We’ve written this week about how this is the first Premier League season in quite a while where we’re genuinely unsure how it’s all going to play out.
For the last few summers, we’ve had a fairly good idea of what we thought would happen next. Those fairly good ideas have very often proved to be wildly wrong, because that’s the beauty of sport and also we are idiots. But still we held those ideas with some conviction, and in fairness a lot of them revolved around ‘Yeah, Man City will probably win the league, won’t they?’
Yet while some are already handing the 2025/26 title to Liverpool, we honestly feel like we have far less conviction about what might happen next season than in a long time. Maybe this is just the natural response to Spurs winning a trophy. Certainty has been replaced by doubt. If that can happen, anything can happen.
But in that piece we did fairly swiftly skate over the relegation side of things with a ‘Well, Leeds are quite a big club aren’t they so it might be okay’. Because promoted teams getting instantly relegated is very much the new normal and it still feels like that is one area where a deal of certainty remains.
It doesn’t mean that it’s definitely going to happen, but it feels like an easier thing to expect than trying to work out what Liverpool or City or United or Spurs might do this season, or how precisely Arsenal finishing second again will be further evidence they are the best team in the country, actually.
We’ve given it a bit more thought now, though, and while we still can’t bring ourselves to muster much enthusiasm for Sunderland, and Burnley’s only chance is probably to start so badly they git rid of Scott Parker – walking, talking Premier League albatross that he is – while there’s still plenty of time for that to actually matter, we do now find ourselves with reasons to be cheerful for Leeds.
And it’s not even really because of anything Leeds have done or are doing; it’s because a lot of bad things are happening all at once to some of the Settled Seventeen that could spice things up nicely.
Wolves are being stripped bare, and are notoriously slow starters anyway. We do also find ourselves wondering whether and how much they come to rue the way their season ended with a jarring loss of all that momentum they built up in March and April.
After six giddy wins on the bounce, they then lost three and drew one of their last four games against City, Brighton, Palace and Brentford.
Suddenly that six-game winning run looks a bit less like a team solving all its problems under a new manager and more like a quirk of a fixture list that handed them a run of games featuring the worst bottom three in history, a very bad West Ham team and very bad and also very distracted Tottenham and Man United teams all in a row.
And now they’ve lost two of their key players to bigger beasts, and are the Premier League’s most reliable sacking-a-manager-after-just-one-win-in-opening-nine-games merchants.
And talking of Premier League teams who make shoddy starts to the season, what of Bournemouth? Last season they were a huge part of the league’s burgeoning aspirational middle-class along with other B-based teams and also Fulham. Their best football was as good as any outside the top three, but at their worst they can be very bad.
They’ve also made wonky starts to both their seasons under Andoni Iraola. We like him a huge amount, but Bournemouth are by definition and to a large extent design a team that spends every summer in flux, and there does seem to be something at least in the idea it takes a while for Iraola to get his message and methods through to new players.
They had eight points from eight games at the start of last season after a 1-0 defeat at Leicester in early October, and didn’t win a Premier League game at all until the final weekend of October in 23/24.
They’ve already lost Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez, while there is still a great deal of chat around Illia Zabarnyi with PSG and now Newcastle sniffing around. That’s potentially half of a new defence to source (they have bought one replacement) before they even think about strengthening, and further forward they face a fight to keep Antoine Semenyo out of Tottenham’s clutches.
And talk of Tottenham brings us inevitably to Brentford, another upwardly mobile member of the B team now wracked with uncertainty.
Even more so than Bournemouth, theirs has been a model built around coping and even thriving on the back of inevitable departures. But this is a summer to test that model to extremes.
Thomas Frank is at the core of two of 25/26’s key variables: how will Spurs cope with him, and how will Brentford cope without him.
Throw in almost certainly being without Bryan Mbeumo and very possibly the underrated creative influence of Christian Norgaard, and here’s another team suddenly having to replace an uncomfortable number of core components all at the same time.
The Premier League is a brutal league now. It’s why it is so hard for promoted teams to gain a foothold. But it also means that even for a large number of the seemingly cosy coterie with their feet under the table, they are never more than one mis-step of a summer away from significant peril.
This isn’t necessarily anything new for these clubs, and all of them can point to a track record of being able to cope in the end. But it does all look rather dicey suddenly for really quite a few teams.
And promoted teams don’t need to be as fast as the established Premier League pack…just faster than its most vulnerable member. The problem for Leeds and Burnley a month ago was that identifying that vulnerable member largely relied on a vague hope that West Ham might remain quite sh*t.
Suddenly, there seem far more potential routes to safety. Or if not quite that, then at least something approaching an actual relegation fight. Remember those?