The Monday Almanac: Is a day late this week

This week, there’s a bit on the Premier League’s opening weekend for everyone, then paying subscribers get a full run-down on the rest of everything, including an update on the team who had the worst opening day result of anybody. Interested? You can subscribe or upgrade your subscription here.

If nothing else, the last couple of seasons have taught me that the anticipation of something will frequently be better than the reality of it. That feels truer than in the Premier League than just about anywhere else. For supporters of a majority of clubs, that pre-season feeling of optimism and hope is only ever going to be a temporary feeling before the actual football starts and we’re reminded of the realities that our aspirations have to bump up against.

It’s entirely possible that the timbre of the 2026-27 season has already been decided. Arsenal will be imperious against most teams that they come up against, while everybody else scrapes along, baring their arses as they go. That was the main theme of the weekend, really. The champions made light work of beating newly-promoted Coventry City and laid down a marker for the others to match. They all, in some way or another, failed to do so.

Consider the performances of the other teams that would be expected to compete for a place near the upper end of the table. Chelsea and Manchester City were distinctly flawed but ground out wins against teams with a fraction of their resources. Liverpool were flawed against a Newcastle side who’ve had a dismal summer and needed a 99th-minute penalty to emerge with a draw. Spurs and Manchester United were both abject.

Still, at least things aren’t as bad for them as they are for Aston Villa. Their opening half-hour against Brighton on Sunday afternoon was the worst 30 minutes of football that we’ll see from anybody all season. At least, it’s to be hoped that this is the case, because if anybody can manage a worse opening to a match this season, it will be a sure sign that something has gone very, very wrong indeed.

The Ollie Watkins situation has only inflamed an already furious fanbase, and it seems entirely plausible that the disruption caused behind the scenes by his little tantrum was the biggest single reason why the team who finished last season in 5th place in the Premier League played the first half of their match at the Amex as though in a daze. Don’t go blaming the “Big Six Cartel” for Victor Lindelhof playing as though he’s only just been introduced to the concept of spherical objects.

Watkins reportedly wants out to go and fill his bank account in Saudi Arabia, and Villa supporters have clambered aboard the “there’s a conspiracy against us” bandwagon, though this rather overlooks the uncomfortable fact that, if this account from Football365 is to be believed, both their club and Newcastle United, the other club whose fans have been complaining the loudest about a “cartel” all summer, voted in favour of it. Had either one of them changed their vote, the rules wouldn’t have changed.

It is frustrating, but it’s also telling that the only system that would have been truly equalising - a hard salary and transfer fee cap - is routinely dismissed out of hand as being against employment law, unsuitable for a pyramid system, and, if the PFA - who have an extremely vested interest in ensuring that player salaries are kept as high as possible - are to be believed, a restraint of trade.

If anything, the opening weekend of the season proved that there isn’t an elite cabal of clubs who are demooring themselves from the rest and sailing off into the distance. Two of the three newly-promoted clubs won, and the only one that didn’t were away to the white hot favourites to win the title again this season. Hull blew Manchester United away and Ipswich were stronger than Sunderland, who have been widely predicted to be in for a year of Second Season Syndrome.

Two of the three “B” clubs - the neologism that seems to have been decided for Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth - also started their seasons with big wins, while the other lost narrowly to the club owned by an emirati. For all the talk about how changes to financial regulations are going to change the game, the first weekend of the season felt very much like business as usual, if we’re talking about the last couple of seasons of this division.