbs-White.
How much blame truly lies at Spurs’ door for the collapse of the latter deal we perhaps won’t ever know. What we do know is that none of that money has been reinvested on another No. 10 despite Spurs’ already obvious requirements in that area being enormously exacerbated by James Maddison doing his ACL.
Even without the pre-season results to help bear it out we would be pretty confident that Thomas Frank would make Spurs slightly less consistently ridiculous in defence, albeit with the occasional paddling from teams that are actually good, but we fear they are going to be utterly moribund going the other way.
Spurs have some handy wide players, and were definitely if sadly right to consider Bilbao the perfect end to the fast-fading Son Heung-min’s decade at the club, but they do now have a startling lack of both creativity and leadership in those forward roles.
With Dejan Kulusevski also on the long-term injured list, we have absolutely no idea who is going to create the chances for Richarlison and Dominic Solanke to miss.
Spurs smashed the record for their lowest Premier League points haul last season. This season it could be their low goals tally that comes into focus. That currently stands at 44, achieved in back-to-back seasons between 1996 and 1998, and could easily come under threat from a team that has managed just two goals in their last four pre-season games and seems unlikely to add significantly to that tally against PSG on Wednesday.
And that level of boringness will surely ultimately make them interesting; just imagine what kind of mess a Spurs team that finished 17th last season would have got themselves into with 20 fewer goals to their name.