Premier League 2024-2025 Preview: The dominating anti-narrative of Manchester City against anything and everything else

The new season is here.

We meet again, with the world’s most popular league of the world’s most popular sport. The pinnacle. We do so still in a kind of daze, a limbo between all the emotions we lived at the Euros this summer, with the now passed backdrop of the culturally dominating but parochially insignificant Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. Everyone cares about it on a grand scale but in a smaller one, we’ll still be off in a corner meandering with our deepest sporting habits, sad because of Pascal Gross leaving the Premier League after seven understatedly glorious years. The Olympics are great, but they aren’t Gross saying goodbye to Brighton. They aren’t whatever financial weirdness Nottingham Forest and Newcastle decided to perpetrate over two separate player transfers. The actual gymnastics of the Olympics were awe-inspiringly impressive, but the accounting gymnastics those two teams were doing is probably not too far off – even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Something the Olympics taught us about the upcoming Premier League season could be found in women’s swimming. Katie Ledecky explains perfectly, beautifully, the uncontestable, somewhat horrific reality that awaits us. Pure and utter dominance. Less graceful, less pretty than Ledecky weaving through endless particles of H₂O, but Manchester City’s version of dominance is what awaits us. We’ll watch, though. Don’t think that we won’t watch despite knowing the ending, like a predictable book, movie or like most professional wrestling. What has saved the Premier League over the last seven years, in its marketing, in its unique selling points, is that it’s “the most competitive league in the world”. But before getting into the darker, less flattering reality of things, let’s stop to think about how no one ever stops to try to establish points of measurement for this to become something that we can explain and just repeat like a truthless cliché. Because everyone always means different things when they say “competitive”. It’s a contortable expression that molds itself to whatever we’re trying to praise. But what most people tend to mean when they use it is “highest level of athletes + regular different winners of the competition in question”. England’s second division, The Championship, is obviously way more even, way more “competitive” in the sense of how many teams can realistically win it; but on the flipside, even more obviously, it does not, by definition as a second division, have the best athletes of its sport playing in it.

What has saved the Premier League, beyond the catchphrase of how great it is, is the illusion of competitiveness, of evenness, of nail-biting finales. What the Bundesliga really couldn’t do in the Bayern years (don’t you fret, those are coming right back), nor Ligue 1 in the ongoing PSG years or even Serie A through the Juventus decade, is sell that same illusion. Since 2017 France has had more different winners (3) than the Premier League (2). That horrible Farmers League that PSG always wins has seen more variety over that timespan than the best, most competitive league in the world. What has saved them, despite the drowning dominance of one team, is the fact that in only two of the six seasons in which Manchester City came out as champions, was there not a legitimate title race. Pep Guardiola’s team ran away with it in 2018, reaching the dizzying mark of 100 points in a season, and in 2021. Every other year some team has been able to give the impression of pushing Man City to the limit, to the bitter end. Because oh was it bitter for all of them. By “all”, we mean, of course, Liverpool and Arsenal. (Curiously, over these years, if Manchester United were the team that finished 2^nd, it meant City had run away with it. Make of that what you will.) But what the Premier League was able to do, in order to market its product as better than it perhaps actually was, was make those title races seem like the most enthralling of sports occurrences. But time after time, close call after another, who won was always the same team. The same team that will probably win again this year. Because what only prevents it is a generational-level blitzing team like Liverpool in 2019-2020, who were able to be so great and to squeeze out every ounce of luck this world had to give, for good measure, to make sure Manchester City for once and only once weren’t able to rally another monstrous comeback. Pep Guardiola has the mathematical equation that wins league titles figured out and financial resources that make sure that the mathematical equation can be printed onto the paper.

Because that’s the thing we come back to again and again. How Man City do this. And that mathematical, clinical, unforgiving way of doing things has just left the Premier League devoid of any narrative interest. Because this team lives above any narrative twists or turns, everything is at most a tease and never materializes into something ultimately compelling. It’s the story of the team that just… won. No real, honest suspense, no jeopardy, no intrigue. Naïve versions of all of this, sure, as we talk ourselves into the possibility that someone might dethrone them. But it just doesn’t happen. Even the one time it did, it happened in the weird dystopia of empty stadiums and worldwide plague. The dystopia of the serial, state-funded winner can only be tackled down by another kind of dystopia, it turns out. Hopefully that won’t happen again – hopefully we won’t need another pandemic in order to see a different Premier League champion. But this year, this upcoming season, all signs point to another year of anti-narrative winner Manchester City. There will be no plot twist, only a league twisted into submission by the team that rules them all.

(We’ll talk about the potentially, allegedly 115 broken rules by this institution some other day.)

What’s funny about the anti-narrative Manchester City reality, of the Manchester City era of deafening rule, is that the biggest threat to knock them off the top is a depraved, cosplayed, mini me version of themselves. Man City’s dominance is so uncontestable that only a team born out of them can beat them. Because, stylistically, footballistically, Arsenal are the closest thing to Manchester City we have seen. Morally, ethically, conceptually they are two very different institutions, let’s not get that confused and let’s be clear about that. But on the pitch, what has separated them over the last two seasons is that one is the original and the other one is the imitator. Which isn’t meant as disparagingly as it might read. If you can’t have Jürgen Klopp, this is what has proven to be the best, most effective way to get to Manchester City, to rock them, to shake them, and maybe one day, beat them.

But at the end of the day, there isn’t a narrative spirit of the underdog, of someone trying something that different to combat the historic winning machine that Guardiola continues to lead to league titles. It’s Guardiola’s former assistant, trying to play all the same notes, but hopefully just a little bit more skillfully to finally be the one to come out on top. Whereas Klopp was a much more enthralling opponent for Guardiola and City – even if the rivalry was always a little understated in terms of drama because of neither of the two managers holding much of any ill will towards each other – Arteta is kinda just Guardiola with Lego hair. Arteta will probably never be as disingenuous or passive-aggressive because those are things that Guardiola is also one of the greatest at, but from bringing Olekasandr Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus with him, to molding Odegaard into De Bruyne’s role (for much as they are very different), to this thing of constructing the team around the most vanguardist false-9 he could humanly find in Kai Havertz, to searching for Rodri in Declan Rice, to playing the 4 centre-backs, they feel so similar to one another. There’s nothing countercultural about it all. There’s nothing to sink your teeth into. And nothing proved exactly that more so than that Manchester City 0-0 Arsenal game from last March.

What I can’t quite decide on is if this season’s future result feels more inevitable than last year or the year prior. Because they all feel mightily similar. After 2022, and beating Liverpool at the last gasp like in 2019, Manchester City felt like they were just not gonna be contended with after forcing Liverpool to pour everything they had into winning it and, again, coming short against them. As it was, Liverpool would not challenge that following season and even finished 5^th. Arsenal emerged and gave us what felt like a knockout blow to City, being capable of leading by as many as 10 points at one stage of the season. But Saliba got hurt, Arsenal ran out of steam and it turned out that no, you can’t beat Manchester City by starting their 12^th and 14^th players from the year before. But then, again, in 2023 it felt like it did at the beginning of the season before. Arsenal gave their opponents all they absolutely had, and it still wasn’t enough. And even though they made sure it went all the way to final matchday of the season, they, still, could, not, win. So how is it reasonable to expect anything other than Manchester City to win it again? Yeah, you try to logically expect City to collapse, because at some point the wheels have to fall off. But it’s just not happening when you have Guardiola plus their resources.

Still, we will watch. And intently so Arsenal, who are the one legitimate threat, to see if they can take another step forward. But similar to last year, Arsenal give off this sense that it is going to be hard for each one of their pieces to be better than last season. Like a year ago, when Granit Xhaka left for Leverkusen, one of the biggest questions lays straight in the heart of the team. Where Guardiola has had Fernandinho and then Rodri right there after (as a matter of fact, the only year City haven’t won the Premier League since 2017, it was Rodri’s rookie season), Arteta first had a double pivot of Thomas Partey and the aforementioned Xhaka, alongside the good, more-often-than-not-hidden version of Zinchenko in his auxiliary role. When they were set to take that step forward, Xhaka decided it was time to go. But Rice was simultaneously signed, so everything would be alright, right? No. A year in, we can confidently say that Rice isn’t Rodri and probably will never be. He’s a taller, more physical, way less dexterous version of Kevin de Bruyne. Or sort of if William Saliba was a centre-midfielder. So it will have to depend on Jorginho, a year older, never a particularly fast-twitch athlete. Because who seemed like the chosen one, the guy in world football whom Arsenal wanted to come in, isn’t coming. Martín Zubimendi of la Real Sociedad decided against the move and, in a somewhat perplexing turn of events, Arsenal now seem decided on acquiring his teammate Mikel Merino. That only works if Rice can be turned into Rodri like water into wine.

The fit will be weird but so was the case last season and Arteta still made it work. What will make things easier, even in this horrible world of four starting centre-backs, is the signing of Riccardo Calafiori. Because Arsenal are coming off of a year in which they had a historically good defense. And they didn’t even have a serious starting left-back. They had Jakub Kiwior. Essentially just the three of Ben White, William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhães had a season performance that can hang with any basically defensive unit in Premier League history that isn’t 2004-2005 Chelsea. Adding such a promising ballplayer in Calafiori should give them that extra oomph. Ignoring the mess that David Raya feels destined to be at Arsenal, after such a lackluster first season, what does seem like will be even better this year are Martin Odegaard’s performances, and same goes for Bukayo Saka and Kai Havertz. Left-wing seems much more imperfect but hey, maybe something out of the box happens and Gabriel Jesus ends up starting there (probably not), ahead of Martinelli and Trossard, like he did at the Santiago Bernabéu in February 2020 for Manchester City in what was one of his best career performances. Will all that be enough to beat Kyle Walker, Rúben Dias, Nathan Aké, Rodri, De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva, Phil Foden, Savinho, Haaland and bald mastermind? Probably not. But we’ll be there to see, because we love this all a little too much.

Everything else that isn’t the title race

Speaking of bald masterminds, Liverpool now have one of their own! Liverpool right now have a very odd, very accentuated “wait and see” feel to them. No expects them to be great, no one expects them to be bad, no one knows what to exactly expect from them. Other than just, kinda, sort… the same, if everything goes mildly well? It’s such a strange feeling when a new manager comes in to replace someone who has been there for so long and that left on their own terms, and with the team on the upswing, and having already done a lot of the refreshing and remodeling a team cyclically needs. It feels somewhat like Manchester City in 2016, but neither is Arne Slot such a sure thing as Guardiola was back then nor was that team as finely detailed as this Liverpool team feels right now. It’s kind of like Arsenal in 2018 when Unai Emery came in, but in Liverpool’s present case, being qualified for the Champions League. But in terms of not being able to get a read on him, of not being able to see through the unknown, Slot feels now a lot like Emery did then. Sure, a lot of people in Arsenal’s universe wanted Arsène Wenger out, but like with Klopp now, that was man that was one with the club, who’s personality was essentially that of the club’s or vice-versa. Liverpool have been engrossed so thoroughly, so completely in Jürgen Klopp for the past 8-plus years, that now everything feels like a trance, like in a state of limbo, from somewhere into nowhere. Liverpool’s social surroundings feel like they neither trust nor distrust Slot; they have no high hopes and just a tinge of dread that he may not work out. They don’t know what to think, such was always going to be the Klopp hangover.

Having benefited from the opposite those times that Steven Gerrard ended up turning down a move to Chelsea at the eleventh hour, the aforementioned Zubimendi not only turned down Arsenal but ended up doing the same, more dramatically this time, to Liverpool. Maybe he should do Manchester City now to complete a trifecta of a transfer that was never to be. But it leaves Liverpool with the same squad Klopp had as he exited the building. For some reason, a couple of nights ago somewhere in my sleep I dreamt that Mohamed Salah was signing for Juventus in of these swap deals that we are seeing so many of. Can’t make out who was going in the opposite direction, Liverpool bound. Make of that irrelevant oneiric anecdote what you will. But with how much this Liverpool team struggled, at least relatively, down the stretch of last season, no new signings probably don’t help perceptually for the start of this new era of Slot. The more you can give a sense of all around newness – and I don’t mean Darwin – the easier it will be for people to move, to embrace the future, the turning of the page. What won’t help either, one would think, is that Salah as well as Alexander-Arnold and Van Dijk, are entering the last year of their respective contracts this season. The challenge of the changing of the managerial guard will already be hard enough and this time Liverpool not seeming totally one step ahead of things, adds an awkwardness to it all that will be fascinating to see unfold.

Still, Liverpool remain as the odds-on favorite to be third. So, will anyone else catch them? Last year’s fourth-place finishers Aston Villa feel very uncertain. On one hand, they have wheeled and dealed more and perhaps better than everyone else. You have the weird Juventus swap of players plus roughly equivalent sums of money, that saw them say goodbye to probably-not-as-vital-to-the-team-as-people-think Douglas Luiz in exchange for Samuel Iling-Junior and Enzo Barrenechea. But have also brought back, all these years later, Ross Barkley. An incredibly Emery-like player that should give them all that depth they will crave and that for comparison Newcastle saw get pulverized with injuries as they tried to play in last season’s Champions League and qualify back to the Champions League at the same time. It didn’t work for them, but Villa will hope it does for them. It’s hard to live up to high expectations and to match previous improbable feats, by their very improbabilistic nature. Have Villa been able to add enough player quality to make a repeat of last year more plausible? Jury is still definitely out. But just as Barkley screams “Emery player”, so does Amadou Onana and to a lesser extent Ian Maatsen too. But something that stands out when going through their transfer window signings is how young they’ve gone. Yes, they’d love to go back-to-back for Champions League qualifications, but more so than that, they want to build the Villa of the future. Of the 8 players signed, Barkley at 30 years of age notwithstanding, they have an average age of 21.7. They’ve gone really young. On the flipside, everyone beyond Douglas Luiz is still there. Ollie Watkins is still there. Those are the kind of “retainings” that make you. But… the question that withstands is can the rest of the pack push Villa back to their supposed place in the pecking order, mate?

Enter our favorite Australian sage. Apart from all the interesting interviews and press conferences, I thank Ange Postecoglou first and foremost for being competent. Because if you’re not competent, we can’t keep listening to your philosophical little diatribes. Because you get sacked. I used to like, and still very much do, Gary Rowett. He was one of the most stimulating interviews among Championship managers. So what happened then? He started getting sacked from places. And so then he couldn’t make it to the Premier League. And nowadays I barely keep up with the Championship. And now I don’t hear much from him. And I resent that, but such is life. And life also is, nevertheless, much better with Postecoglou being a successful Premier League manager. Tottenham find themselves in a very interesting position of being under a lot of pressure this coming season and not really that much pressure. They could probably finish 5^th again and it would all be okay. But, barring extenuating circumstances, they cannot finish below that. Unless they win the Europa League or something in exchange. They might have not won the English First Division since 1961, but as Champions League finalists in 2019, and with the stadium they play in, they are a club with an expectation of being league top-4. It’s almost an obligation. A season can have enough justifications for not finishing in the top-4 and still be considered a success, like last season was. But that is the level of expectation among that fanbase after the last fifteen years. Being only three years older, at 18, both Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall were initially the only brand-new signings. Both look like they are ridiculously talented, but still. What Postecoglou will have to bank on getting in Dominic Solanke a striker that will fire on all cylinders like he did last season at Bournemouth and also that a second season of familiarity between coach and players will give Tottenham that final shove. As Tom DeLonge would sing, “it comes with a shove, when you fall in love”. Hopefully for Spurs, pretty much in love with at least all the positives that were seen in the first year of Angeball, it does so, hopefully it does come with a shove.

If not, Newcastle or Manchester United (not you, Chelsea) might shove them out of the way. In Newcastle we have a club in a weird kind of state. Not just by being a state club, but with the departures of club leaders Amanda Staveley, Mr. Staveley, and sporting director Dan Ashworth, everything has been a little in flux. Having to do all that financial engineering that makes you sign Odysseas Vlachodimos for 30-plus million pounds in the year of our lord 2024, is taxing enough. But what will it mean for Eddie Howe that his biggest advocate, Ms. Staveley, is now gone. After what was an unequivocal disappointment of a season for a club with such grandeur expectations. It was an acceptable, reasonable transition year, massacred by injuries. (Probably not the first massacre they know about.) But Eddie Howe starts the season as the odds-on favorite Premier League manager to leave his position/get sacked this season. With at least the return to health (and suspensions) by everyone from Nick Pope to Joelinton, Sandro Tonali, Alexander Isak or Sven Botman and the fact that Bruno Guimaraes and Anthony Gordon haven’t left, “blue eyes” will have to live under that guillotine until wins get steadily racked up.

Manchester United and Chelsea remain as their own distinctive flavors of chaos, but footballing talent does pretty much overflow on both teams. The problem is that it overflows at the same time as both have terrible defensive units and two very positionally-oriented bald managers. It could all click miraculously and either of them could qualify for next year’s Champions League. But it’s too chaotic, for both. Ten Hag, as Lisandro Martínez returns to health, can maybe rediscover his true positionalism and systematized style and stop being an ill-equipped hip shooter because that’s not gonna work. Maybe nothing will after such a horrendous season, but at least the vibes were able to begin to be restored off the FA Cup win in May.

And may god have mercy on whatever Chelsea are doing. They probably deserve their own separate essay, because logistically anything else is inviable. Just naming everyone in their squad needs its own longform piece. Nothing feels like it will work. It feels like the absurd squad-building they’ve perpetrated over the last two years will destroy even their best players. It doesn’t matter how good Enzo Fernández is, or Moisés Caicedo, or Christopher Nkunku, or Cole Palmer, or Nicolás Jackson. The insanity is too strong. The chaos is beyond the pale. Behold a pale horse, behold the bald Guardiola disciple who almost didn’t get Leicester promoted. But above all behold the hedgefunder types that come in to reinvent the wheel while doing nothing that the smartest people in the industry would actually do.

Will any of the 3 promoted teams not get relegated back to the Championship? But first…

We couldn’t leave without very briefly mentioning that maybe a new team will break into the now top-8 Premier League status quo. Crystal Palace may just go and do it like Oliver Glasner qualified Wolfsburg for the Champions League a handful of years ago in Germany. The vibes, the football, the maximized talent at Selhurst Park could not be any better right now, even without Michael Olise. They have that deeply special feeling about them. Which may be fleeting. But if anyone is to be bet on, it’s them. (Hi Ivan Toney.) Brentford, after underperforming their unexpected goals so pointedly, might be another sneaky consideration for revelation of the season, if Toney can relearn the goalscoring trait and Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa keep doing their thing and the rest of the team continues to execute its game plans way above their base-level quality of players. West Ham, in their own corner of London and the Premier League, might be another interesting proposition to shake the top half of the league table. Because if we want to talk about quality of players, West Ham have an amazing squad that is right there, waiting to be catapulted god knows how high.

And god knows how low will the standard be down at the bottom of the table. There’s no way it can be worse than last year, a historically bad outing for the promoted trio of teams. Sheffield United were DOA, Burnley got their ambitious squad confection completely wrong and Luton tried very, very hard for as unintendedly condescending as that sounds. As a new season dawns, we have to evaluate Leicester City, Ipswich Town and Southampton. My non-Championship-watcher bias tells me that all three of them will go down. My more rational sense is that at least one will make out of the relegation black hole, out of the yo-yoing limbo, a least for one more season.

In Ipswich it’s one new season after so many years. More than 20 years in a non-Premier League spell. They’ve finished 5^th in the modern football era (you know, post-1992), yet nothing feels fresher than to see them return, as the most exciting team of the trio, with throwbacks such as Massimo Luongo, exciting starlets like Omari Hutchinson, Conor Chaplin or Nathan Broadhead. But at above else, the head of this team, their manager Kieran McKenna. There’s something very exciting about them, about what can be possible, kind of like 2019 Sheffield United, who finished 9^th that season. All eyes will gravitate towards the Suffolk fields and Portmand Road as the charming tractor boys can shake things up in this league, maybe even upset Liverpool or Manchester City in the first couple of matchweeks.

For as Southampton nothing feels quite as riveting. The Burnley of the south. Lived comfortably under Ralph Husenhüttl for a bunch of years just like Burnley did under Sean Dyche and then it was over, it ended. Down a division you go, restart, reset and give the reigns to a young up-and-coming somewhat recently retired defender who likes to pass, for his team especially to pass, a lot. One was Vincent Kompany, up north, and the other is Russell Martin, down south. Exciting people who left one Anderlecht and the other Swansea to answer this particular call to arms, call to rebirth an exhausted Premier League team back into, precisely, the Premier League. Both bounced back at first try. And now Southampton are here, to battle against the odds of the cycle of promotion and relegation. Can they pass the ball and pass the ball all the way to salvation? Can they avoid the press of teams better than them enough to ultimately avoid relegation? Like Burnley, there are a lot of new signings, no one on the level of even a Sander Berge in terms of football titillation. I guess Ben Brereton is there? Russell Martin adapted, made tweaks, made it work throughout last year. He’s bright and not merely at the mercy of ideals. The ghost of Guardiola doesn’t keep him (Vincent) company. But is it enough.

Lastly, we have a completely soulless recreation of Leicester. When people say a team has lost its “identity”, I usually don’t know what they mean – or I usually think their defining it poorly. But I don’t recall feeling such a sense of something in football losing its identity as I have with Leicester. Because it’s the style of play what often people mean by the term identity. But more so than that, it’s just a feeling. Everyone is gone, even if Jamie Vardy is physically still there. But I don’t mean from 2016, I mean from the 2021 FA Cup-winning team. It’s not that they’re not winning at the rate that they were back then. Different from the 2016 miracle, the Brendan Rodgers years made them a deeply soulful team. A team that crashed ferociously from Champions League qualification not once but twice. A team that, parallel to those brutal loses, won an FA Cup. There was a body silhouette to that team, something almost tangible. And in almost an instant, it was gone. The team decayed in plain sight even as we didn’t realize what was happening. Two years after the FA Cup title, they were getting relegated, as a collection of players way too good to be doing that. They played horribly that season and yet played way to too well, still, to be getting relegated. But their soul had left them. It feels like it left at Wembley with that FA Cup win. Because prior to the relegation, they finished 8^th and yet felt almost exactly the same to the team that got relegated. And nothing has gotten better in any real way. They feel like a cheap AI-rendering of themselves. From what I could judge from a further distance, they felt like this too as they rampaged and then crawled their way to promotion in the Championship. And now that coach has gone to Chelsea and Steve Cooper is the new guy. Someone who through long stretches of his Nottingham Forest tenure, with the most bloated of bloated squads, kinda reverted to all vibes no tactics. So he might just be the guy for Leicester to recover enough sense of self to become a Premier League staple once again.

And as I said all the way at the beginning, this might be a league, ultimately, devoid of narrative. But it is now also a sad place, a desolate land, because Pascal Gross is no longer there. Probably my favorite Premier League player of the last seven years and that isn’t even an exaggeration. Someone who’s been a distant but ever-present backdrop to a very important seven years of my own life. I’m not even a Brighton fan as such. But I do have a deep appreciation for them. And for no one more than for this German king of on-the-ball composure. The slowest member of a team that had Adam Webster and before that Shane Duffy. But it never mattered because Gross never needed gross speed, only net movement. The graceful way in which he played for seven years, being so beautifully instrumental to a team that grew to unsuspecting heights, with such improbable sustainability… it’s been amazing to see. Just like all his free kicks at Ingolstadt were amazing to see when in the summer of 2017 I searched for highlights of him on YouTube to roughly learn who it was that the newly promoted Brighton had just signed. I needed to know because I was writing a dedicated in-depth season preview of Brighton for my former employer. I had just gone to the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago’s Grant Park the day before. I saw blink-182 there and that next morning I saw a video of The Killers – who were playing at the opposite stage of the festival that same night, and who I had guiltily not chosen in my dilemma of who to see – playing a cover of “Disarm” by The Smashing Pumpkins. There, that morning, listening to such a charming musical rendition and as I got up to write about what could we expect from Brighton in the Premier League, Pascal Gross was the hot new signing. A warmth, a light, that didn’t dim with time. It only grew and the team only played better and better thanks to his presence. A disarmingly good football player. The Gross experience in the Premier League is over. But what still exists is the possibility of accessing all the fantastic memories of witnessing the understated football magic of Pascal Gross at Brighton. We wish him all the best in Dortmund.