The Premier League 2024/25, Part Four; Nottingham Forest to Wolves
Your final batch of previews, ahead of the start of the 2024/25 Premier League season.
And so here we are at the end of the line. The final batch of pre-season Premier League previews. And that means, among others, my very own Tottenham Hotspur. Le sigh.
Nottingham Forest
There was a rumble coming from the Forest last season. With a points deduction over PSR, constant complaining over officiating, sacking a popular manager and plans for a rebuild of the stadium, The City Ground was never less than busy last season, and in a variety of different ways. The team ended up avoiding relegation by ending it all in 17th place, which was at least hitting some sort of target, even if that target was about the most meagre one available.
For manager Nuno Espirito Santo, survival was a veneer of respectability at the end of a difficult season. The decision to sack Steve Cooper, the popular manager who’d taken them into the Premier League and kept them there, had not been a popular one among supporters, and although Santo got over the line it would be difficult to make a case that he particularly ‘won over’ the supporters in any meaningful sense.
There may have been celebrations at the end of last season, but they were primarily powered by relief rather than joy. Summer transfer business has been brisk, but this time it looks as though there might be something approaching a plan. This is the Forest that can do a job in the Premier League. It’s a far more enticing version of the club than that which spent as much time caterwauling about refereeing decisions, for sure.
Elliot Anderson cost £35m from Newcastle United. With 44 Premier League appearances under his belt, he’s a useful addition. Nikola Milenkovic joins from Fiorentina. His club finished in 8th place in Serie A and qualified for the Europa Conference League at the end of last season. It’s not difficult to see how Evangelos Marinakis might have looked at Milenkovic’s 2023/24 season and thought that’s exactly what his team could do with this time around. A top half finish might be stretching things, but after two full seasons in the Premier League they should be improving by now. Subsistence will no longer cut it.
And with this in mind, perhaps what Nottingham Forest need this season is one of mists and mellow fruitfulness, a season blessedly free of the drama that cast such a pall over their last rodeo. The last two seasons have been uphill battles to stay in the Premier League in the first place, and supporters can certainly be forgiven expecting more than another attritional fight against the drop.
Southampton
No-one is expecting this to be easy. Southampton only returned to the Premier League through the play-offs at the end of last season, and key personnel have left the club. The target is to step away from the yo-yo.
The stratification of English football has been such that at the end of last season the three promoted teams were all relegated straight back from whence they came. Recent years also saw both Fulham and Norwich City become locked like stars in opposing binary orbit, getting relegated and promoted opposite each other over consecutive seasons. When they came to a rest, Fulham were in the Premier League, but Norwich City ended in the Championship. The up and downing has to end someday. Which side of the coin will Southampton be facing when they settle?
The personnel lost can hardly be considered inconsequential. Director of football Jason Wilcox leaving for Manchester United at the end of April required the replacement of a significant cog in the wheel, and while at least the fact that Che Adams leaving for Torino rather than another Premier League club means that he won’t be terrorising their defence this season, he leaves a big gap in the personality of a team that, if nothing else, has had a mixed couple of years.
In the other direction, while there has been transfer activity, it’s mostly been fairly low-key. Adam Lallana returns after a decade away, but otherwise their summer has been about making previous loans permanent, as in the case of Flynn Downes and Taylor Harwood-Bellis from West Ham United and Manchester City respectively, or somewhat modest signings such as Nathan Wood from Swansea City, Ben Brereton-Diaz from Villareal, and Ronnie Edwards from Peterborough United.
Manager Russell Martin is no longer the new kid on the block. He was highly thought of in Milton Keynes and at Swansea City, but Southampton appointed him with high expectations and getting back up through the play-offs may even be considered close to the limits of what would have been considered acceptable by the club hierarchy. But he’s still there, and this is his big challenge, the opportunity that he was looking for when he arrived at St Mary’s in the first place. No-one is expecting it to be easy.
Tottenham Hotspur
It’s been yet another curious twelve months for Tottenham Hotspur. The catastrophism of the Late Stage Conte Era seems to have eased, although there can remain a slightly febrile atmosphere around the club at times, as though all it could take would be one small spark for current feelings of goodwill to conflagrate and a familiar sullen gloom to descend again.
Look to the future, and everything starts to look brighter. Archie Gray had been highly impressive for Leeds United and has the potential to grow further, while securing the outstanding Mikey Moore on a three-year contract was business that the club needed to do. He has the potential to be an extremely special player indeed. Lucas Bergvall has already been capped by Sweden and is still just 18 years old. The kids, as they say, are alright. Very alright indeed, at the moment.
Youth cannot be the answer to everything, though, and the club’s big marquee signing of the summer was Dominic Solanke from Bournemouth. For those of us who remember, say, Roberto Soldado, Chris Armstrong, or Alan Brazil squeezing himself into a Spurs shirt like a hairy haggis, the club spending a lot of money on a striker is always likely invoke some sort of traumatised muscle memory, but Solanke’s form last season makes him as reasonable a bet as any to succeed.
There also remains reason to be optimistic about the manager. There seems to be buy-in from the players over Ange Postecoglou’s system, and the football has been more fun than it was under the other two incumbents that they’ve tried since kicking Mauricio Pochettino to the kerb in 2019. Sort out their wretched set-piece record and cure that strange tetchiness about them when trying to play the ball out of defence, and they’d be an excellent team.
As ever with Daniel Levy, Postecoglou will be judged by league positions. European football means more money, and the manager’s biggest achievement was getting them into the Europa League at the start of the new, expanded version of the tournament that will earn them a reasonable amount of money. With no ‘relegations’ from the Champions League, as there have been in recent years, any more, they may even fancy trying to win that. After 16 years without one, actually going for one or both of the domestic trophies would be a worthwhile endeavour, as well.
Mikey Moore and the rest of them are all bets for the future for Spurs, but the present raises questions. This looks like a team that could click, and a run to next season’s Champions League certainly isn’t beyond them. But start doing Spurstastic things again and any accrued edifice of built up confidence could easily come tumbling down very quickly as well. Ever was it thus with this most perplexing of football clubs, and ever, it often seems, will it be.
West Ham United
Out with the old, then, and in with the new. David Moyes left West Ham United at the end of last season with his head held high, having brought them their first major trophy in almost four and a half decades and getting them to sixth and seventh placed finishes in the Premier League in 2021 and 2022.
But West Ham’s 2023/24 season had tailed off over the course of their last six matches, from which they could only manage one win. Indeed, you can go back further than that, should you wish. They only won four of their last 19 games of the season; the entire second half of it. Their FA Cup involvement came to an end at Bristol City and their Europa League ended in a fairly comprehensive defeat to Bayer Leverkusen. They finished the season in 9th place, but eight points short of 8th placed Manchester United.
Enter stage left then Jolen Lopetegui, whose previous stint in the Premier League with Wolves ended at the very start of last season with disagreements with the owners of the club. He’d registered 10 wins in the Premier League in 37 games with them. Not an especially outstanding record, but not a disastrous one either.
And their time in the transfer market has been busy. Niclas Fullkrug is an impressive signing, very much the sort of battering ram they grew accustomed to at the London Stadium with Andy Carroll. Crysencio Summerville returns to the Premier League from Leeds to offer a little spice to their attack, while Aaron Wan-Bissaka returns to London after a sojourn at Manchester United which may be reasonably described as “mixed”.
There’s been quite a lot of activity and there may well be more to come, so the big question facing Lopetegui is how quickly he can get a quite different looking squad to gel and start working as a functioning unit. The pieces are there. West Ham already had a number of talented players before we even move onto their summer acquisitions, while they haven’t lost any players who fans will particularly lose sleep over losing. West Ham can reach the top half again, but it’s likely to be congested.
Wolverhampton Wanderers
Last season was a difficult one for Wolves. Following the sales of Ruben Neves and Matheus Nunes and the sudden departure of Jolen Lopetegui six days before the start of the season, Gary O’Neil was brought in at extremely short notice, brought the best out of his team, including especially Hwang Hee-chan and Matheus Cunha, and eventually took them to 14th place in the Premier League table.
They’d have finished higher had they not tailed off in the closing weeks of the season after having climbed as high as 9th. If form can carry over summer breaks, then Wolves need to be wary of a slow start. Beginning their season at The Emirates is as tough as fixtures come at the moment, and four of their next five league fixtures are against Chelsea, Newcastle United, Aston Villa and Liverpool. That’s a tough start.
So it may be important for Wolves to keep their heads. The league table may not be looking too great after six games, and while Gary O’Neil did pretty well last season in the end, considering the circumstances of his arrival, right at the very start of the season, he hasn;’t really built up the credit in the bank to be able to last that long, should that poor start begin to extend towards the autumn.
For the second summer in a row, two key players have left the club; Max Kilman to West Ham United and Pedro Neto to Chelsea. But despite having brought in the lion’s share of £100m for those two players alone, their own transfer activity has been modest; £25m on Rodrigo Gomes from Braga, Tommy Doyle from Manchester City, and Pedro Lima from Sport Recife. Another two spins of Jorge Mendes’ random Portuguese name generator, there.
Wolves should have the financial liquidity to invest in the transfer market before it closes at the end of the month. In losing Kilman, who was not only one of their better players but was also their captain, they have a particularly large hole to fill. But as that tough start to the season approaches, the five points they picked up from their last ten Premier League matches of last season is not a run they can afford to continue into the new one.