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8 September 2026

We are only three weekends into the new Premier League season. So surely it is far too soon to judge whether this campaign is going to be any good?

Yes, of course it is, but in the immortal words of Barry from EastEnders: we are going to do it anyway, we are going to do it anywaaayyyyyyy.

So here are 10 things that help make a Premier League season a good one, and whether this season appears to be moving in the right direction.

Proper title fight This is obviously the big one, and also the main concern right now. Not every title race has to be AGUERROOOOOOO or It’s Up For Grabs Now, but it should not be this easy in September to spot the overwhelmingly likely winner of the league title.

There is, of course, one important caveat. A year ago, plenty of people were also saying, “Well, it looks like the defending champions are just going to win it again then,” after a strong start to their title defence.

But with hindsight, there was always something twitchy and unsustainable about Liverpool’s start to last season, all hanging on by their fingertips to the fading momentum of the previous campaign and a stream of late winners.

What at the time appeared to be the Hallmark of Champions was really just a team that was no longer all that good getting away with it for a while. As ever, occasionally winning without playing well is a Hallmark of Champions. Regularly needing to win while not playing well is simply a sign that you are not actually playing very well, and that is not especially sustainable.

Still, full credit to Liverpool for effectively sacrificing themselves for the greater good last season and not simply disappearing into the distance with the title, because that would have been dull.

At the moment, though, Arsenal do not appear to be quite so community-minded, the ruthlessly efficient pricks.

All this talk of Liverpool and Arsenal and It’s Up For Grabs Now has also reminded us how odd it is that, if you ignore 24/25 as you should because it was not really a race, there has never been a genuine Premier League title race involving Liverpool and Arsenal.

In loosely related news, we have long believed that the best Liverpool-Manchester United dynamic is not when they are fighting each other for the title, but when one of them is really good and the other is at least slightly sh*t. It genuinely does not matter which way round it is. The Premier League was obviously blessed with plenty of periods of United being good and Liverpool being sh*t in the early years, and the reverse more recently. We are not at all convinced we are getting either version this season. And just to be clear, not because they are both good.

Proper relegation battle This is the other obvious requirement. And the signs here are far more encouraging. This should be absolutely fine. After a couple of bleak years in which all the promoted clubs simply f*cked straight back off again without much fuss, Sunderland and Leeds did brilliantly last season and pushed out two members of what had begun to look like an immovable Settled Seventeen.

Wolves were so poor that they looked doomed very, very early, and it rarely felt like Burnley were doing anything other than continuing their grim and existentially pointless yo-yo existence, but even just one relegation place remaining genuinely uncertain until the final day is enough if the fight for it is gripping enough.

Especially when it slowly becomes clear that the battle is going to involve two big clubs. It already seems mad in retrospect that West Ham, a club that had been a Premier League side for 30 of the competition’s 34 seasons, were the plucky underdogs everyone was backing in that scrap.

And, even more absurdly, there is every chance we get exactly the same kind of scenario again this season, with perhaps Newcastle or Aston Villa cast in the West Ham role because…

Big club in crisis It does not have to be Spurs. But it does seem as if it is almost always most likely to be Spurs. We still think Manchester United have enormous potential in the field of big-club slapstick pratfall farce this season, but there is no need to overcomplicate matters just yet. Spurs are the obvious leading contenders here. Again.

They had a genuinely extraordinary transfer window, one that began with bold and decisive moves which, while in several cases already beginning to look as though they may have been duds, were at least undeniably and powerfully un-Spurslike in their confidence as a big club and in the speed of their execution.

And yet by the end of the window they were still desperately rummaging around for other clubs’ cast-offs and going full Timo Werner. Love that for them.

Incidentally, we fully expect that by around December we will be able to make a coherent case for Mykhailo Mudryk having been their best summer signing, because it is the history of the Tottenham.

Upstart promoted club Once you start listing the ingredients of a good Premier League season, you begin to see how connected they all are, how one leads to another.

Think about it. Spurs and Manchester United were both, domestically at least, trapped in hilariously bleak crises in 24/25, but the lack of jeopardy caused by the sheer incompetence of the three promoted-and-relegated clubs took a lot of the edge off.

We vividly remember people saying at the time that even one competent promoted club would have been enough to drag Spurs and United into a proper relegation battle.

Spurs, the relentless people-pleasers they are — and note, not the people who actually support Spurs, who must never be permitted joy or happiness for more than about a fortnight once every four or five calendar years — provided exactly that the following season.

But it would all have been pointless without the efforts of Sunderland and, to a lesser but still significant extent in every sense, Leeds.

Leeds’ competence was not only less obvious and slower to emerge than Sunderland’s, it was also much less surprising. There was always good reason to think Leeds might buck the recent trend for promoted sides. They were never really upstarts. Just… starts.

Sunderland, having scraped through the play-offs with a squad assembled from assorted Football League spare parts, began the season with the words “Derby County” echoing through every pre-season preview. They were a completely different case, and now Hull have followed them down that same road.

Which is excellent news for almost everybody. Apart from Fulham, who are this year’s Wolves, and whichever one of Newcastle and Villa turns out to be this year’s West Ham, and most obviously Spurs, who are this year’s Spurs.

Managergeddon We make no apology for loving the managerial merry-go-round. The more manager sackings the better. Whenever we say this, there are sometimes replies suggesting it is not nice to enjoy people losing their jobs, to which the answer is simple: obviously that is true in the real world.

But football managers are not part of the real world. They belong to football, which is an entirely different universe. Yes, it is very bad when ordinary people lose their jobs because it can and does have devastating consequences for them and for their families.

When a Premier League football manager loses his job, something that is built into that inherently absurd profession, he gets handed several million pounds. And then usually gets another job not long afterwards.

Unless he was so staggeringly bad in so many astonishing ways that no club will employ him, in which rare cases he simply ends up with a job on Match of the Day instead.

So no, there is no need at all to feel guilty about enjoying Managergeddon. In theory, a season and summer of managerial chaos like the last 12 months should trigger an equal and opposite reaction. In theory, a year in which two-thirds of the Premier League changed manager ought to be followed by a period of relative calm.

Thankfully, that is not how this works in the slightest. The fact that there are so many new managers only increases the chances of even more Managergeddon this time, as various clubs realise one by one that they have made a terrible mistake. Again.

There is no logic in the world of Managergeddon. Only glorious, stupid chaos. And already it is easy to identify at least six Premier League clubs who will probably change manager this season, many of whom only did so in the summer.

Manager veers wildly off piste Again, this is closely connected to the previous point. But you simply cannot have a great Premier League season without a manager losing the plot somewhere along the line.

Sometimes that can just mean a new manager arriving who is inherently ridiculous in some way. A Nathan Jones or a Liam Rosenior, for instance, who provide consistently entertaining press conferences because of the absurd things that keep tumbling out of their mouths.

That is fine. It works.

But much, much better is when an established and even well-loved manager snaps and completely loses it. Kevin Keegan, bless him, will always be the classic example. But there is also Rafa Benitez and his facts. Or Jose Mourinho, the most disrespectful man in the world, demanding respect. Or Antonio Conte tearing his very expensive hair out at the utterly unfixable futility of Tottenham Hotspur.

Sadly, we will surely never again get the guaranteed fireworks of a highly combustible and emotional Italian manager in charge of a club as relentlessly addicted to embarrassment as Tottenham, so this season we will just have to take what we can get.

Emergence of a Michu-style cult figure Remember that brief but glorious period of Barclays history when Michu became as much a unit of comparison as an area the size of Wales? Great, great times. You could probably have covered an area the size of Wales with all the references to how many Michus Club X could have signed for what they spent on Player Y.

Sadly, it soon faded away because, despite the best efforts of the Premier League’s finest boffins in their secret underground lair, attempts to clone Michu failed. Which meant there was only ever one of him, and the dream of giving clubs the genuine option of choosing between one Paul Pogba or 50 Michus never became reality. There was also the issue that the one actual Michu ultimately turned out not to be all that good.

But we assume the technology has improved a bit by now, which means that when the next Michu arrives it should be much easier to produce enough of them to go round.

Especially because the exponential rise in transfer fees means that a Michu-style bargain now effectively looks like spending £40m on Mamadou Sangare, so even for the most outrageously flashy big spenders of this summer, you only need about three of him.

Fun This is necessarily vague and difficult to define, but absolutely essential. What is fun football? We are not sure we can define it, but we know it when we see it. Or, more accurately, when we do not.

Last season was not fun, was it? Not really. The football was not fun. The best team in the country were not fun at all. Such fun as there was came from incompetence, which can absolutely be a major part of the fun, but it really does need an opposing counter-balance to work properly.

The early signs this season are very encouraging. We think this campaign is going to be much more fun and much less mechanical as Premier League football lurches into a new era. Even Arsenal themselves might be watchable this season, based on the Chelsea performance. Huge if true.

A pantomime villain This can be almost anything. A specific tactic, a particular manager, a player, or even a chairman. It could even be a pundit. Just someone or something that repeatedly boils everyone’s p*ss and sends heads to Mars, even if it is actually fairly harmless or insignificant. In fact, especially if it is actually fairly harmless or insignificant.

Although he is neither harmless nor insignificant, Mr Marinakis is the obvious current holder of that role and by far the most likely to deliver this season. His logical next step now surely has to be completing one of the three or four managerial sackings he appears to have lined up for us this year while a match is still going on.

But it does not have to be him. It could be almost anyone or anything. One way or another, we are pretty sure that by the end of the season we will be able to tick this box.

The only caveat — and it is a major one — is that it absolutely cannot and must not be related in any way to VAR, because all VAR chat, even in the vanishingly rare event that it is balanced, fair, in good faith and uses the correct terminology, is just f*cking dull. It is not biased against your club. Or in favour of that club. Grow up.

Erling Haaland breaking the fourth wall Most of these points have been fairly broad and vague for obvious reasons. We are speaking in general terms about what makes a Premier League season good. But Erling Haaland absolutely Fleabagging the sh*t out of a camera lens has been our favourite thing in football for a good couple of years now, to the point that we can no longer even imagine properly enjoying a Premier League season without it.