Before the Wheel Turns: Previewing the 2025/26 Premier League Season
The great wheel turns again. 33 years since English football broke away and dressed itself anew, here we are — the Premier League, from its bold 1992 birth to this very breath on an August night in 2025.
Sir Alex Ferguson, the grand architect of a dynasty, sculpted an empire from red brick and roaring terraces, conquered all, then took his bow. Arsène Wenger came, an alchemist in a long coat, weaving silk into steel, turning diet and detail into titles, then too he stepped away. Claudio Ranieri charmed Chelsea before they learned the business of winning. Years later, he returned to Leicester and in the most unthinkable spring, he painted the league’s greatest miracle.
José Mourinho swaggered in, the self-proclaimed ‘Special One,’ blue blood in West London, red in Manchester, and finally a flicker of lilywhite in North London. With each chapter, he left the taste of theatre on the tongue. Carlo Ancelotti — a man who has conquered leagues in every land he has walked upon, the Godfather of the Champions League, Don Corleone in a dugout — came to Chelsea, and left with the league and FA Cup in hand.
Roberto Mancini, a flash of sky-blue defiance, the man who dared to rip the crown from Ferguson’s head, snatching City’s first Premier League title with the last kick of the last day. Pellegrini followed, dignified and understated, before the great chessboard was set for Pep Guardiola.
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The Catalan conductor, orchestrated a symphony of domination, whilst his great counterpoint Jurgen Klopp, the grinning German who believed in chaos and charisma. Their rivalry defined an age. And now, Klopp is gone, leaving the Kop to Arne Slot, who in his very first season delivered Liverpool’s holy grail again, but carries into this campaign the absence of Diogo Jota, gone far too soon, whose name will echo with every Anfield chorus.
Last season brought a twist in the tale. Manchester City crumbled, their godlike sheen dimmed. Manchester United… fifteenth. A crimson giant brought low under Rúben Amorim, now clawing for redemption. Chelsea, reshaped by Enzo Maresca, once Pep’s understudy and now a champion of the UEFA Conference League and the inaugural FIFA Club World Cup, is ready to write his own doctrine.
Arsenal, Mikel Arteta’s perfect paintings missing only the frame, three seasons a runner-up, desperate to finish the canvas. Spurs, Thomas Frank, a Brentford man made bold, still haunted by Paris where a 2-0 lead against PSG dissolved into penalty defeat in the UEFA Super Cup.
And so, Guardiola, Slot, Maresca, Arteta, Frank, Amorim. Six men staring into the white-hot sun of a season that could define them. The stage is as crowded as it is cruel. The stakes are nothing less than legacy. The Premier League begins again, and in the blink of the next 38 games, history will decide who merely played their part and who will be remembered forever.
Each season begins the same way: empty tables in August, futures unwritten, the grass still fresh with its artificial neatness, untouched by the chaos that will soon fray its patterns. The air hums with possibility. In these opening days, nobody is yet haunted by the cruel arithmetic of points dropped. There are no scapegoats, no tactical betrayals, no weary post-match confessions from managers under siege. For now, there is only the pristine illusion of perfection — every team level, every ambition alive.
But football is not built for perfection. It is built for erosion. Every victory will be contested, every flaw exposed, every dream reshaped by the blunt hands of reality. What begins as a mural in the mind will become a scuffed, weathered thing by spring and yet, it is the fragility of these dreams that makes them precious. The season’s opening is not a declaration of certainty, but an invitation to risk heartbreak for the faint chance of transcendence.
Consider the peculiar theatre of this moment: squads have been assembled like delicate machines, each part theoretically compatible with the next. In the manager’s mind, the geometry is flawless — passing lanes will open, rotations will click, pressing triggers will snap into place. But football is not geometry. It is weather. It shifts with mood, confidence, the weight of a crowd’s silence or the panic in a goalkeeper’s eyes. Systems are theories; matches are storms.
Somewhere right now, a teenager in a squad photo will step into training believing he is months away from irrelevance, only to find himself, by winter, the decisive spark in a match that changes everything. Somewhere else, a record signing will arrive to fanfare, a crown waiting for his head, only to discover the crown is made of lead. These are the early seeds of narrative that will grow in strange directions.
A season opener is also a meeting place of timescales. The match before us is ninety minutes long, but the forces that shape it are measured in years. A manager’s philosophy may have been forged decades ago, an echo of an old mentor’s advice. A player’s confidence might rest on a childhood triumph no one else remembers. Even the chants in the stands are the product of decades, melodies passed down like family heirlooms. Football is never truly new; it is the past re-telling itself through the bodies of the present.
And yet, every season finds a way to surprise us. It is the unpredictability of human choice within structure — the winger who ignores the coach’s instruction and tries something impossible, the centre-back who decides to carry the ball twenty yards further than prudence allows, the midfielder who sees an angle others do not. These moments, raw and unscripted, are where a season shifts from prediction to poetry.
In August, the table is a mirage. You can stare at it all you like, but it tells you nothing. The real truths emerge in October, when rain slickens the pitch and fatigue begins to whisper in tired legs. They deepen in January, when fixtures pile up and ambitions face the slow grinding cruelty of winter. But now is the luxury of ignorance. Every side is still their best possible self, every supporter allowed to dream without irony.
There is also a more personal ritual here. Each fan returns not just to the team, but to the version of themselves that football brings forth. The nervous energy before a match, the reflexive mutterings at a poor pass, the deep, irrational joy of a goal — these are seasonal emotions, dormant in June and July, alive again in August. For some, football is the only consistent narrative in a life otherwise shifting under their feet. For others, it is a bridge between generations, the one subject that can draw conversation from a father or grandmother who otherwise says little.
The start of a season is not just a sporting event — it is a social reset. Cities hum differently on matchdays. Streets, pubs, living rooms are temporarily reorganised around a shared attention. Strangers nod in recognition at scarves, buses fill with colours, and the world outside the match seems briefly less urgent. For ninety minutes, it is enough to care about the geometry of a midfield, the bravery of a goalkeeper’s dive, the cruelty of a late offside flag.
Managers know this moment is deceptive. A win today feels enormous, but the table will forget it by May unless it becomes part of a larger pattern. A defeat feels catastrophic, but it is, in truth, only a single grain of sand on a vast beach. The great managers — the Ancelottis, the Guardiolas, the Mourinhos at their peak — read the long rhythm. They know that the season is not a sprint but a slow construction, built match by match, habit by habit, until the final shape is revealed.
And yet, they too are vulnerable to the peculiar intoxication of the opener. They will stand on the touchline today with the same mix of calculation and emotion as everyone else. They will glance at the crowd, feel the pulse of the occasion, and perhaps — just for a moment — allow themselves to believe that the season ahead will match the image in their mind.
Because football, for all its science, remains a game of seduction. It draws us in not with certainty, but with the suggestion that this might be the year — the year the underdog rises, the year the champions fall, the year something happens that will be retold for decades. It is this possibility, fragile and irrational, that makes the first weekend feel like a beginning in the truest sense.
Soon, the season will harden. Injuries will bite, refereeing decisions will provoke fury, tactical flaws will be exposed. Winter will arrive and strip the game of its early brightness. But none of that is here yet. Today, the pitch is green, the shirts are clean, and the story is unwritten.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, a pass will be made, a run will be timed, a finish will be struck, and the season’s first goal will be scored. It will not just be a goal — it will be the opening sentence in a story that will carry us through the months ahead, a sentence we cannot yet interpret but will look back on with the clarity of hindsight.
For now, the beauty lies in not knowing. The opener is an act of faith — faith that the game will again deliver moments to lift us, to wound us, to remind us why we keep coming back. The whistle will blow, the ball will roll, and once again, we will step into the great unfolding.
By Tobi Peter / @keepIT_tactical
Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Rhianna Chadwick – PA Images