Good afternoon and welcome back to The Overlap newsletter.
The Premier League is back! Kicking us off is defending champions Arsenal hosting newly promoted Coventry City - a real baptism of fire for last season’s EFL Championship winners.
Coventry last played in the Premier League during the 2000-01 season, bringing an end to a 34-year stay in the top flight. Now, after 25 years away, the Sky Blues have finally earned their place back at English football’s top table. Under the tutelage of English great Frank Lampard, Coventry were exceptional in the Championship, winning the title by an 11-point margin while playing some of the most attractive attacking football in the division. But the Premier League is a different beast entirely - one that has swallowed up promoted sides time and time again, as Vincent Kompany’s Burnley discovered just two seasons ago. So, now comes the real test: can Lampard and Coventry take their Championship success and translate it to the biggest stage of all?
As for Arsenal, this season represents an opportunity to truly cement themselves as the dominant force in English football. After years of trying and falling short, Mikel Arteta’s men finally got their hands on the Premier League trophy last season, while they were also just spot-kicks away from becoming European champions. And with the rest of the ‘big six’ undergoing periods of transition - Pep leaving Manchester City, Carrick rebuilding Manchester United, Iraola taking over at Liverpool, Alonso finding his feet at Chelsea and De Zerbi reshaping Spurs - Arsenal appear to have the one thing their rivals lack: continuity. With Arteta, his core squad and the club’s wider structure all firmly established, they should be the favourites to defend their crown. Doing so would put Arteta in an elite group, joining only Sir Alex Ferguson, José Mourinho and Pep Guardiola as managers to win consecutive Premier League titles.
Catch the brand new season of Stick To Football as Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Jill Scott, Roy Keane and Ian Wright are back around the table as we look ahead to the new Premier League season. Following a busy transfer window that continues to rumble on, we rank the best midfields in the league and discuss the business still to be done. Do Arsenal need another superstar to retain their Premier League title? What does Manchester United’s midfield rebuild still need? And how will Manchester City adapt to life after Pep Guardiola and Rodri? The team also reveal their hot takes for the season ahead, before Super 6 returns with predictions for the opening weekend.
Catch the latest episode of The Breakdown as we analyse why Carlos Baleba could be the PERFECT signing for Manchester United as the club looks to build a new era at Old Trafford. We break down Baleba’s progressive carrying, ability to press high and win the ball back, and explore how his physicality and intensity could bring the perfect balance to a midfield featuring Kobbie Mainoo, Andrey Santos and Youri Tielemans. With Mainoo’s press resistance, Santos’ aggression and Tielemans’ amazing passing and creativity, could Baleba be the missing piece that brings everything together and gives United the balance they’ve been searching for?
Which club have won the most opening-day fixtures in Premier League history?
Answer to follow at the end of the newsletter.
“These geniuses are unbalanced people,” says Ferran Soriano in the Amazon documentary on Guardiola’s farewell years at Manchester City. “Not only Pep, not only in football. In any artistic activity.” And he’s not wrong, the Manchester City CEO. From Jose Mourinho turning up in London to announce he was “a special one,” to Arsene Wenger’s concession that he used to be so sick after defeats he would literally throw up and Sir Alex Ferguson’s expletive-strewn outbursts at journalists, there was always a little bit of the unhinged about the big managerial beasts. The Mount Rushmore of Premier League coaches would arguably be those four, geniuses all in the football sense. Unbalanced, all of them. And now they are gone.
For the first time since 1987, not one of those big-four managers starts the new season in England. It comes after an unusually busy summer season for coaching turnover, with eleven new appointees starting at Premier League clubs. Fabian Hürzeler, 33, is now a Premier League veteran approaching his third season and the fourth-longest-serving manager. Regis Le Bris is the fifth. It feels like we’re at an inflection point, that perhaps we will never see the like again.
A Beautiful Obsession was the title of the Pep documentary, which is perhaps gilding it a bit. Was it beautiful when he was so stressed he was scratching his face until it bled, or raging at his team and his back-room staff for enjoying their meal after a defeat? Was it beautiful when he told the team: “I leave my life, my divorce and my family is away, and everything for all of you. And what do you give back? The f****** performance you have done. It’s a disgrace, guys. I’m really f****** tired. I’m exhausted, I’m drained. I want to quit.”
There is a pertinent line in the documentary when the interviewer asks Pep: “Are you happy?” “In my job, yeah,” he replies. It comes after he has discussed his new status as a divorcee. Wenger reflected in his autobiography after he quit Arsenal that he was “obsessed by my passion. I didn’t go to the theatre or the cinema; I neglected those around me.” He split with his wife Annie Brosterhous in 2015, just as his career came to an end. He talks about how leaving the job allowed him to spend time with daughter, Léa, a clinical neuroscientist and Cambridge University graduate, while regretting the times he had missed with her in the past. The price these men paid was not insignificant.
And who will step into the void? Bizarrely, four of the candidates come from the Basque country, born within a few miles of each other and three are childhood team-mates. Mikel Arteta, with a Premier League title, an FA Cup and a Champions League final behind him at the age of 44, seems best placed. Undoubtedly he carries that obsessive gene, the slightly weird pursuit of excellence. Andoni Iraola strikes me as the best and most-interesting tactically, and yet he is a quietly spoken, thoughtful man. You can never imagine him striding into a room saying he is a special one nor shouting at reporters “youse lot can f** off!” Likewise Unai Emery and Xabi Alonso. There may be steel behind their politeness, yet they are cut from a different cloth. The intensity remains but the charisma is, as yet, not in the same category. Maybe it takes time for this to grow. Maybe in thirty years’ time a report in this newsletter will reflect on the extraordinary Arteta-Alonso rivalry, childhood team-mates who bestrode the Premier League for twenty years, trading barbs and insults as they battled ferociously for multiple trophies?
What of the rest? Enzo Maresca looked a little lost last week in the Community Shield. It feels like a hospital pass, inheriting the Manchester City dynasty at this time of flux. Great things are reported of Matthias Jaissle and yet, like Maresca, he takes over a team in transition, selling its best players. Pierre Sage looks a smart appointment from Lens at Palace. But then so did Frank De Boer in 2017. The Premier League has a habit of jettisoning hard-won reputations in European leagues. Ask Ruben Amorim. Gary O’Neil returns, Marco Rose feels like the right fit for Bournemouth, a nurturer who overachieves at clubs with relatively small budgets. Alvaro Arbeloa steps from the stormy seas of Real Madrid into calmer waters by the Thames at Fulham. And yet, as Felix Magath can tell you, even there you can quickly feel like you’re drowning. Oliver Glasner will attempt to tame the Tiger that is Evangelos Marinakis. No one has previously succeeded. Daniel Farke will hope to build on a growing reputation at Leeds.
Frank Lampard carries a swagger while his former West Ham team-mate Michael Carrick is, as he was as a player, more methodical. Roberto De Zerbi is surely the manager most likely to succeed Ferguson with intemperate bust ups with reporters. Keith Andrews remains the most understated and Sergej Jakirovic, on the back of his Bosnian Premier win with Zrinjski Mostar in 2022 and Croatian league and cup win at Dinamo Zagreb, the most intriguing of all.
What stands out is that 63-year-old David Moyes is the oldest by nine years and only four managers (Le Bris, Emery and Glasner are the others) are over the age of 50. It is, if not a young man’s game, definitely the job for forty-somethings, the point at which peak energy meets optimum experience. Bobby Robson and Sir Alex were 71 and still managing in the Premier League, Wenger was 68 when he left Arsenal. This feels like a different era.
One big beast survives, of course. Mourinho is back at Real Madrid aged 63. Since leaving Manchester United in 2018, he bobbed around mid-sized clubs. Yet, with Florentino Pérez at least, fashions always come around again and now he’s back in favour. Nonetheless, the sense of a new generation rising up is undeniable. It is perhaps why Arsenal remain title favourites even though their transfer business has been less than captivating. Consistency combined with force of personality was always a winning formula for Ferguson, Wenger, Mourinho and Guardiola. The man who learned at the feet of two of those masters looks ready to inhabit the role. And yet we have to accept we are unlikely to see the like again. Something similar, maybe. But not the same.
Manchester United - 22 wins
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.