Normally I’d leave writing this until the eve of the Premier League season in mid-August.
The rationale – it gave me the most time to assess the state of each team before making a prediction. The flaw has always remained the same: other than the 2018 and 2019 summer windows when the Premier League decided to close the summer transfer window the day before the first game of the season, usually there is two to three weeks of the transfer window remaining after the first round of matches.
Given this constant, my dangerously incompetent predictions and that in this summer transfer window there’s been relatively little transfer activity so far, there seems little point waiting an extra two weeks.
A few clubs engaged in a flurry of quite nefarious (and likely irrelevant) transfers in late June between themselves trying to amortise their way to PSR compliance, but the majority of clubs have only signed a couple and Liverpool have signed none so far. The outliers: Aston Villa have been extremely busy (eight new signings!), at this point they’re threatening Chelsea’s supremacy as winners of the transfer window. This will not stand! Having made only seven signings so far this summer, a disgracefully meagre haul, Todd “Burger Me” Boehly’s surely feeling the pressure to sign ten nineteen-year-olds who’ll never play a minute for Chelsea’s first team, just to appease their transfer obsessed whiner fans on Twitter, his own vanity as a big spender, and to maintain his well-earned idiotic fat-fuck American tourist running a football club stereotype.
Speaking of meagre, revisiting my predictions from last year’s column has become a favourite pastime of mine. It tends to be both a humbling and amusing experience. So how badly did I do last year? I incorrectly picked Everton for the drop. At least I had Liverpool and Arsenal in the top four, albeit not in the correct places. Manchester United in third was a whopper. I was proud of how terrible that one was. Predicting Manchester City to win the title doesn’t count anymore. They’ve made the Premier League a farmer’s league, and largely dispensed with suspense. It’s easy for English football “It’s coming home” supremacists and exceptionalists to mock this when it occurs in other leagues, such as Bayern Munich winning the Bundesliga eleven times in a row (2013-2023), or Juventus winning Serie A nine times in a row (2012-2020), but such dominance shouldn’t happen in the “richest, most competitive league ever in the world and the history of history”, right?
City have won the league four years in row, and in six of the last seven. The counter argument to this is that Liverpool managed to spare the Premier League’s show of self-denial and cod reputation that it’s truly competitive by breaking City’s monopoly in 2019-2020 and finishing runner-up to City by a point in two other seasons, while Arsenal also kept the title ace alive until the final game of last season. But let’s be real here, for consistency, City have been truly exceptional and so dominant, over a sustained period, in a way we’ve never seen before. That means if they’re within six points of top spot with half the season remaining the outcome begins to feel inevitable. All the fans of other clubs have PTSD and a collective dread entering the start of the season from suffering through the formulaic plot of this tawdry movie repeatedly.
The only hope left is that the Premier League grow a set, choose to damage their own “product” and finally punish Manchester City for their extensive cheating (why are you laughing sarcastically?), and or Pep Guardiola finally grows weary of Manchester’s weather. The latter is surely more likely than the former. But, as we know, Guardiola is a football obsessive and getting paid in gold bars would make anyone take to cold drizzle.
Anyway, another season, another chance to finally become Nostradamus with the other nineteen teams. It has to happen one of these years, surely? I’ll pick who’ll be relegated, the Thursday Night Wankers, title pretenders and yeah, Manchester City as champions. And for extra shits and giggles, for posterity (oh you pretentious so-and-so), I’ll do a full table prediction too.
Relegation:
All three promoted clubs went straight back down last season.
This assists the impression percolating on the interwebs that the gap between Championship and Premier League is widening every year. If you subscribe, you’ll believe that Ipswich Town, Leicester City and Southampton will be the three relegated clubs.
Two causes that make me pause – a PSR point deduction, can, in any given season, potentially place a team with a midtable win-loss-draw record in a relegation battle (see Everton last season) and second, while the financial gap between the Championship and Premier League is now a chasm, from a competitive perspective, why is it that all three promoted sides were relegated for the first time since the 1997-98 season? If the gap in quality between the divisions truly is that vast, shouldn’t this have been happening more often?
Now forgive me as I don my sad bastard anorak to drive the point home. Since the 1993-1994 season newly promoted clubs have a 54.5% chance of survival. If we take the last five seasons, the number of promoted clubs surviving has decreased to 46.7%. So, while it has gotten marginally harder, it’s far from impossible and it’s basically a fifty-fifty shot that any promoted club will stay up.
In part, this justifies why I’m picking Everton for relegation this time, as the statistical chances of one of the survivors from last season being relegated is high. There are better reasons, despite incorrectly picking them to go down last season, I can’t be wrong about this twice in a row, can I? In all seriousness Everton have circled the drain of relegation in each of the last three years. The squad gets weaker every season, and as a business is losing £1m a week on interest repayments on its £600m plus debts. The club has been on the market for the last year and has already had two takeovers fall through due to a US legal challenge against the security of one of their loans. Everton also labour with the added weight of knowing that relegation would likely have devastating consequences for the club’s ability to remain solvent. It’s a recipe for a tailspin and their gradual, agonizing decline is very reminiscent of Leeds United’s after Peter Risdale “lived the dream”.
Leicester City to join them. They’ll likely start with a points deduction, a new manager and weaker squad than the one that got promoted. I’d love it if Ipswich Town stayed up. Two successive promotions is quite an achievement, but that also means they’re playing Premier League football with a squad largely populated by players who were playing third tier football two years ago. That’s a massive ask, and with only two players recruited from other Championship clubs added to it thus far I’d be amazed if they didn’t finish bottom, never mind survive.
I also expect Wolves, Forest, Fulham and Bournemouth to be hovering in and around the relegation places, but to be just good enough to survive.
Top Four (maybe five?) and Thursday Night Wankers:
Choosing who’ll finish fourth was as difficult as I can remember. It’s a quagmire. Chelsea have signed thirty-seven players in the last two years (I had to triple check this, and even now I’m not sure that number’s right) and are now on their fourth permanent manager (who has no experience of managing in the top flight) over the same period. Despite this I’m still not sure they have a functioning defence or reliable keepers. So that’s a no.
Manchester United? What does it say that the most surprising development of the off-season wasn’t Erik Ten Hag remaining in situ but that they extended his contract. United’s calamitous performances in the league (eighth) and Champions League (finished bottom of their group) were deserved given the often kamikaze, tactical approach which led to chaotically open matches. It’s delusional to believe that an eighteen-year-old defender (already injured), a striker with thirty-three career league goals (and half of those came in the Belgian top flight) and keeping Mount and Martinez fit is going to fix their Basil Fawlty and Benny Hill mash-up tactical paradigm. Ten Hag is currently 14/1 to be the next manager sacked, which seems good value – the only doubt here is he seems to have a canny knack of keeping his job by doing the bare minimum.
Unai Emery did very well to get this Villa squad into fourth last term, but they’ve only gone and changed half the squad (and there’s still a month of the window left) and I’d argue it’s now weaker than before. How will they cope with Champions League football? Making the semi-finals of the Conference League isn’t nothing given the travel involved, but facing Real Madrid or Bayern Munich is a far more grueling task. I’m picking them to struggle next season (relatively speaking) – too much upheaval, too many mediocre players.
So that leaves us with Newcastle or Spurs (who have less of both, so far), or maybe a surprise (West Ham and Brighton). Spurs will be their usual flaky selves but entertain, as Ange is the sort who’s too naïve for management but seems as though he’d be a quality pint. I’ll go for Newcastle, their squad is better suited to no European football, especially if they can keep hold of Anthony Gordon and Alexander Isak stays fit for most of the season (both ifs, but then all of these clubs have ‘em). I’ll be quite pleased to be wrong here, especially if Eddie Howe takes the England job as that means the creepy Patrick Bateman knockoff Jason Tindall will surely go with him.
We’re about to find out just how valuable Jurgen Klopp is. Arne Slot’s surname will at be a gift for the dismal red top headline writers at least. The record of Dutch managers in England is truly mediocre (649 games, 42% percent win percentage, 3 FA cups and 1 League cup), and most of that constitutes the underwhelming tenures of Martin Jol with Spurs, Ruud Gullit at Chelsea, and Ten Hag and Van Gaal at United. Liverpool do have a strong squad and continuity of player personnel. So that’s why I have them third, but falling short of a title challenge. Is there a world where Slot doesn’t slot in (I apologise) and they finish fifth? Sure. But that also means believing in the other options. Tricky.
Speaking of tricky. It’ll be tricky for Arsenal to believe they can finish above Manchester City if they’re neck and neck with City when spring comes around after bottling leads of several points two years in a row. They’ve only made one signing so far, and it isn’t in attack, where consistent sources of goals is a weakness (only four players reached double figures in all competitions, is that enough for a team aiming for the league?). Martinelli and Gabriel Jesus both had subpar seasons, at least one needs to step up this time. Having Havertz as a false nine has its limitations when you don’t have Salah and Mane flanking him scoring twenty goals apiece. Will a striker of good pedigree be purchased? Can they have the same fortune with fitness to key players again? Does it even matter?
Champions:
Manchester City to make it five in a row. Why not? No club in the history of English football had ever won four league titles in succession until they did it in May. The only question remaining is how many league titles will City amass on this current streak and what will the consequences be? Will there be any? Or will we keep watching, shell shocked by what the game’s allowed to become and demoralized at the degradation of competitiveness, meritocracy and intrigue by a geopolitical toy.
Table:
1. Manchester City
2. Arsenal
3. Liverpool
4. Newcastle United
5. Manchester United
6. Chelsea
7. Tottenham Hotspur
8. Aston Villa
9. Brighton & Hove Albion
10. West Ham United
11. Crystal Palace
12. Brentford
13. Bournemouth
14. Wolverhampton Wanderers
15. Fulham
16. Southampton
17. Nottingham Forest
18. Everton
19. Leicester City
20. Ipswich Town
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard 
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