And I heard, as it were, a sound of thunder. I heard multitudes marching to the big kettle drum. Not to mention, it should be said, even larger multitudes talking on the wicked and unholy internet about agent sightings, failed here-we-gos and the Alexander Isak wheel of global conspiracy.
Let he that hath understanding count the number! Because, let’s face it, it really is an absolute beast of a number, 215 live Premier League games on Sky Sports alone, an endless rolling debauchery of games, of graphics that go whoosh, of arguments by the lighted dias.
Welcome to the start of the Premier League season 2025-26. It is, as ever, a thrilling prospect. The opening round of fixtures will play out across this long weekend with the familiar sense of unspent energy, shapes, tides, narratives that will only reveal themselves in the slog through winter into spring.
There are very good reasons why this thing has become the world’s dominant pop cultural stage. It works. No matter how sated you might have become by the end of the last one, there is always renewal and fresh hunger. Albeit with an even stronger sense this time of shifting planes, hard lines dissolving, a Premier League that is, for the first time in some time, a little menaced by omens, portents and notes of horn-parping rapture.
Two significant things have happened this summer. First, Premier League clubs have spent like the world is on fire. The running total on basic transfer fees is more than £2bn with two weeks to go, already the second-largest ever, with a shot at beating 2023’s all-time high, post-Covid.
This has been classic muscle-flexing Big Window Energy. Nine clubs, according to Transfermarkt, have ticked up more than £60m on ins minus outs. Manchester United and Arsenal are more than £200m. Liverpool, the champions, have spent £253m gross in regearing the starting XI, part of a wider trend of genuine churn, book-balancing and head-count shift.
Arne Slot has a very different challenge this season, having expertly taken Liverpool to the Premier League title last season. Photograph: Matt Impey/Shutterstock
If this feels a little wild in places it is perhaps a reflection of that second element, the feeling of rumblings off stage, other powers rising, a war in heaven about to break. There are good reasons why Sky has chosen to gorge itself on English football this season, recentring on its key asset.
This has been the founding commercial relationship for both parties, and a relatively simple dynamic. Put on the show. Sell the show to people whose business is screwing metal dishes to a wall, who can then sell it on to an audience watching a screen from its sofa. Defined territories. Easy to defend from outside interference. That model has been screwed into place for 35 years now, its coherence a key source of the league’s global power.
It is already being disrupted. This summer Fifa gouged its fingers into domestic football, juicing up its invitees to the Club World Cup with vast amounts of Saudi-backed money, skewing the domestic balance of income, focus, internal tension. Behold the bald Swiss power broker on his great white throne saying, I will make all things new. These structures, these watertight shapes, are not football’s final form.
There are signs of the times everywhere, indicators of control being ceded in plain sight. The expanded Champions League is already having a similar stratifying influence. Regulations feel more mutable and vulnerable to challenge, unless you’re Crystal Palace and forgot to play the game. La Liga is playing matches overseas. The Premier League is launching a Netflix-style app. A baby has been born in Germany speaking only in Thierry Henry memes. That golden ladder is reaching down. Flick forward five years. How much longer can the centre hold?
How Tijjani Reijnders and Manchester City’s other new players will gel is one of the questions of the new season as Pep Guardiola tries to rebuild his team. Photograph: Miguel Rodriguez/EPA
In the meantime we have more boom times, a fever of commerce. Buy, spend, shore up your place in the new heaven and earth. It makes the current season feel both oddly reassuring and safe in its August-to-May routines, but also hard to read.
In recent years there have been three distinct Premier League tiers: the lanterne rouge, the back-markers; the well-run middle; and the overclass. But even within this who can say who is good right now, who is healthy, who has found the right chemistry?
Partly this is related to the excitable nature of much of the team building this summer. What kind of signings are the current wave of US-facing, entertainment product owners most likely to go all in for? The answer seems to be whizzy attackers with resale value. Florian Wirtz for £116m, Hugo Ekitiké £79m, Benjamin Sesko £73.7m, Viktor Gyökeres £63.5m. These are all exciting and unpredictable additions. Nobody knows how they will fall, who will fire, which of these variables will resolve itself.
It still seems safe to say the league title will be divvied up between four contenders. Arne Slot has a harder job this season in some ways. Ticking over, rejigging, fixing the joins is one thing, and it was expertly done. What is required now is now an act of major, high-intensity rebuild on the hoof. It is an entirely different kind of test.
Nobody knows whether Manchester City are back, half-back or non-back. Pep Guardiola talks only in prophecies and gospels and sooths these days. Some key expertise has left the club. Rodri and Tijjani Reijnders looks a very good midfield. There is also quite a lot of filler around.
Manchester United have spent more than £200m on the attacking talents of Bryan Mbeumo, Benjamin Sesko and Matheus Cunha (from left), but they still look brittle. Photograph: Ash Donelon/Manchester United/Getty Images
Arsenal will be fascinating to watch. Here are a team who already have the best defence. Add a new central midfield and a goalscorer with the nickname the Cannibal, and there really is nowhere to hide. This will not be a personnel issue or a stadium issue or a vibe issue. It will be an issue of will and nerve and the bravery to play on the edge, to take risks as well as squeeze.
Are Chelsea good now? Will they be exhausted or energised? They have a thrillingly strong midfield and a fresh cutting edge. They really should be title contenders.
In the tier below, Newcastle fans have finally found something objectionable about their owners, specifically the inability to run a successful player recruitment and retention arm. But the team are still very strong.
Aston Villa can get on with winning the Europa League. Manchester United will as ever exist in their own group of one, simultaneously epic, moreish, big-time, brittle, rickety and utterly brown paper and string. Sesko could be an excellent signing, and has the right elite vibes. On one hand there has to be an improvement. On the other the midfield is still two bad games from thawing out the cryogenic chamber and having another go with Casemiro.
Can Leeds manager Daniel Farke end the run of promoted clubs dropping straight back down? Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
In the middle range, AKA Brightfordmouth, the challenge is to resist the effects of being cannibalised and rebuild once more. Crystal Palace look strong and motivated. Everton could have their best season for a while. Fulham have failed to add much but should be fine because of Marco Silva + London stadium bonus + just enough good players. Nottingham Forest have the Europa League to cope with. A poor start could be a problem. Spurs could be anything, or simply Spurs. West Ham’s problem will be patience, allowing Graham Potter’s influence to swell slowly like a tuberous root vegetable.
Burnley and Scott Parker will be a fascinating contrast, a far more defensively robust prospect than the Vincent Kompany job pitch project last time around, with its doomed brand-building style. Leeds have energy and a sense of collectivism at Elland Road, although somehow it is still hard to avoid the idea of Daniel Farke ruefully explaining things on Match of the Day. Sunderland will Sunderland. Wolves are going to have to do something surprising.
The end result is a notably rigid hierarchy of clubs, a league table that could well simply end up in the exact order listed here. But which still seems to be operating in a state of high-end jeopardy just off stage, bonds and structures being tested, a sense of some looming rapture yet to reveal itself.
Take your sickle and reap. Don’t get left behind. Reach up towards those new sources of light and heat. Chelsea are world champions. A dog with the head of Jamie Carragher has been found wandering the Mendip Hills talking about defensive body position. And now the thing that never ends is all set to start once again.
