The Premier League 2024/25, Part Three: Leicester City to Newcastle United
There's some big guns in the third of our four brief previews of the upcoming Premier League season.
As we head into the alphabetical bottom half of the Premier League there are some big names waiting for us. Four of these five have won the Premier League in the last eleven years, and at least a couple of them will be expecting to be in the title race come the latter stages of this season. But first of all, a club returning to the Premier League in a gloomy state of mind.
Leicester City
From a distance, Leicester City should be returning to the Premier League after a season away in a positive frame of mind. The Championship title was, after all, wrapped up with room to spare. The fuss and bother of twelve months earlier felt like already receding memories.
But contrary to expectations, this has not been an especially happy summer for the Foxes. Enzo Maresca, the coach who’d taken them straight back to the Premier League, jumped ship for Stamford Bridge as soon as a bag of cash big enough was waved in his direction and a new challenge. Never forget: the rich always get what they want, even if they’re going to break it once they’ve got it.
The replacement is Steve Cooper, who should be a perfectly viable replacement but who doesn’t quite feel like being worth getting excited over after Leicester’s lengthy but ultimately fruitless pursuit of Graham Potter. The club had clearly been in pursuit of a project, but in the absence of that a manager who successfully kept a newly-promoted team from the East Midlands in the Premier League seems like a reasonable place to start.
Maresca wasn’t the only departure this summer. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall has also gone to Chelsea, and since Dewsbury-Hall was very much a ‘one of our own’ type of player for Leicester fans his departure–particularly as the club had returned to the Premier League–particularly stings for them. The option to go to a ‘bigger’ club is always available, but Leicester fans might have realistically hoped that a local(ish) lad who’d excelled as part of their promotion team.
Dewsbury-Hall’s departure was primarily brought about by Leicester's battle with PSR. There are already storm clouds ahead. The club were charged in their absence with breaches during their last stay at this level, but it is considered likely that they will suffer a points deduction this season. When you’re going into a new season having already lost your manager and arguably best player leave for a huge great big wooden chest full of gold and diamonds a new challenge, that sort of sanction makes obviously staying up even more difficult than it would otherwise already have been. It may be a long winter ahead, for Leicester City.
Important line for pub conversations: Something about Jamie Vardy being the oldest man alive, when in reality he’s actually fifteen years younger than you.
Liverpool
In a transitional season for more than one Premier League club, few others are having to undergo greater transition than Liverpool. The loss of Jurgen Klopp at the end of last season wasn’t just the loss of a manager. It was the loss of a part of the fabric of the club, an individual who had rebuilt the identity of Liverpool FC in a way that no-one had truly done since Bill Shankly.
Arne Slot is the replacement, and his start has been fair. Liverpool’s third-placed finish last season wasn’t the title challenge that had been expected, but it does also represent a return to the Champions League, and Slot has commented on the need for marginal improvements if Liverpool are to get back to challenging again.
The margins are tight–compression of the fixture list means that he will only have had his full squad back together for 11 days before the new league season starts–but Slot’s previous record means that, for all the sadness at having to say goodbye to a literally iconic manager, the atmosphere around Anfield going into the new season is fairly sanguine.
Familiar questions will raise their heads. Mo Salah has scored twenty or more goals in each of the last eight seasons. He is as excellent as ever and seems to be in good condition, but he is now 32 years old and won’t go on forever. Darwin Nunez has been in patchy form pretty much since he’s been at Anfield and had a poor end to last season. Slot already considers him a key component to his plans, but can he deliver under what will likely be a somewhat different delivery system?
Liverpool have only finished as high as second once in the last four seasons. It wasn’t a ‘fall from grace’ or anything as dramatic as that, but it was something of a tail-off, and while Klopp’s departure signals the obvious end of an era for the club, perhaps the end of last season was the right time for all concerned to grasp what was always going to be a difficult nettle to grasp.
Contention for major trophies is where Liverpool need to be, and the way in which last season tailed off for them was perhaps the clearest indicator that Jurgen Klopp himself was running out of energy. There’s enough general uncertainty around elsewhere to indicate that they will be able to challenge again this season, and that should be enough, though it might not be enough to win them the Premier League title, this time around.
Important line for pub conversations: “Reminder: Bob Paisley was wayyy more successful than Bill Shankly ever was!”
Manchester City
For all the talk of Manchester City stomping their feet all over the face of English football, it’s striking that their last two Premier League titles have come about only on the last day of the season. Margins at the top end of European club football can be extremely fine, and City have perfected the art of nudging them in their direction in recent years.
Of course, whether they’ve taken those marginal gains in accordance with financial rules is a different matter, and after a couple of years of caterwauling from all sides over those 115 charges, it should at least feel like something of a relief that it seems likely that this season will finally see this case moving forward. Whether it proves to be a significant distraction or have a galvanising effect on everybody within the club remains to be seen.
There is something of a fin de siecle feeling surrounding the club at the moment. This may yet be Pep Guardiola’s last season with the club, while some of their key players are ageing. Kyle Walker is now 34. Kevin De Bruyne is 33. Even Ickle Jack Grealish is now 28 and starting to look his age. Changes are going to come, but what will they look like?
All runs of title wins come to an end eventually, and Manchester City scraped over the line in each of the last two seasons. The Death Star has its vulnerabilities. Furthermore, this year’s Arsenal team looks more ready for a scrap and have improved upon last season, and they weren’t too far off snatching it then.
The truth of the matter is that those charges will continue to dominate discourse surrounding this particular club, and even if a result is reached over the course of this season, it’s unlikely that even that will be the end of the matter, considering City’s propensity to throw millions at lawyers with the intention of bludgeoning anything that gets in the way of them doing whatever the hell they like.
There’s no point looking for City supporters to stand up to these owners. They’ve made their feelings perfectly clear. And previous experience of the governing bodies of football have indicated pretty strongly that they don’t really give that much of a damn either. They let the fox in the henhouse more than a decade and a half ago, and it should be no great surprise that it’s not going to leave until it’s devoured everything it can.
Important line for pub conversations: Don’t bother. As soon as you open your mouth a thousand sock puppets will appear from out of nowhere and try and drown you out.
Manchester United
Eleven years and counting. Manchester United may be under new part-ownership and a familiar round of bluster may have started, but there’s little actual evidence that this club will be suddenly thrust back towards the top end of the Premier League table over the next nine months. Talk of a new 100,000 capacity Old Trafford has fluffed up the hubris machine over the course of the summer, but where are Manchester United actually up to, at the moment?
Off the pitch, the answer to this question is probably ‘still stuck in an ethical vacuum’. 200 jobs were lost at the club over the summer while multi-millionaires earned multi-million pounds, and all the social media talk of, “It’s a business, don’t you understand? It was critical to the club that this money was saved?” demonstrated where the loyalties of a substantial enough proportion of the club’s fan base remained. Trophies, trophies, trophies. Lost your job? Tough shit. We demand more players.
So what have they got this summer? Mattijs de Ligt was a central cog in Erik Ten Hag’s Ajax team of 2019. Noussair Mazraoui joined at the same time, also from Bayern. WIth United’s defence so porous last season and Raphael Varane having left at the start of the summer, they needed the defensive cover. They paid Lille almost £59m for Leny Yoro, but he got injured during their pre-season tour match against Arsenal and is now already unlikely to be back before the new year. Joshua Zirkzee was part of the Bologna team which qualified for the Champions League last year and cost United £36.5m. He was the first signing of the Dan Ashcroft era.
And there’s the manager. It was widely expected that Erik Ten Hag would lose his job at the end of last season, but instead he signed a contract extension and will be running the show again this time around. Winning the FA Cup obviously brought him some goodwill from INEOS, who are now running the ‘football side’ of the corporation. Whether that will be enough to assuage fans in the event that everything starts crumbling again in the first couple of months of the season remains doubtful.
This is Manchester United, so it’s always possible that they could pick up a tin pot or even have a go in the League. But as things stand on the eve of the start of the new season, reasons to get too excited about this year’s team seem somewhat thin on the ground. At least they shouldn’t be as bad as last season, though.
Important line for pub conversations: “Actually yes, I think that Mark Goldbridge is 100% representative of the entire Manchester United fan base.”
Newcastle United
This time last year, there were oodles of optimism emanating from Tyneside. The first full season of Saudi government ownership had ended with the team finishing in a Champions League place, and who cares about ongoing human rights abuses when things are going this well, eh? I mean, these owners can drop €70 million on Sander Tonali, only for the player to get banned for the rest of the season after eight League appearances, and they don’t even seem to notice it, right?
Except last season didn’t exactly go according to plan. They were dumped out of the Champions League in the group stages and there will be no immediate return to European football after Chelsea pipped them to 6th place in the Premier League at the end of it all. Still, at least this gives them a clear run this time around. No European football at a time when UEFA have expanded the group stages of their competitions may prove to be a handy advantage in domestic competitions.
Eddie Howe remains in position, though this state of affairs is broadly presumed to be less than secure. Howe tops the betting for first Premier League manager to be sacked this season, and the departures of former directors and minority co-owners Amanda Staveley and her husband and business partner, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, during the summer, and subsequent press reports did seem to indicate that Howe was less than happy with the way in which was managed. A position of mutual detente seems to have quelled this for now, but how long this would last in the event of poor results is anybody’s guess.
Tonali is back, and the signing of Marc Guehi, which seems to be edging closer and closer, would give them extra defensive cover. At the time of writing, the only player to have arrived for significant money is Lewis Hall from Chelsea, and at 18 years of age he’s probably one for the future rather than the right now. This is, of course, all a consequence of PSR rules, which are restricting their spending.
But given how Howe’s team plays and the injuries they racked up last season, the thinness of their squad remains an issue. With that advantage in terms of not having qualified for Europe, they could be good to press for a Champions League place again, but the competition will be strong and that susceptibility to injury - a matter that they have sought to minimise with the arrival of injury prevention specialist James Bunce - so fourth or fifth will likely be the summit of their ambition this time around.
Important line for pub conversations: See Manchester City.