Charalampos Kostoulas broke the deadlock just before the half hour mark, and from there Brighton barely let up. Malick Yalcouyé doubled the lead early in the second half, Pascal Gross added a third from the penalty spot, and further goals from Lewis Dunk and substitute Yasin Ayari in stoppage time turned a difficult afternoon into a humiliating one. Coventry’s misery was compounded shortly after Yalcouyé’s goal when Taiwo Awoniyi was shown a straight red card for an elbow on Maxim De Cuyper, reducing the hosts to ten men and ending any faint hope of a fightback before it had really begun.

It was the kind of scoreline that will have supporters wincing rather than reflecting fondly on what should have been a landmark season. Coventry’s return to the top flight, ending 25 years away from English football’s elite since relegation in 2000-01, was greeted with genuine warmth across the game in the summer. This is a club whose sole major honour, the 1987 FA Cup, still means everything to those who remember Keith Houchen’s diving header at Wembley, and getting back among the country’s biggest clubs was supposed to be a moment of pride rather than punishment. Sunday afternoon was a reminder of just how steep the climb back to competitiveness can be.

How the game slipped away

There was nothing sluggish about Brighton’s approach at the Coventry Building Society Arena. Kostoulas’s finish set the tone, and once Yalcouyé added a second shortly after the restart, the game was already running away from the hosts. Awoniyi’s dismissal followed almost immediately, and with Coventry down to ten men, the penalty converted by Gross gave Brighton daylight they scarcely needed.

Dunk’s header from a set piece made it four, a reminder that Brighton’s threat was not confined to open play, before Ayari rounded things off deep into stoppage time. For a Coventry side already toiling for goals and confidence, conceding five without reply, and finishing with ten men, is about as bad as an afternoon gets.

A tough start made tougher

Lampard had been honest about the scale of the challenge facing his players even before kick off. Reflecting on defeats to Arsenal and Manchester City in the opening weeks of the season, he said: “We knew it was going to be a tough start and that’s proven true, but I feel we’re in a better place having gone through those three games.” He had also flagged Brighton as a particularly awkward early fixture, noting: “This could be as hard, if not harder than, Manchester City for different reasons,” pointing to the identity Brighton have built under Fabian Hurzeler over several seasons.

Those words now read as prophetic, even if the manner of the defeat will have been worse than anything Lampard could have envisaged. Coventry have now lost their opening four Premier League fixtures, conceding ten goals along the way and scoring none, a run that leaves them adrift at the bottom of the table before September is even finished. For a club still adjusting to the physical and tactical demands of the top flight, after so long away from it, points matter less right now than rebuilding belief before the gap becomes unmanageable.

There will be sympathy for Lampard given the scale of the task he inherited, and few expected Coventry to be competitive against City, Arsenal or Brighton in the same breath. But a Premier League table does not deal in context, and four games without so much as a goal is a stark starting point for a promoted club to be judged against.

Brighton continue to build momentum

For Brighton, the result was another sign of the progress made under Hurzeler. They arrived at the Coventry Building Society Arena on four points from their opening three fixtures and left having added a comfortable away win to that tally, with five different goals scored across open play, a penalty and a set piece. Brighton’s model of recruitment and coaching continuity has made them one of the most consistently well run clubs outside the traditional elite, and the win lifts them comfortably into the top half of the table.

There will be sterner tests to come for Hurzeler’s side, but the ruthlessness on show, from open play, from the penalty spot and from a set piece, will have pleased their head coach as much as the scoreline itself.

Where it leaves Coventry

The immediate concern for Lampard is not the table position itself but the pattern building behind it. A side that cannot score is a side that cannot win, and Coventry’s inability to find the net in four matches, against opposition of varying quality, points to problems further up the pitch that will need addressing quickly. The next block of fixtures will tell us far more about whether this was a one off horror show against a good side in form, or the start of a genuinely difficult season for a club that worked so hard to get back to where it wanted to be.

Coventry’s supporters have waited a long time for Premier League football to return to the Coventry Building Society Arena. Afternoons like this one are the unwelcome part of that deal, and Lampard’s job now is to make sure they become the exception rather than the pattern.

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Tottenham Hotspur have gone four Premier League games this season without a win or a goal, after a goalless draw with Everton at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Saturday left Roberto De Zerbi’s side languishing in 17th place. It is the sort of start that would alarm any club, but for Spurs it carries an extra edge, because it comes barely four months after De Zerbi’s side beat these same opponents to preserve their Premier League status on the final day of last season.

That victory, sealed by a Joao Palhinha goal in May, capped a remarkable rescue act. De Zerbi had arrived in late March as Tottenham’s third manager of the 2025 to 2026 campaign, replacing Thomas Frank after a run of results so bad that Frank was sacked following a home defeat to Newcastle that stretched a club record losing streak to six games. Spurs were five points above the relegation zone at that point and sliding fast. Under De Zerbi they briefly got worse before they got better, extending a winless league run to fifteen matches at one stage, before a run of results including a pivotal win at Aston Villa dragged them clear. They finished the season in 17th, only two points above West Ham, having come closer to their first relegation in 49 years than anyone at the club would care to remember.

Given all that, the summer was supposed to be about building forward rather than looking over a shoulder. Spurs backed De Zerbi with genuine investment. Savinho arrived from Manchester City for a fee reported at around £85 million, a deal that would represent City’s record sale. Omar Marmoush followed from the same club on a season long loan with a £60 million obligation to buy. Sandro Tonali and Matheus Fernandes joined for a combined fee in the region of £185 million, with Jan Paul van Hecke arriving from Brighton for £52 million. Marcos Senesi, Andy Robertson and Martin Dubravka came in on free transfers to add further competition and experience. It amounted to one of the more eye catching rebuilding jobs anywhere in the Premier League this summer.

A goalless start with few modern precedents

None of that spending has translated into results yet. Four games into the new season, Tottenham have drawn two and lost two, scoring no goals and conceding five, a record that leaves them without a Premier League win and, remarkably, without a Premier League goal. It is understood to be the club’s worst attacking start to a top flight season in half a century. Everton, by contrast, arrived at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium unbeaten in the league, and left having stretched that run to four games with a point that lifted them into the top half of the table.

The Everton performance told its own story. Tottenham dominated the ball, held around 62% possession, and repeatedly worked the pitch into promising areas without finding a way through. Speaking afterwards, De Zerbi pointed to the volume of good positions his side reached without the end product to match. “We were 75 times in the area and not shoot enough to explain the quality of the play we did,” he said, arguing that the underlying performance was better than the result suggested. Pressed on the wider picture, he refused to dress it up or panic about it in equal measure. “Four games, no wins, any goals scored. It is tough also for the players,” he said, before adding that his own outlook was “realistic, not positive, not negative.”

Injuries, new faces and a squad still bedding in

There is context behind the numbers, even if it will only buy De Zerbi so much patience. Tottenham went into the Everton game missing Fernandes, Micky van de Ven and Dominic Solanke through injury, three players who would ordinarily be expected to start. De Zerbi also pointed out that Savinho and Marmoush, two of the summer’s headline arrivals, had only joined the squad around ten days before kick off, limiting the time available to integrate them into his system. World Cup involvement for several first team players over the summer had already cut into pre season preparation before a series of knocks picked up on a tour of Australia complicated things further. De Zerbi has consistently rejected the idea that any of this amounts to excuse making, noting that his side had scored five goals in a comfortable Carabao Cup win over Charlton Athletic in midweek, evidence, in his eyes, that the attacking quality within the squad is there when confidence and fitness allow it to show itself.

Supporters inside Tottenham Hotspur Stadium were less forgiving in the moment, with frustration audible as chances went begging against Everton, and De Zerbi used his post match media duties to apologise directly to the crowd for the manner of the performance. It is the sort of gesture that buys goodwill without answering the underlying question, which is how quickly a squad assembled at considerable expense can start delivering results that match the outlay.

What comes next for De Zerbi

Tottenham have one more Premier League fixture to find their first win and first goal of the season before the game shuts down for an extended run of international football later this month, with several major leagues across Europe pausing for an expanded window of Nations League and qualifying fixtures. That gap will either offer De Zerbi a period to reset an early season stutter into perspective, or it will hang over the club as an unwanted stretch of time to dwell on a winless, goalless start with no midweek match to put it right straight away.

What is not in doubt is the scale of what De Zerbi achieved last season, dragging a team out of the bottom three when relegation genuinely looked likely. That history buys him more credit than most managers would have four games into a difficult run. Whether it buys him enough time to turn this summer’s outlay into results on the pitch is the question now hanging over Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

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Saturday’s full round of Premier League fixtures produced seven matches and plenty of storylines, but the headline act came at the Stadium of Light, where Arsenal ground out a 2-0 win over Sunderland to stretch their winning run to nine successive matches in all competitions. It is the kind of sequence Arsenal have not managed since the Invincibles era, and on a day when City kept pace at the top with a victory of their own, Mikel Arteta’s side made sure they stayed level at the summit heading into Sunday’s Manchester derby.

David Raya was the difference in the first half, saving Enzo Le Fee’s penalty in the 53rd minute after Ezri Konsa had been penalised for a coming together with Dan Ballard, a decision upheld by VAR after a lengthy check. Sunderland could not make that let off count, and Arsenal made them pay through Bruno Guimaraes, whose thumping finish into the top corner in the 56th minute settled a tight contest before Bukayo Saka added a second penalty deep into stoppage time. It was Arsenal’s ninth Premier League win in a row, and while Arteta has been careful not to get carried away with comparisons to 2003/04, the numbers are starting to invite them regardless.

Guimaraes and Saka do the damage as Le Bris searches for fine margins

Régis Le Bris had little to complain about in terms of application from his Sunderland side, even if the result extended their winless run against members of the traditional top six. “David Raya was one of the best players on the pitch today, it shows we are dangerous but not enough to score,” the Sunderland manager said afterwards. “We are getting better game after every game, it’s hard to take but we need to go again.” Both Gabriel and Sunderland substitute Brobbey were booked amid a feisty finish, and Arteta himself picked up a caution for straying outside his technical area, a reminder of just how tight the contest remained even as the scoreline settled in Arsenal’s favour.

For Arsenal, the win keeps them level with Manchester City at the top of the table and sets up a fascinating trip to Old Trafford next weekend, though for now the focus will simply be on maintaining a run that shows no sign of slowing.

Elsewhere, Crystal Palace suffered a chaotic afternoon at Selhurst Park, losing 3-2 to Ipswich Town after Axel Disasi was sent off for a reckless, studs up challenge on Jack Clarke in the 32nd minute. Ipswich made the extra man count, with Emersonn’s double either side of half time putting the visitors firmly in control before Anan Khalaili and Jorgen Strand Larsen threatened a Palace comeback either side of the interval. It was not enough. Substitute Zian Flemming struck in the 90th minute to complete an away win that gave Ipswich their first three points on the road this season, and their first successful top flight comeback in the best part of a quarter of a century.

Chelsea and Bournemouth also serve up plenty of goals

Chelsea, meanwhile, were made to work hard for a point against a newly promoted Hull City side showing no signs of nerves at Stamford Bridge. Morgan Rogers put the hosts ahead inside seven minutes, only for Hull’s Mohamed Belloumi to score twice in the space of six minutes either side of a nasty collision between his own goalkeeper and Levi Colwill that briefly interrupted play. Joao Pedro’s left footed finish just after the hour mark rescued a point for Xabi Alonso’s side, who could easily have won it themselves in a frantic finish before Cole Palmer’s late free kick drifted wide. The draw leaves Chelsea fourth, with Alonso admitting his side have “developed a habit of scoring early” without yet finding the consistency to close matches out.

There was late drama too at the Vitality Stadium, where Kevin Schade’s brace for Brentford was cancelled out twice by Bournemouth, Justin Kluivert and Marcus Tavernier both finding replies as the sides shared the points in a 2-2 draw that will have pleased neither manager fully.

Stalemates in north London and at Anfield, and a familiar story for Aston Villa

Not every game produced goals. Andoni Iraola’s Liverpool were held goalless by Alvaro Arbeloa’s Fulham at Anfield, with Victor Munoz rattling the crossbar in the first half and Alexander Isak heading over in stoppage time as the closest either side came to a breakthrough. Rodrigo Muniz spurned Fulham’s best opening late on, but a point away from home ended the visitors’ three match losing run and offered a reminder that Liverpool, unbeaten but short of their usual sharpness after a midweek Champions League trip, still have work to do at home this season.

It was a similarly frustrating afternoon for Roberto De Zerbi, whose Tottenham side remain both winless and goalless after four Premier League matches following a flat 0-0 draw with Everton. The pressure on De Zerbi will not ease with a run of fixtures still to come, and Spurs supporters will hope for signs of life in attack sooner rather than later.

Aston Villa’s afternoon ended in familiar frustration, too. Unai Emery’s side led for spells against Nottingham Forest through a spirited second half fightback, but two goals from Liam Delap and Igor Jesus either side of that response condemned them to a 2-1 defeat that leaves Villa still searching for their first win of the season. Emery was left fuming afterwards at a late tackle on Ian Maatsen that forced Villa to finish the match a man light, having already used all of their substitutes, calling it a decision VAR should have intervened on. Oliver Glasner’s Forest, by contrast, will be delighted with a first win of the Glasner era against opposition Emery has traditionally troubled.

Between Arsenal’s ongoing surge and the chaos further down the table, it made for one of the more eventful Saturdays of the season so far, with the top of the table setting up nicely for Sunday’s Manchester derby to add another twist to an already compelling title race.

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Manchester derbies rarely need extra spice, but Sunday’s meeting at Old Trafford arrives with a genuinely fresh storyline attached. When Manchester United host Manchester City in the late Sunday kick off, it will be the first time Michael Carrick and Enzo Maresca have gone head to head in the fixture, two managers who took permanent charge of their clubs within a few weeks of each other in the summer and are already being judged on very different curves.

City arrive top of the table on nine points, level with Arsenal, having won every game they have played across all competitions since Maresca replaced Pep Guardiola. United sit eleventh with four points from three matches, a mixed start that has included a chastening opening day defeat to Hull City and a five goal thriller against Ipswich Town inspired by a Bruno Fernandes hat trick. Carrick himself did not shy away from what is on the line. “There’s a lot riding on it,” he said this week, wary of United falling further behind the leading pack so early in the season.

Maresca’s unbeaten start sets the early tone

Maresca’s appointment in the summer, arriving at the Etihad Stadium after his own departure from Chelsea earlier in the year, was always going to be scrutinised against Guardiola’s extraordinary legacy. So far the early signs have been positive. City have beaten Bournemouth, thrashed Crystal Palace, ground out a narrow win over Coventry City and opened their Champions League campaign with a win over Porto. Erling Haaland has been at the heart of it, scoring five goals in City’s first four matches of the season, a run that has taken him to 167 goals in all competitions for the club and above Tommy Johnson into third on City’s all time scoring list, behind only Eric Brook and Sergio Aguero.

New signings are also beginning to bed in. Elliot Anderson, who joined for a club record fee from Nottingham Forest having previously been linked with a move across town to United, could line up alongside fellow summer arrivals Enzo Fernandez and Ayyoub Bouaddi in City’s midfield, though Jeremy Doku remains sidelined with a calf injury. Anderson’s description of City as the “kings of Manchester” earlier this week has done nothing to lower the temperature ahead of Sunday, even if Maresca himself has tried to play down any personal narrative. “To be honest, I’m more thinking about the team, the fans, the table,” he said when asked about facing United for the first time. “The main focus is not that it’s my first derby and I want to win the game. For sure I want to win the game, but it’s because we want to continue to win games.”

Carrick weighs United’s progress against the scale of the task

Carrick’s own reaction to the “kings of Manchester” line was measured rather than combative. Rather than bristling at the suggestion, he pointed to how far his side have come. “I understand it, and I think going into the Champions League game and talking about the expectation there, it’s a really good thing that it’s shifted in a way,” he said, noting that United’s return to the Champions League this season is itself a sign of progress from recent history. “We’re humble enough and realistic enough to know where we’ve come from in recent history, and we need to be, we want to be better and we want to be challenging more.”

There is also a selection boost for United in the return of Marcus Rashford, back at Old Trafford after two loan spells away, the most recent at Barcelona, with the option to make his move permanent having expired over the summer. Carrick has been pleased with how quickly the forward has slotted back in, describing him as “a real threat” in recent appearances and confirming United now have “good options” to keep the squad fresh through a demanding period. Carlos Baleba and Amad Diallo remain unavailable through injury, but Benjamin Sesko’s recent form off the bench gives Carrick something to work with in attack.

History offers United a small crumb of comfort. Their most recent meeting with City, back in January, ended in a 2-0 win at Old Trafford under Carrick’s interim charge, a result that briefly halted City’s dominance of the fixture. City’s response the last time these two sides met at the Etihad, in September last season, was to win 3-0 with Haaland scoring twice, a reminder of how quickly momentum can swing in this fixture depending on which version of each side turns up. Carrick was careful not to lean too heavily on that Old Trafford win when asked about his approach this time around. “There’s no way we’re assuming,” he said. “We won last year but we’re not going to do everything the same.” He added that City have “players to rotate from” and that United will need “a really good performance to get the result we want.”

What is at stake on Sunday

Beyond the personal subplot for two managers still finding their feet in these jobs, the table context gives this derby real early season weight. A City win would stretch their unbeaten start and pile further pressure on a United side already eight points off the top after three games, while a United victory would offer Carrick the sort of statement result that quietens outside noise and gives his rebuilding project genuine early season momentum. Kick off at Old Trafford is 4.30pm on Sunday, live on Sky Sports.

Whatever unfolds, the fixture remains one of English football’s great occasions, and this version of it, shaped by two managers only a few months into defining jobs, is one worth paying close attention to.

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For a player who only turned 22 in the summer, it represents a significant show of faith from a club still shaping its identity under a new head coach, and an equally significant statement from Hall about where he sees his future.

From a club record fee to a first choice starter

Hall’s rise at Newcastle has been steady rather than instant. He arrived at St James’ Park on loan from Chelsea in August 2023, making 22 appearances and scoring twice as Eddie Howe’s side reached the Champions League for the first time in two decades. Newcastle liked what they saw enough to make the move permanent the following summer, paying £28 million to bring him back on a full time basis, a club record fee for a teenager at the time.

Since then Hall has become close to undroppable, making well over a hundred appearances for the club across all competitions. Last season he led every full back in the Premier League for high speed and underlapping runs, and ranked among the top three for dribbles completed in his position, numbers that explain why he has become such a consistent outlet down Newcastle’s left side. He already has two assists this season, and produced one of the defensive performances of the campaign so far by containing Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal during a Champions League tie.

That form had not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Manchester United, short of senior cover at left back following Tyrell Malacia’s departure and with Luke Shaw entering the final year of his contract, made an enquiry for Hall earlier this summer. Newcastle rejected it outright and made clear he was not for sale, a message reinforced now by a new deal that runs for another five years.

Hall’s progress has also been recognised at international level. Having come through Chelsea’s academy and represented England at various youth levels, he earned his first senior call up while establishing himself at Newcastle, further evidence of how far his game has come since his teenage years in south west London.

A vote of confidence from the new head coach

The timing of the contract also says something about how quickly Hall has established himself under Matthias Jaissle, who was appointed Newcastle’s head coach in August following Eddie Howe’s departure from the club. Jaissle arrived from Saudi side Al Ahli, where he had won back to back Asian Champions League titles, and before that had built his reputation with two Austrian league titles at Red Bull Salzburg.

Jaissle has described Hall as a very important player with an exemplary mentality, praising his ground coverage, defensive maturity and the technical quality he offers in advanced positions. According to the head coach, there is more still to come from the left back, a notable endorsement given how highly Hall already ranks among his position’s best performers in the country.

It is also a reminder that Jaissle, for all his experience of winning trophies abroad, is still finding his feet in the Premier League. Backing an existing academy trained talent over a marquee outside signing suggests a head coach willing to build on what already works at St James’ Park rather than reshaping the squad from scratch, at least in defence.

Hall himself sounded delighted to have the deal wrapped up. Speaking after signing, he said it was an absolute pleasure to play for the club and to represent its supporters, adding that he knew exactly how much it meant to them. He went further when discussing the atmosphere at St James’ Park, saying the fanbase and the support Newcastle receive is the best in the league in his opinion, and that the club is a really good place to be with big things still to come.

The new contract lands at an interesting moment for the club. Jaissle’s start in the Premier League has been solid without being spectacular, with Newcastle currently sitting seventh after three matches, having taken five points from a win and two draws. There is plenty of season left to judge the new head coach properly, but keeping hold of a player of Hall’s quality and continuing to improve him will matter enormously to how far Newcastle can push this season and beyond.

It also fits a wider pattern at St James’ Park of committing to players who arrived as exciting prospects and have since become genuine first team fixtures. Hall was seen as a gamble worth taking when Newcastle broke their transfer record to sign him from Chelsea. Two years on, with Manchester United among those keen to take him elsewhere, that gamble looks to have paid off comfortably.

For Newcastle supporters, the deal offers reassurance that at least one significant piece of the squad is settled heading into a season that will test Jaissle’s ability to build something lasting. For Hall, it is confirmation that the club which took a chance on him as a teenager now intends to build around him for years to come.

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It is the first of two Old Firm derbies inside eight days. Win or lose on Sunday, the same two clubs meet again at Celtic Park the following weekend in the Premiership, meaning this quarter-final also doubles as the first proper form guide for a season that has already thrown up plenty of intrigue at both ends of Glasgow.

A familiar rival in a new dugout

McInnes arrived at Ibrox in June on a three year deal, taking over from Danny Rohl, who left after less than a year in charge to join RB Salzburg. For McInnes, a boyhood Rangers supporter and former player at the club, it was described at the time as the natural next step after two impressive years at Hearts, where he had come agonisingly close to something remarkable.

Last season, McInnes took Hearts to second place in the Premiership, only to be denied the title on the final day by Celtic. The manager on the other side that afternoon was Martin O’Neill. Four months on, the pair find themselves plotting against each other again, only this time from the Rangers and Celtic dugouts.

McInnes’s start at Ibrox has not been entirely smooth. Rangers dropped points in their opening two league matches and were eliminated from the Conference League before finding their feet with three straight domestic wins over Aberdeen, Falkirk and Motherwell. Those results have lifted the mood around the club, even if Rangers still sit just behind the top two on goal difference having lost early ground. McInnes reached the last eight of the League Cup with a 5-1 win over St Mirren, his first competitive victory in the job, and has since praised midfielder Dan Neil, calling his display against Motherwell “probably his best performance since he came to the club,” while Nigerian centre back Emmanuel Fernandez has begun repaying the faith shown in him after a difficult opening few weeks.

The manager’s plans for Sunday have been complicated by the loss of captain Lawrence Shankland, who is expected to be out for up to four months with a hamstring injury and will miss both meetings with Celtic. It is a significant blow. Rangers have already shown a tendency to create chances without taking them, missing several presentable opportunities in the win over Motherwell, and losing their most experienced forward option for the visit of Celtic only sharpens that concern.

O’Neill’s remarkable third coming

If McInnes represents a fresh start at Ibrox, O’Neill’s position at Celtic Park tells an entirely different story. The 74 year old is now in his third spell in charge of the club, and the route back to the dugout has been anything but conventional.

Brendan Rodgers resigned in October last year with Celtic eight points behind Hearts in the league, following a Champions League qualifying exit and public friction with the club’s board. O’Neill returned on an interim basis alongside Shaun Maloney, before Celtic handed the permanent job to Wilfried Nancy in December, fresh from MLS Cup success with Columbus Crew. Nancy lasted barely a month before he was dismissed in January, and it was O’Neill who was asked to step back in for a second time.

What followed was one of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent Scottish football. O’Neill closed an eight point gap to win the Premiership on the final day against Hearts, then added the Scottish Cup with victory over Dunfermline at Hampden Park. In June, having twice come back from outside the building to rescue the club’s season, he agreed to stay on a permanent basis, signing a one year deal with the option of a further year. It took his total trophy haul at Celtic to nine, to go with the seven he won during his first spell in charge between 2000 and 2005.

O’Neill’s honesty since returning has been one of the more refreshing aspects of his second act. Celtic remain unbeaten domestically this season and top of the Premiership, but their manager was blunt after a scrappy 1-0 win over St Johnstone in midweek, admitting his side had made scoring “almost impossible” and joking that he thought he could have scored himself at 74. Colombian forward Camilo Duran, who has six goals in nine appearances this season, was absent that night, and his return to full fitness may prove important against a Rangers defence that will already be missing key personnel of its own.

Where both clubs stand now

Neither side arrives at Sunday’s tie in ideal shape, which is part of what makes it such an intriguing contest. Celtic have the better league form and sit top of the table, but O’Neill’s frustration at his side’s finishing suggests there is more improvement to come from a Celtic team that has looked short of its free flowing best in recent weeks. Rangers, by contrast, have needed their recent run simply to get back into contention after a stumbling start, and the loss of Shankland leaves McInnes with a genuine selection puzzle up front.

What is not in doubt is the significance of the occasion. It is McInnes’s first serious cup test since taking charge, against the very manager who denied him a trophy last season, and it arrives just a week before the two sides meet again with league points at stake. For O’Neill, still finding the right blend after a chaotic twelve months behind the scenes at Celtic Park, it is another chance to show why he keeps being trusted with the biggest job in Scottish football.

Ibrox on Sunday will not decide anything beyond a place in the League Cup semi finals, but with both managers still shaping their teams and only a week separating this meeting from the next, it promises to set the tone for a fascinating month of Old Firm football.

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Wednesday night’s result, Leicester’s second defeat in five League One matches, was as one sided as the scoreline suggests. Fans inside the King Power Stadium turned on the team well before full time, and the mood afterwards was bleak even by the standards of a club now three divisions removed from the Premier League it won so memorably in 2016.

Martin, appointed in June on a three year contract, did not shy away from the scale of the problem. “The learning is the team was too young, and too inexperienced at the end,” he said afterwards. “We were naive and a bit too soft.” Looking ahead to Saturday’s trip to Stockport County, he added: “It has been a punch in the nose today, but we have to be really brave and stand up. I said it wasn’t going to be easy with the amount of youth we have, but we have to find a balance.”

From Title Winners to the Third Tier

The context makes Leicester’s current struggles harder to process rather than easier. This is a club that won the Premier League at odds of 5,000 to 1 in May 2016, celebrated with an outpouring of goodwill rarely seen in English football. A decade on, as Sky Sports charted in a review of the club’s decline, that same club has become only the second in more than a century to fall from the top flight into the third tier this quickly, and the first in its own history to suffer back to back relegations.

The route down has been unusually cruel. Leicester won the Championship title in 2023/24 with 97 points under Enzo Maresca, only for their promotion winning manager to leave for Chelsea within weeks. Back in the Premier League, results collapsed under Steve Cooper and then Ruud van Nistelrooy, with Leicester winning just once in sixteen league matches between mid December 2024 and early April 2025. Relegation was confirmed with five games still to play.

Worse followed. In April 2025, Leicester were docked six points for breaching the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules during that 2023/24 promotion season, the first such punishment in the club’s history. Fighting to beat the drop in the Championship with that deduction upheld on appeal, Leicester’s fate was sealed on 21 April 2026, when Hull City’s Oli McBurnie struck a 63rd minute equaliser in a 2-2 draw that confirmed the drop to League One.

A Manager Learning on the Job

Russell Martin arrived in June with a reputation built on Swansea City’s possession based football and a difficult, ultimately unsuccessful spell at Southampton. Leicester’s project was always going to be a rebuilding job rather than an instant promotion push, and the club’s transfer business over the summer leaned heavily towards developing younger players rather than recruiting League One experience.

Five games into the season, the results have been erratic rather than disastrous on paper: a draw away at Notts County, a home defeat to Stockport County, a goalless draw at Peterborough United, victory over Plymouth Argyle, and then Wednesday’s heavy loss to Oxford. Leicester sit seventeenth with five points, comfortably clear of relegation trouble for now, but Saturday brings an early chance to settle a score: a trip to Stockport County, the side that beat them at the King Power Stadium three weeks ago.

What Saturday Needs to Answer

For a manager still finding his feet with a young squad, the response at Stockport matters more than the level of League One football might usually warrant. Martin has been open about the inexperience in his side and about the scale of the rebuilding job he inherited, but a third defeat in five matches, following a result as chastening as Wednesday’s, would raise the volume around his position further still.

None of this changes the wider picture. Leicester’s ownership backed Martin with a three year contract precisely because this was never going to be a quick fix, and one bad night against Oxford does not undo that logic. But supporters who watched their club lift the Premier League trophy a decade ago have understandably little patience left for performances like Wednesday’s, and Stockport on Saturday offers the first real chance to show it was an aberration rather than a pattern.

If you enjoyed this look at Leicester’s fall and Russell Martin’s early test, the best way to keep up with everything else happening across the game is to subscribe to It Was Always… Football.

There are weeks when football seems determined to make itself unnecessarily complicated.

Contracts. Systems. Squad registrations. Transfer clauses. Lawyers. Players who want to leave clubs but reject opportunities to leave clubs. Managers inheriting wonderful footballers and then discovering their preferred formation has nowhere obvious to put them.

Then Saturday arrives and somebody kicks a ball.

Thank God for that.

After the transfer window dominated everything for what felt like an entire geological era, this week has felt a little more like the reason most of us became obsessed with football in the first place. We can actually talk about players again.

One of them, Lewis Hall, has signed a new Newcastle United contract and prompted a fairly predictable argument about whether Manchester United will eventually get him. My own reaction was slightly different. I’m increasingly convinced Hall is already the best left back in the Premier League.

Chelsea have a different problem with Estêvão. They possess one of world football’s most exciting teenagers, but Xabi Alonso appears to have constructed a system without an obvious position for him.

Then there is Richarlison, who told Tottenham he wanted to leave, rejected a return to Everton, ended up outside Roberto De Zerbi’s Premier League squad and is now reportedly exploring whether he can terminate his contract.

Footballers occasionally make baffling decisions too.

Finally, because we have an actual Premier League weekend to enjoy, I’ve had a go at predicting all ten games.

Given my record with predictions, feel free to use the exact opposite of everything below.

Lewis Hall Is Already the Premier League’s Best Left Back

I’ll start with something that will probably annoy supporters of about six different clubs.

Lewis Hall is the best left back in the Premier League.

Not the left back with the highest potential. Not somebody who might become the best in three years. Right now, if I could choose one Premier League left back for my team, I’m taking Hall.

Newcastle agreeing a new contract with him until 2031 therefore feels enormously significant.

Hall only turned 22 this week. He has already made 107 appearances for Newcastle, established himself as an England international and gone from barely playing during his first season at St James’ Park to becoming one of the first names on the team sheet. Newcastle originally paid around £28 million to sign him from Chelsea.

That increasingly looks excellent business.

What I love about Hall is how complete he already appears.

He’s technically excellent, progressive with the ball, intelligent in possession and capable of affecting games much further up the pitch. He doesn’t look like a converted winger masquerading as a defender, nor a conventional full back whose usefulness disappears when his team has possession.

He can play.

That sounds ridiculously simplistic, but sometimes football analysis ties itself in knots trying to describe players whose greatest strength is that they make difficult things look straightforward.

Manchester United wanted him this summer. Newcastle rejected their interest and have now strengthened their hand further. There is reportedly no fixed release clause in this new agreement, which means anybody wanting Hall will have to negotiate on Newcastle’s terms.

And why would Newcastle sell?

For all the grand declarations about projects, growth and eventually competing consistently for major honours, this is how you actually build something. You identify footballers young enough to improve with you and make them central to the next version of the team.

Newcastle have experienced enough instability. Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali, Bruno Guimaraes and Alexander Isak have all asked to leave during the past 13 months. Hall signing a long term contract therefore matters beyond the player himself.

It suggests somebody central to their future still believes in where the club is heading.

Manchester United may return. Manchester City might eventually look. Liverpool could conceivably need another left back somewhere down the line. At Hall’s age, plenty can change.

But the conversation around him occasionally still sounds as though Newcastle are merely borrowing a future elite footballer until one of the traditional giants comes calling.

Perhaps people should update their thinking.

Newcastle already have an elite footballer.

Chelsea Need to Find a Place for Estêvão

There is a temptation whenever an exciting teenager isn’t playing to immediately manufacture a crisis.

Estêvão has played only 16 minutes across Chelsea’s opening three Premier League games. That sounds dramatic because we’re talking about a teenager widely regarded as one of Brazilian football’s great hopes.

But we’re also talking about three games.

He’s 19. He’s returning from a serious hamstring injury that cost him the World Cup. Xabi Alonso is implementing a new system. Cole Palmer exists.

Some perspective is required.

Still, there is something genuinely interesting underneath the noise.

Chelsea apparently regarded Estêvão as effectively untouchable during the summer. Yet Alonso’s preferred structure has removed the conventional right wing position in which the Brazilian looked so comfortable last season.

That leaves him with two obvious routes.

One is right wing back.

I’m not convinced.

Could he do it? Probably. His former youth coach Joao Paulo Sampaio believes Estêvão is tactically intelligent enough and willing to contribute defensively. Chelsea’s asymmetric shape would also allow him to play higher than a traditional wing back.

But when you possess somebody this gifted, I’m generally reluctant to begin the conversation by asking how we can make him spend more time defending.

The other route is centrally.

That feels more natural. Estêvão played as a No 10 during his youth career and there have long been people in Brazil who believe his technical talent is eventually best utilised inside. Chelsea themselves apparently helped convince his camp to choose Stamford Bridge partly because they saw him capable of playing there.

Unfortunately, Palmer and Morgan Rogers are currently standing in the doorway.

Nice problem to have.

And that is ultimately what this is, a wonderful problem rather than a catastrophe.

The challenge for Alonso is ensuring it remains that way.

Exceptional managers build structures. The very best also recognise when an exceptional footballer deserves some flexibility within them.

Estêvão doesn’t need to start every game in September. Chelsea would be irresponsible to treat a teenager returning from a major muscular injury as though he needs 90 minutes twice a week.

But if we arrive in December and we’re still discussing where he fits, that becomes different.

One of Estêvão’s former mentors describes him as one of the outstanding talents of his generation, capable of changing a match within minutes.

Players like that eventually demand space.

Chelsea’s job is to make sure somebody else doesn’t offer it first.

Richarlison Has Made a Mess of This

I’m struggling to find a winner in the Richarlison situation.

Perhaps there isn’t one.

He reportedly told Roberto De Zerbi during pre season that he wanted to leave Tottenham. That’s perfectly reasonable. Players move on.

Everton then offered him a route back before the transfer deadline.

He turned it down.

Trabzonspor showed interest. Brazilian clubs have shown interest. Tottenham reportedly wanted significant money. No deal happened.

Now Richarlison isn’t registered in Tottenham’s 25 man Premier League squad, is training separately from the first team and his lawyers are reportedly investigating whether FIFA’s “sporting just cause” regulations could eventually allow him to terminate his contract.

How have we ended up here?

Richarlison has to accept a significant portion of responsibility.

If you’ve made clear that you want to leave, and your former club offers you a Premier League escape route where you already know the environment and supporters, turning it down carries risk.

He took that risk.

It hasn’t worked.

Tottenham have subsequently moved forward. Omar Marmoush arrived from Manchester City, initially on loan with a £60 million obligation, while Dominic Solanke remains another option through the middle.

De Zerbi’s position is brutally straightforward. Richarlison told him he wanted out, so he planned without him.

That doesn’t mean Tottenham’s handling has been perfect.

Richarlison is 29. His contract expires next summer. He isn’t part of the squad.

At that point, what exactly is a £35 million valuation protecting?

Sometimes the market tells you what a footballer is worth. Clubs can put whatever number they like on an internal spreadsheet, but if nobody is prepared to pay it, eventually reality intervenes.

Richarlison has hardly been a complete disaster at Tottenham either.

He joined for £60 million in 2022 and has scored 32 goals in 134 appearances. Last season, his 11 Premier League goals played an important role in keeping Spurs in the division.

That’s not £60 million worth of success, but nor is it somebody who suddenly forgot how to play football.

Now everybody appears trapped by decisions made earlier in the summer.

Richarlison wanted to leave but rejected one of his best opportunities.

Tottenham wanted to sell but couldn’t secure the price they wanted.

De Zerbi has moved on.

The transfer windows that could solve things are closing.

And lawyers are involved.

As a general rule, once lawyers become central to a footballer’s attempt to get onto a football pitch, somebody has probably made a mistake.

Here, I suspect several people have.

Premier League Predictions: Derby Drama and Goals Everywhere

We have ten games this weekend and I’m going to do something incredibly foolish.

Predict all of them.

Aston Villa vs Nottingham Forest

Villa’s start worries me. Three league matches without a victory would be one thing, but failing to score in any of them is harder to ignore. Last season showed they can recover from slow starts, but Forest look capable of making this uncomfortable.

I’m going for a score draw.

Prediction: Aston Villa 1-1 Nottingham Forest

Bournemouth vs Brentford

Two teams I enjoy watching because both tend to know exactly what they are trying to do.

Bournemouth look direct and inventive, Brentford carry real attacking threat and have started strongly in the underlying numbers.

Goals.

Prediction: Bournemouth 3-3 Brentford

Chelsea vs Hull City

Hull deserve enormous credit for reaching this stage without conceding a Premier League goal.

I suspect that ends fairly emphatically at Stamford Bridge.

Chelsea look stronger with every game under Alonso and have too much attacking quality.

Prediction: Chelsea 4-1 Hull City

Crystal Palace vs Ipswich Town

This feels like one of those games we’ll look back on later in the season as more important than it appeared in September.

I’m impressed by the recruitment at Ipswich.

Palace can hurt them, but I fancy the visitors to get a point.

Prediction: Crystal Palace 1-1 Ipswich Town

Liverpool vs Fulham

Liverpool finally looked much more like themselves against Ipswich and then produced another encouraging performance against Atletico Madrid.

Alexander Isak is scoring, Cody Gakpo looks sharp, Bradley Barcola is settling and Alexis Mac Allister suddenly resembles the footballer Liverpool supporters know he can be again.

Fulham at Anfield should represent another step forward.

Prediction: Liverpool 3-1 Fulham

Tottenham vs Everton

I’m not convinced by either side enough to trust them.

Tottenham have quality but remain in transition under De Zerbi. Everton have started positively and look capable of causing Spurs problems.

This has draw written all over it.

Prediction: Tottenham 1-1 Everton

Sunderland vs Arsenal

Sunderland can make this horrible.

They did last season and the Stadium of Light is exactly the type of place where title challengers can find themselves dragged into a contest they didn’t particularly want.

Arsenal should still have enough.

Prediction: Sunderland 0-1 Arsenal

Coventry City vs Brighton

Promoted sides occasionally receive schedules that feel personally vindictive.

Coventry have already discovered how brutal this league can be and Brighton are producing some of the strongest attacking numbers in the division.

I think this could get ugly.

Prediction: Coventry City 1-3 Brighton

Manchester United vs Manchester City

Game of the weekend.

City have started perfectly, but Manchester United under Michael Carrick look much more comfortable at Old Trafford.

Derbies also have a habit of ignoring whatever sensible analysis preceded them.

I think City edge a tight one.

Prediction: Manchester United 1-2 Manchester City

Leeds United vs Newcastle United

Monday night. Elland Road. Under the lights.

Leeds have energy, aggression and the type of intensity that can overwhelm teams before they’ve properly settled into the evening.

Newcastle are improving, but I’m going for my biggest gamble of the weekend.

Prediction: Leeds United 3-1 Newcastle United

At Last, Football Is Doing the Talking

This is probably the first Friday in months where I haven’t finished writing Gibbs’ Game with transfers occupying half my brain.

No deadline countdown.

No unnamed sources claiming a player has verbally agreed personal terms.

No pretending anybody really understands PSR.

Instead, I’ve spent the morning arguing that Lewis Hall is the best left back in England, wondering how Chelsea find enough minutes for Estêvão, trying to understand how Richarlison managed to strand himself outside Tottenham’s squad and predicting ten football matches that will probably make me look stupid by Monday evening.

Much healthier.

This is what September should feel like.

The summer creates possibilities. Football eventually provides answers.

Hall now has to prove my opinion right. Estêvão has to force Alonso into difficult decisions. Richarlison has to find a route back onto a pitch somewhere.

And the ten predictions above have approximately 48 hours before they begin being systematically destroyed.

Perfect.

Because for all the money, contracts, transfer sagas, agents, lawyers and endless speculation surrounding modern football, the part that keeps dragging us back remains remarkably simple.

There’s always another match.

And finally, we’re talking about them again.

I should probably begin this week by admitting something that might sound strange coming from somebody who makes his living in football media.

Thank God the transfer window is over.

For those of us working in fan media, the summer window is intense in a way that is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived through one. The working day starts when you open your eyes and, increasingly, finishes when you realise you should probably have gone to bed several hours earlier.

Every rumour matters. Every report needs checking. Every bid generates another show, article, video, thumbnail or social post. A player can apparently be nowhere near joining your club at lunchtime, in advanced negotiations by dinner and booked for a medical before you’ve had a chance to wash the plate.

I’ve had days this week beginning around 6am and finishing at 11pm. I’ve also developed some involuntary muscle spasms, which I suspect might be my body’s rather unsubtle way of pointing out that the ratio of coffee to water has become completely ridiculous.

At my age, perhaps that qualifies as performance analysis.

So there is genuine relief this morning.

It should mean I can resume some of the thoroughly ordinary things that disappear during a transfer window. Taking my son to his activities without constantly checking my phone. Going somewhere for lunch. Perhaps even having dinner away from my desk without wondering whether somebody in Paris has suddenly decided to accept an offer.

Those things suddenly sound rather luxurious.

There is another side to all this, though.

Transfer windows are enormously important financially to fan media. Interest explodes, audiences grow and revenues follow them. Now the window has closed, those revenues will nosedive. We know that. We plan for it every year. It is part of the business model.

And yet it saddens me.

Because very few of us got into this business because we dreamed of spending our lives discussing transfer valuations, net spend, release clauses and whether somebody has reached a verbal agreement with somebody else.

We got into it because we love football.

The actual game.

Yet the click based economics of football media increasingly tells us that the possibility of a player signing generates more interest than watching that player once he actually arrives.

Something feels backwards about that.

Perhaps that is why I find myself looking at the wreckage of another transfer window with mixed emotions. My bank manager might miss it more than I will, but I would quite happily go several months without hearing the phrase “advanced talks” again.

There is football to discuss now, and plenty of it.

Liverpool have spent another fortune, yet somehow I think Richard Hughes has left them further away from a Premier League challenge than Arsenal, Manchester City and Chelsea.

And Mike Dean has provided a timely reminder of something else that irritates me enormously about the modern game, the extraordinary arrogance that can surround its referees.

So, two subjects this week rather than four.

Frankly, after the hours I’ve been working, two is plenty.

Liverpool Spent Big, Their Rivals Built Better

The transfer window is finally closed and, after months of rumours, bids, rejected bids, verbal agreements, medicals and deadline day theatre, we can finally judge clubs on something more tangible than who they might sign.

For Liverpool, I find the final picture difficult to defend.

They have spent an extraordinary amount of money. Their total outlay this summer reached £246 million including add ons, taking spending since the beginning of last summer to around £670 million. Those are figures which should produce a squad capable of competing for the Premier League title.

I don’t think Liverpool have one.

Bradley Barcola is an outstanding signing and potentially a transformative attacking player. Victor Munoz gives Andoni Iraola another exciting option. Ronald Araujo provides defensive experience and Jeremy Jacquet is a player I am extremely excited about.

Taken individually, there are signings I like.

The problem is what Liverpool didn’t do.

They entered the summer needing somebody capable of replacing Mohamed Salah on the right, cover for Alexander Isak, greater strength in midfield and reinforcement at right back. They finished it with Barcola and Munoz, two players who have predominantly operated from the left, while Araujo is expected to provide cover across centre back and right back.

Then they sold Curtis Jones to Inter and didn’t replace him. Perhaps Trey Nyoni takes another enormous step forward, and I desperately hope he does, but hoping a 19 year old academy player fills the hole is not the same thing as strengthening the midfield.

Meanwhile Mohamed Salah, Ibrahima Konate and Andy Robertson all departed for nothing.

That is why the size of Liverpool’s spending doesn’t particularly impress me.

Football isn’t won by net spend tables.

City Have Rebuilt Their Engine

Look at Manchester City.

They lost Rodri and Bernardo Silva, two players who have defined their midfield, and responded by signing Enzo Fernandez, Elliot Anderson and Ayyoub Bouaddi. They have rebuilt the most important area of their team rather than crossing their fingers and hoping existing options can absorb the losses.

City spent an enormous amount, around £451 million in initial transfer fees, but also generated £279 million in sales.

You can question individual deals. You can question the turnover. What I struggle to question is the ambition.

Arsenal Strengthened From a Position of Strength

Arsenal didn’t have a perfect window either.

They wanted another elite attacker and didn’t get one. Morgan Rogers, Barcola, Vinicius Junior, Malick Fofana and Julian Alvarez were among the players they failed to land.

Yet they were already champions.

They have subsequently added Bruno Guimaraes and Ezri Konsa, while Christos Tzolis gives them another attacking option. Arsenal spent £198.5 million while generating £122.5 million in sales.

That matters because Arsenal weren’t trying to repair a broken squad. They were adding to the team everyone else was already trying to catch.

I still think they enter this season as the team to beat.

Chelsea Might Be Ready

Then there is Chelsea.

I’ve spent enough years wondering what on earth Chelsea’s transfer strategy is supposed to be, but I think they have had a very good summer.

Morgan Rogers is the headline arrival, and pairing him with Cole Palmer and Joao Pedro gives Chelsea an attack capable of frightening anyone. Maxence Lacroix strengthens the defence, Emiliano Martinez improves them in goal and they have deliberately added experience through Jordan Henderson and Danny Welbeck.

Even more remarkably, they have continued generating huge sums from departures. Chelsea say they invested approximately £328 million while receiving around £519 million through sales and loan fees, although those club figures have not been independently verified.

For all the mockery Chelsea’s model has attracted, they now look dangerous.

Which brings me back to Liverpool.

I currently see Arsenal, Manchester City and Chelsea as the Premier League’s top three.

Liverpool, for me, sit below them.

That might sound ridiculous after spending £246 million this summer, but that is precisely the point. Richard Hughes has spent enormous amounts of Liverpool’s money without constructing a squad that I believe is equipped to challenge the best three teams in the country.

The right back problem remains. The midfield wasn’t strengthened. Jones left without replacement. Salah and Konate walked away for nothing. Liverpool have invested another fortune in attacking players while other obvious weaknesses remain.

Perhaps Barcola explodes immediately. Perhaps Munoz adapts brilliantly. Perhaps Nyoni makes the leap. Perhaps Bradley returns and stays fit. Perhaps Araujo solves two defensive problems at once.

There are too many perhapses.

Premier League titles tend to expose them.

My fear is that Liverpool will eventually discover that during the long grind of a season, and by then the transfer window will be long closed.

Mike Dean and the Arrogance That Stains Refereeing

There are stories about referees that make you question a decision, stories that make you question VAR, and occasionally one comes along that makes you question the attitude of the people entrusted with controlling football matches.

Mike Dean has managed the latter.

Dean has claimed that during his Premier League refereeing career he would sometimes play what he described as little games with himself. One involved seeing how long he could go without blowing his whistle. Another involved attempting to remain inside the centre circle for as long as possible.

His explanation?

It was “as a laugh”.

I’m struggling to find the funny bit.

Football supporters spend enormous amounts of money following their clubs. Managers lose their jobs because of results. Players have careers and livelihoods determined by performances. Promotion, relegation, European qualification and championships can turn on individual matches.

Meanwhile, according to Dean’s own account, the man responsible for applying the laws of the game occasionally fancied seeing whether he could go 20 or 25 minutes without blowing his whistle.

Think about the arrogance required for that.

Dean also claims he once managed around 15 minutes without leaving the centre circle because, apparently, that was another entertaining little challenge he had set himself.

This wasn’t Sunday league. These were Premier League matches.

Referees Aren’t Supposed to Be the Entertainment

There is an important qualification here. The organisation formerly known as PGMOL has reviewed Dean’s claims and insiders reportedly say there is no evidence these practices actually happened. Previous refereeing leadership is also said to have been baffled by what Dean has said.

That leaves us with two possibilities, and neither reflects particularly well on Dean.

Either he really did referee Premier League matches while setting himself private challenges unrelated to correctly officiating the game, or he is embellishing stories about his refereeing career because he thinks they make entertaining podcast material.

Take your pick.

Former referee Peter Walton says he never encountered these supposed competitions, although he remembers a conversation at a referees’ training camp about who could go longest without blowing the whistle. Walton regarded that as light hearted conversation rather than something anybody would actually do.

That distinction matters.

Referees can joke among themselves. Of course they can. What they cannot do is treat the 90 minutes they are officiating as their personal playground.

And this gets to something that has irritated me about refereeing for years.

Too many elite referees seem to forget what their job actually is.

Nobody bought a ticket to watch Mike Dean.

Nobody turned on Sky Sports because Anthony Taylor was refereeing.

Nobody travelled hundreds of miles hoping Michael Oliver might produce a memorable performance.

The best referee should almost disappear into the match.

Football Doesn’t Belong to the Officials

Dean was always one of the most theatrical Premier League referees. There were extravagant gestures, facial expressions and moments when the official seemed remarkably conscious that television cameras were pointed towards him.

Some people found that entertaining.

I found it irritating then, and I find these comments worse.

There is an arrogance surrounding refereeing which football has tolerated for far too long. Decisions are explained selectively, mistakes disappear behind institutional language, former officials are wheeled out to defend current ones, and supporters are frequently left with the impression that the refereeing establishment regards scrutiny as an inconvenience rather than an essential part of accountability.

Dean’s comments encapsulate that culture perfectly.

The referee possesses extraordinary power during a football match. Players have to accept his decisions. Managers can be punished for questioning them. Clubs can be fined. Supporters can scream themselves hoarse and none of it changes the authority granted to the person holding the whistle.

With that power should come humility.

Instead, we get somebody reminiscing about seeing how long he could avoid using the whistle he was being paid to use.

That isn’t a charming anecdote from football’s recent past.

It’s an insight into an attitude.

Football has spent years trying to understand why relations between referees, players, managers and supporters have become so poisonous. Respect has to travel in both directions. You cannot continually demand that everybody respects officials while allowing officials to behave as though the game is partly there for their amusement.

Referees are necessary to football.

They are not the reason football exists.

And whenever an official forgets the difference, it leaves another stain on a profession already desperately short of public trust.

Sometimes You Need to Stop Watching

I had hoped the end of the transfer window might provide the opportunity to disappear for a couple of days.

Then somebody scheduled Ipswich Town against Liverpool for a Friday night.

So while many of you will be settling down with a drink tonight, I’ll be beginning the final shift of another fairly ridiculous week. By the time the podcasts are recorded, shows finished, articles published, social media dealt with and everything else put to bed, I’ll probably finish around 1am.

I shouldn’t complain.

There are countless people who would love to make their living from football, and I remain enormously fortunate that something which began because I loved the game became my job.

But making your passion your profession occasionally produces a strange consequence.

Sometimes you don’t want to watch it anymore.

At least for a little while.

Once Ipswich against Liverpool is finished tonight, I genuinely can’t see myself watching another match this weekend. There are Premier League games everywhere, including Arsenal against Chelsea on Sunday, and normally I’d consume most of them in one form or another.

This weekend, I need to get out of the house.

Autumn is approaching. The days will soon become darker, the Scottish weather will become even less accommodating and there will be plenty of weekends ahead when sitting inside watching football feels like the only sensible option.

So perhaps this is the weekend to go somewhere. Have my parents over for dinner. Do something that doesn’t involve staring at a screen waiting for a footballer to kick something.

My brother is visiting too.

He’s an Arsenal supporter.

That provides another compelling argument for avoiding football altogether.

Given that I think Arsenal will finish above Liverpool this season, and I’ve just spent a sizeable portion of this column explaining why, the less opportunity we have to discuss football over the weekend, the healthier our relationship is likely to remain.

The transfer window has consumed the summer. Tonight, Liverpool will consume my Friday night.

After that, football can manage without me for 48 hours.

The strange thing is that this is precisely why I’m glad the window has closed.

When I come back to work next week, there will be no imaginary transfers to chase, no deadline clock ticking and no sporting directors pretending everything went exactly according to plan.

There will simply be football.

Wins, defeats, players, managers, terrible refereeing decisions and all the arguments that come with them.

That’s what I got into this business for.

The game should matter most.

Always.

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Can We Have the Football Back Now?

There comes a point every summer when I realise I’ve had enough of the transfer window.

I reached it some time around the 400th update telling me that a club was “preparing” to consider whether it might submit an improved offer for a player whose representatives had already reached a broad verbal agreement over personal terms.

Whatever that actually means.

This week has been particularly relentless. Every refresh brings another bid, rejection, valuation, agent conversation or player being “open” to a move. For Liverpool supporters, Bradley Barcola has dominated proceedings, accompanied by the apparently endless search for another forward and the lingering suspicion that there might still be another surprise before the deadline.

I understand why we’re addicted to it. I’m part of the machine myself. Transfers generate enormous interest and there is genuine excitement in watching your club sign a player you’ve spent weeks imagining in the shirt.

But eventually I want to see the shirt being worn.

The strange thing about late August is that the football has already started, yet we’re still behaving as though assembling the teams is more interesting than watching them.

We’ve had a full Premier League weekend. Liverpool have already managed to put me through the familiar emotional cycle of excitement, frustration and irritation during a 2-2 draw at Newcastle. The Champions League draw has given us eight European fixtures to anticipate. Yet much of the conversation remains dominated by who might be arriving and leaving before somebody finally turns the lights off on the transfer window.

Thankfully, we’re nearly there.

In a few days it closes and, for three glorious months, sporting directors will largely have to live with the squads they’ve built. Managers will have to coach them. Players will have to perform. Supporters can start judging what actually happens rather than what might happen if somebody agrees another £5 million in achievable add-ons.

And perhaps that is the thread running through my thoughts this week.

The Champions League draw reminded me why I actually enjoy European football, different opponents, different places and matches with stories attached to them.

Jamie Carragher provided a reminder that those paid handsomely to scrutinise everybody else occasionally find the camera pointing back at them.

Gianni Infantino reminded me, as if I needed reminding, why I would quite happily never see his face anywhere near a football pitch again.

And living in Scotland, I have watched another miserable European week raise uncomfortable questions about just how far Scottish football has fallen.

All of which brings us back to where football should eventually end up.

On the pitch.

So, with the transfer circus preparing to pack away its tent for a few months, here’s what has caught my attention this week.

Champions League Draw Gives Liverpool No Excuses

There are Champions League draws that make you wince before a ball has even been kicked.

This was not one of them.

Liverpool should be absolutely delighted with what came out of Monaco.

Atlético Madrid at Anfield, Inter away, Porto at home, Club Brugge away, Villarreal at home, Fenerbahce away, Lens at home and LASK away.

That is a very workable set of fixtures.

There are difficult nights in there, of course. San Siro is never comfortable and Istanbul can turn a perfectly ordinary European away fixture into something considerably more chaotic. But Liverpool avoided Paris Saint-Germain, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, which immediately removes several of the teams I would least have wanted to see in this phase.

If Liverpool are serious about being one of the best sides in Europe, they should finish in the top eight.

No excuses.

The draw is kind enough to demand that.

What I also like about it is that the fixtures have stories attached to them.

Inter away will inevitably become the Curtis Jones game. He has barely left Liverpool and already finds himself preparing to face his old team mates at San Siro.

That is exactly the sort of narrative European football thrives on.

Villarreal has another one.

Andoni Iraola and Iñigo Pérez go back years, from their time together at Athletic Club to working alongside one another at Rayo Vallecano. Now they find themselves facing each other in the Champions League in their first seasons managing in the competition.

Again, that makes the game more interesting before anybody has kicked a ball.

Atlético Madrid at Anfield should feel like a proper European night. Porto remain one of those clubs whose name immediately carries Champions League weight. Fenerbahce away will be hostile. Brugge away is exactly the kind of game where everyone assumes three points and then discovers European away football rarely respects assumptions.

There is enough jeopardy there.

Just not too much.

And that is probably the ideal combination.

I remain a fan of the new league phase format too.

I know football has a habit of changing things nobody asked to be changed, but this is one alteration I think has genuinely improved the competition.

The old group stage had become painfully predictable.

Four teams. Six matches. Home and away against the same three opponents.

Far too often you knew before Halloween which two teams were going through.

Now there is variety.

Eight different opponents, different countries, different stadiums and different tactical problems.

The draw feels broader.

It also creates far more individual narratives.

Arsenal get Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, with the Vinicius Junior storyline impossible to ignore after everything that happened during the summer.

Manchester United return to the Champions League with Bayern coming to Old Trafford and Atlético Madrid waiting for them in Spain.

Barcelona face Manchester City, PSG and Aston Villa, as well as matches against Como and Sabah which feel entirely different from the usual Champions League rotation of familiar names.

That is what I want from this competition.

I want familiarity at the very top, because Barcelona against PSG still means something.

But I also want the strange nights.

I want somebody having to travel somewhere uncomfortable in January.

I want an elite club turning up at a ground where the atmosphere is completely different to anything they experience domestically.

I want the sense that European football is actually European.

The danger with modern football is that everything becomes too polished and too familiar.

The same clubs, the same broadcast packages, the same narratives.

The Champions League works best when it retains a little unpredictability.

Liverpool have been given a draw which offers exactly that without becoming unnecessarily brutal.

There are enough good opponents to keep it interesting.

There are enough weaker ones to expect qualification.

There are enough storylines to give the league phase some personality.

And there are no excuses.

That is the important bit.

If Liverpool struggle to finish inside the top eight from this set of fixtures, the problem will not be the draw.

It will be Liverpool.

Carragher Finds the Spotlight Pointing Back at Him

Jamie Carragher has spent more than a decade telling footballers, managers and clubs exactly where they have gone wrong.

Sometimes he is measured. Sometimes he is provocative. Increasingly, I think, he seems to enjoy the latter.

So there is an unavoidable irony when somebody who makes a very comfortable living scrutinising other people’s mistakes suddenly finds himself at the centre of a story like this.

HMRC has filed a bankruptcy petition against Carragher over an unpaid tax bill. He appeared in court on Wednesday, with HMRC explaining that petitioning for bankruptcy is something it uses only as a “last resort” when pursuing unpaid taxes. Sources familiar with the situation apparently expect it to be resolved quickly.

Before anybody gets carried away, that is pretty much where the established facts end.

We don’t know the circumstances behind the bill. We don’t know what advice Carragher has received. We don’t know what discussions have taken place between his representatives and HMRC.

One of the more sensible responses beneath the original report made precisely that point. There could be accountants involved, there could have been advice not to pay at a particular stage, or there could be circumstances that have not yet emerged publicly. The important point is that we don’t know.

I’m therefore not going to sit here and label Carragher a tax dodger. The available information doesn’t justify it.

I will say this, though.

It is bloody embarrassing.

This isn’t some recently retired footballer wondering where all his money went after the final pay cheque stopped arriving.

Carragher has built one of the most successful media careers of any former English footballer.

Sky Sports, CBS, Stick to Football and everything else that comes with being one of the most recognisable pundits in the country. Since retiring in 2013, he has become almost as familiar to a generation of supporters sitting behind a microphone as he was wearing a Liverpool shirt.

For a financial matter to reach the stage where HMRC has filed a bankruptcy petition is therefore difficult to comprehend from the outside.

And Carragher, of all people, surely understands what happens next.

He has made a second career out of accountability.

When a defender makes a mistake, Carragher points it out.

When a manager gets his tactics wrong, Carragher points it out.

When a club makes a mess of recruitment, Carragher points it out.

Often loudly.

Sometimes repeatedly.

You cannot spend years operating in that world and then expect everyone to politely look the other way when the spotlight swings around.

The jokes were always going to come as well.

One commenter inevitably adapted Carragher’s famous line about leaving football before football leaves you:

“Leave the money before the money leaves you.”

I’ll admit, I laughed.

It was sitting there waiting to be headed into an empty net.

None of this changes what I think about Carragher the Liverpool player.

Seventeen years in the first team, 737 appearances, Istanbul, the UEFA Cup and an entire senior career devoted to one football club.

Those achievements don’t disappear because HMRC has knocked on the door.

Being a Liverpool legend shouldn’t provide immunity either.

I’ve also found Carragher increasingly irritating in recent years. There seems to be less humour about some of his punditry and more desire to create confrontation. One Liverpool-supporting commenter beneath the report made a similar observation, saying Carragher had become increasingly “over the top”.

Perhaps that’s simply the modern punditry business.

Strong opinions generate clips. Arguments generate engagement. Controversy travels considerably further on social media than somebody calmly explaining the merits of a midfield diamond.

Carragher understands that game exceptionally well.

Which is why he will also understand that this story isn’t going away simply because it is uncomfortable.

Hopefully, as those close to the situation apparently expect, everything gets resolved quickly.

Until then, there is something wonderfully football-like about one of the country’s most famous analysts finding himself on the receiving end.

Jamie Carragher has spent years pointing at the screen and explaining where somebody went wrong.

This week, everybody else gets a turn.

Infantino’s Latest Mess Should Be the Last

I have made no secret of my feelings towards Gianni Infantino.

I detest the man.

I don’t particularly like writing that about anybody, but I’ve watched enough of his stewardship of FIFA to have long since stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt. Football’s most powerful administrator should behave like a custodian of the game. Infantino increasingly gives me the impression of someone who believes the game belongs to him.

Now we have reached a point where UEFA is preparing to bring a complaint for alleged “criminal mismanagement” against the FIFA president.

Read that sentence again.

The organisation responsible for running European football is preparing potential criminal proceedings against the man responsible for running world football.

UEFA has already gone to three US courts seeking disclosure of material connected to Infantino’s abandoned plan to sell stakes in FIFA’s World Cup commercial rights to private investors. Any subsequent criminal complaint would be made in Switzerland.

These are allegations and they must be treated as such.

But the details contained within UEFA’s filing are extraordinary.

The dispute centres on the proposed FIFA Forward Enterprise scheme, which would have placed commercial rights to the men’s and women’s World Cups and Club World Cup into a new subsidiary.

According to the filing, the plan was announced without consultation with the FIFA Council, UEFA, the other confederations or FIFA’s 211 member associations. UEFA alleges that it had instead been developed secretly by Infantino and a small group for more than a year.

Apparently world football wasn’t quite commercial enough already.

The proposed investors were going to acquire a permanent financial interest in FIFA’s commercial operation for $4.2 billion, based on an implied enterprise valuation of around $20 billion. UEFA’s filing alleges that figure had not been established through an open competitive auction or tested by an independent valuer.

That alone should raise enormous questions about governance.

Then you reach the part that made my jaw drop.

The filing says contemporaneous reports suggested Infantino was considering taking a commissioner-style or chairman role in the new operation worth approximately $30 million per year.

For context, his reported annual FIFA compensation is around $6 million.

UEFA alleges that the prospective arrangement wasn’t disclosed to FIFA’s members or confederations and that no mechanism had been established to prevent Infantino’s potential personal financial interest influencing his involvement in developing the transaction.

Again, these are allegations contained in a legal filing.

But seriously, how much more of this does football need?

The scheme eventually collapsed following an extraordinary backlash. UEFA’s 55 associations unanimously decided they would refuse to participate in FIFA competitions unless the proposal was withdrawn, with Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation joining that position. FIFA senior adviser Carlos Cordeiro subsequently resigned, describing the proposal as a bad deal for FIFA’s members and football’s long-term future.

Infantino eventually backed down.

That should not be the end of it.

Stopping a terrible idea once everybody discovers it doesn’t answer the question of how that idea got so far in the first place.

That is the part that matters to me.

Who authorised it?

Who knew about it?

Who valued it?

Who stood to benefit?

Why weren’t FIFA’s members properly involved?

These aren’t petty questions being asked because somebody doesn’t like Infantino. They go directly to how the organisation governing the world’s biggest sport is being run.

And this comes after years in which Infantino has increasingly seemed obsessed with proximity to political and financial power.

The UEFA filing even chronicles controversies surrounding his relationship with Donald Trump and connections to the wider Kushner family.

I’ve written before about my contempt for the direction Infantino has taken FIFA.

Nothing about this changes my mind.

If anything, it strengthens it.

Football administrators should be largely boring.

That might sound strange, but I mean it sincerely.

I don’t want the president of FIFA behaving like a global celebrity. I don’t want him chasing political relevance. I don’t want him attempting to become the face of tournaments that belong to players and supporters. And I certainly don’t want questions being raised about whether decisions involving billions of dollars might intersect with his own future financial interests.

I want someone competent, transparent and almost invisible.

Someone who understands that FIFA is not their personal empire.

There may yet be legal answers to all of this. Infantino and others targeted by UEFA’s disclosure applications have been approached for comment, and nothing in these filings establishes criminal guilt.

That distinction matters.

My opinion of his suitability to continue running FIFA doesn’t require a criminal conviction, though.

UEFA has lifted its immediate World Cup boycott threat after receiving assurances that the sell-off proposal will not return, but efforts to remove Infantino are continuing. Those involved are reportedly trying to build support for a vote of no confidence or a challenger at the presidential election in March.

Good.

Because football cannot keep lurching from one Infantino controversy to another and pretending everything is fine once the latest fire has been extinguished.

The sport is bigger than FIFA.

It is certainly bigger than Gianni Infantino.

Maybe it is finally time FIFA remembered that.

Scottish Football Has Fallen Further Than It Wants to Admit

There was a time when Celtic Park and Ibrox represented genuinely intimidating destinations in European football. The noise remains, the history certainly remains and both clubs can still fill stadiums that many supposedly bigger European sides would envy. What has disappeared, increasingly dramatically, is the quality of football required to make any of that matter once they step outside Scotland.

I know this will irritate supporters north of the border, but I look at the best Scottish teams now and genuinely wonder whether their playing level is much beyond England’s League One.

I’m not talking about the size of Celtic or Rangers as institutions. Both are enormous clubs with huge support bases and histories that most clubs would love to possess. I’m talking about the teams they actually put onto football pitches, because European competition has become an annual reality check that Scottish football seems determined to forget as quickly as possible.

This week provided another fairly brutal example.

Celtic somehow managed to turn a 4-0 aggregate advantage against LASK into a 5-4 defeat. It was their sixth failure to qualify for the Champions League in eight attempts, another European post-mortem to add to a collection that is becoming depressingly familiar.

There are legitimate arguments about finances and the enormous gravitational pull of the Premier League, but those excuses only take you so far. Celtic generated £143 million when they reached the Champions League play-off in 2024-25, compared with £155 million for Ipswich Town, the Premier League’s lowest-revenue club that season. The financial gulf between England and Scotland is obvious, yet LASK’s most recently published turnover was only £42 million.

You cannot complain about being unable to compete with England while simultaneously collapsing against clubs operating with considerably less money than you.

Rangers managed to make the picture even bleaker on Thursday night. Their defeat against Jablonec was dreadful, one shot on target, one goal across 210 minutes and eventually elimination on penalties against opponents whose record signing cost around £700,000.

That becomes particularly difficult to explain when Rangers have spent heavily themselves. The team on the pitch in the Czech Republic reportedly cost around £30 million in transfer fees, while Jablonec’s most recent turnover was approximately £8.5 million compared with Rangers’ £94 million.

Derek McInnes’ assessment afterwards was almost more damning than anything an outsider could write. He admitted Rangers aren’t particularly good in possession, aren’t effective enough on the counter and don’t appear comfortable playing directly. His conclusion was wonderfully simple: “teams need to be something.”

Quite.

What exactly are Rangers?

They have signed a dozen players and spent considerable money, yet McInnes is already making repeated tactical changes during matches in an attempt to discover a functioning team. Perhaps it will eventually come together, but European football wasn’t prepared to wait around while Rangers worked it out.

Hibernian then suffered their own collapse against Gent, conceding late after appearing to have turned the tie around, while Motherwell’s European adventure ended with a heavy defeat against Freiburg. Hearts deserve genuine credit for bucking the trend, producing a terrific performance against Rapid Vienna to reach the Conference League.

So Scottish football heads into the autumn with Celtic in the Europa League and Hearts in the Conference League.

I’d be surprised if either lasts particularly long.

That might sound unnecessarily dismissive, but Scotland’s UEFA coefficient provides some fairly compelling evidence of the direction of travel. Scotland was as high as ninth between 2021 and 2023. It has subsequently fallen to 18th and is already 19th in this season’s live standings.

That is a remarkable decline in a relatively short period and should surely provoke considerably more introspection than it does.

The problem, I suspect, is that Scottish football exists within an extraordinarily powerful domestic bubble.

Give this a few weeks and Celtic’s collapse against LASK will begin to fade from view. Rangers’ humiliation against Jablonec will become another unpleasant memory. Attention will return to the Premiership, the next Old Firm meeting, refereeing decisions and the eternal obsession with making sure the other lot don’t win something.

I understand why. Rivalry is the lifeblood of football and Celtic supporters ultimately care far more about finishing above Rangers than impressing somebody like me watching as a neutral on TV. Rangers supporters naturally feel exactly the same in reverse.

But that rivalry can also disguise the deterioration happening around them.

If clubs with the support, resources and pretensions of Celtic and Rangers were repeatedly producing these European results elsewhere, there would surely be sustained fury about how they were being run. Supporters would be demanding explanations from directors, executives and recruitment departments about why clubs with such overwhelming domestic advantages had become increasingly insignificant in European football.

There are signs of that anger at Celtic already. Supporters responding after the LASK collapse described the board as a “shambles”, criticised several disastrous transfer windows and questioned the wisdom of waiting until Champions League qualification before committing serious money to strengthening the squad.

They have every right to ask those questions, particularly when their own captain Callum McGregor described Celtic as “scared” and “passive” during the collapse in Austria. Former captain Scott Brown also questioned whether the squad possesses sufficient depth and quality for Champions League football.

For me, however, this has become bigger than individual managers or transfer windows. Scottish football needs to confront where it actually sits in the modern game’s hierarchy rather than where its history tells it that it belongs.

Nobody sensible expects Celtic or Rangers to compete financially with Liverpool, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich. The economics make that impossible. But expecting them to behave and perform like credible European clubs is hardly unreasonable, particularly when some of the teams eliminating them operate with a fraction of their resources.

Celtic and Rangers remain enormous football institutions. Scottish football remains culturally important, passionately supported and capable of producing atmospheres that put much of the Premier League to shame.

None of that guarantees sporting relevance.

Domestic trophies will be celebrated, Old Firm victories will be treasured and whoever finishes above the other will spend the summer reminding their rivals about it. That’s football and I wouldn’t want to remove any of it.

But every year Europe provides an examination that cannot be marked according to the standards of the Scottish Premiership.

Increasingly, Scotland’s biggest clubs are failing it.

Perhaps the most worrying thing is how quickly everyone seems prepared to return to the domestic bubble afterwards and pretend the examination never mattered.

Matchweek Two, Now We Start Learning Something

The opening weekend of a Premier League season is always dangerous territory for anyone armed with an opinion. One good performance becomes evidence of a revolution, one defeat becomes a crisis and every new signing is either the missing piece or £60 million that should have been spent elsewhere.

Matchweek Two normally brings a little more perspective, although looking at this weekend’s fixtures, there are already several clubs who could do without another bad afternoon.

Manchester United are the obvious place to start. I was fascinated to see how Michael Carrick’s side would begin the season after plenty of optimism over the summer, only for newly promoted Hull City to beat them 2-0. Now another promoted side, Ipswich Town, head to Old Trafford having already beaten Sunderland.

United simply have to win.

Not because a season can be decided after two matches, obviously, but because we know how quickly the atmosphere changes around that club. Lose to Hull and beat Ipswich comfortably and the opening weekend becomes an aberration. Drop points again and suddenly Carrick spends the international break answering questions about why a supposed title challenger cannot beat newly promoted teams.

Carlos Baleba should improve their midfield considerably, but one player cannot solve everything overnight. Ipswich have nothing to lose and Old Trafford becomes an interesting place if the visitors can keep it quiet for an hour.

Liverpool have their own business to take care of much earlier on Saturday.

The 2-2 draw at Newcastle was frustrating because Liverpool led twice and still couldn’t see the game out. There were attacking positives, but some of the defensive issues that concerned me during pre-season were there again.

Nottingham Forest at Anfield therefore feels like a game Liverpool should be winning without too much drama. We have spent the week discussing Bradley Barcola and whoever else might arrive before the window closes, but Andoni Iraola already has more than enough available to beat Forest at home.

Three points, please. Preferably without making the final 20 minutes feel like a medical examination.

Perhaps the fixture I’m most interested in, outside Liverpool, comes on Monday night.

Aston Villa against Arsenal suddenly looks very different after the opening weekend. Arsenal began their title defence by comfortably beating Coventry 3-0, while Villa were four goals down to Brighton before half-time.

Villa’s squad has undergone enormous change and perhaps that performance was the inevitable consequence of so many moving parts. Unfortunately, the Premier League doesn’t provide a settling-in period and the champions arriving at Villa Park is hardly the fixture you would choose when trying to establish some stability.

Arsenal have reached the stage where these are precisely the games champions should approach expecting to win. Last season’s title changes the psychology around them. They are no longer chasing somebody else’s standard, they are defending their own.

Tottenham against Newcastle could be excellent as well. Newcastle’s 2-2 draw with Liverpool contained pretty much everything you expect from watching them, intensity, aggression, danger and enough chaos to keep everybody entertained. Taking that to Tottenham should make for another fascinating game.

Then there are the promoted clubs.

I wrote last week about how pleased I was to see Coventry back in the Premier League, although Arsenal provided a fairly brutal welcome. Their season doesn’t depend on getting anything at the Emirates. Hull at home is much closer to the sort of fixture that will determine whether Coventry can actually stay here.

Hull arrive with enormous confidence after beating Manchester United, which makes the game even more interesting. One of these clubs could finish Saturday with four or even six points, and those early victories are priceless when the inevitable difficult stretches arrive.

Elsewhere, Manchester City begin the weekend at Crystal Palace on Friday night, Chelsea host a Brighton side who looked frighteningly good during that first-half demolition of Villa, while Leeds, Sunderland, Bournemouth and the rest are already beginning the process of discovering what sort of season awaits them.

That’s why I enjoy this stage of the campaign.

We still know almost nothing.

The league table is largely meaningless, transfer business is still being completed and every prediction made during the summer remains vulnerable to being made ridiculous within 90 minutes.

After this weekend, though, patterns begin to emerge.

Two wins becomes a start.

Two defeats becomes a concern.

For Manchester United in particular, losing to one promoted club might be an opening-day shock.

Failing to beat another one seven days later starts looking like something else.

Shut the Window and Start the Football

By the time I sit down to write this again next Friday, it will all be over.

The transfer window will be closed.

Bradley Barcola will either be a Liverpool player or he won’t. The endless list of forwards Liverpool have supposedly considered will finally stop growing. Every Premier League club will have whatever squad it managed to assemble and, barring free agents and emergencies, that will largely be that until January.

Good.

Because I’ve had enough of transfer football.

I want the real thing back.

I want to find out whether Liverpool can stop turning matches they should control into exercises in cardiovascular endurance. I want to see whether Manchester United losing at Hull was an opening-day freak result or the first sign that all the summer optimism was premature. I want to see how Arsenal cope with being the team everybody is chasing rather than the team doing the chasing.

And yes, living up here, I’ll continue casting an occasional eye over Scottish football too.

Raith Rovers are my Scottish team, although I’m hardly pretending to be someone who spends every weekend immersed in the Premiership. I watch much of it as a neutral and, when Celtic, Rangers, Hearts, Hibs or anyone else represents Scotland in Europe, I generally want them to do well.

That’s why this week’s results bother me.

There’s no satisfaction in watching Scottish football slide down Europe’s hierarchy. I would much rather see Celtic Park and Ibrox hosting important European matches than watch another August qualifying disaster followed by everyone retreating into the familiar domestic argument about which half of the Old Firm has bragging rights.

Perhaps that applies more broadly to football.

Sometimes we become so consumed by our own little bubbles that we lose sight of what the game is supposed to be about.

We’ve spent an entire summer discussing valuations rather than goals, negotiations rather than tackles, medicals rather than matches. We’ve treated footballers like numbers on spreadsheets and sporting directors like centre-forwards waiting to score the winning goal.

Soon there will be nowhere left to hide.

No more waiting for the next signing to fix the midfield.

No more hoping somebody arrives before the deadline.

No more judging imaginary teams containing players who haven’t actually signed.

Just the squads that remain, the managers responsible for them and the matches that will determine whether all those clever summer plans were actually any good.

That suits me.

Give me Liverpool trying to defend a lead properly. Give me Coventry attempting to establish themselves back in the Premier League. Give me Champions League nights at Anfield. Give me Raith Rovers doing whatever Raith Rovers inevitably decide to do to my weekend.

We’ve spent months obsessing over building football teams.

Now I’d quite like to watch them play football.

There is something slightly cruel about the first proper weekend of the Premier League season.

You spend weeks waiting for football to come back, complaining that there is nothing to watch, convincing yourself that this time you are ready for the relentless rhythm of it all.

Then suddenly it arrives and you remember that football does not gently return. It kicks the door in.

Tonight the Premier League starts again, and perhaps I should be excited purely about that. Instead, Liverpool’s transfer window continues to irritate me to the point where I find myself wondering whether Richard Hughes has somehow mistaken inactivity for strategy.

I remain utterly unconvinced by him as Liverpool’s sporting director. The squad still has obvious holes, the clock continues to run down, and there is a growing sense that everyone else can see what Liverpool need except the man whose job it is to fix it. If Saudi Arabia really does come calling eventually, I will happily help him pack.

Still, football has a useful habit of dragging you away from your own club’s problems.

Coventry City are back in the Premier League after 25 years, and that one means something to me personally. My dad supports them, and the 1987 FA Cup final remains one of those childhood football memories that never really fades.

Elsewhere, Newcastle and Aston Villa supporters are increasingly angry about the financial rules they believe restrict their ambition. I understand the frustration, but I think some of the complaints conveniently ignore years of spending choices and football’s unavoidable food chain.

At Liverpool, the Cody Gakpo question is becoming more interesting by the day. There is a deal to be done under the right circumstances, but only if Liverpool actually behave like a serious football operation and line up replacements first.

And then there is Match of the Day.

The Premier League returns tonight, but the way we consume football has changed beyond recognition. I didn’t watch Match of the Day once last season. I barely watched it for years before that.

Football is back.

Some old habits are returning with it.

Others might never come back at all.

Coventry City, 25 Years Later, They Really Are Back

I have to admit, there is something genuinely lovely about seeing Coventry City back in the Premier League.

There is a personal connection here because my dad supports Coventry, but there is also something generational about it. If you grew up watching football when I did, Coventry were simply part of the furniture of the top flight.

They had been there for 34 consecutive seasons by the time they were finally relegated in 2001. There was the FA Cup win over Tottenham in 1987, which remains one of the great days in the club’s history, and then all those years when they seemed to possess an almost supernatural ability to avoid relegation.

Highfield Road, sky blue shirts, John Sillett, Gordon Strachan, Gary McAllister, Dion Dublin, Darren Huckerby, Mustapha Hadji, Robbie Keane. Coventry belonged in that world.

Then suddenly they didn’t.

When they went down in 2001, supporter John Mullaney famously held up a handwritten sign saying “We’ll be back.”

I doubt anybody imagined it would take 25 years.

What happened in between makes their return far more significant than another promoted club reaching the Premier League. Coventry suffered three relegations, went into administration and twice ended up playing home matches outside their own city.

Think about that.

A football club separated from the community it supposedly represents.

During the SISU years things became so poisonous that Coventry supporters boycotted matches at Northampton’s Sixfields. Some stood on a hill outside the stadium where they could see only part of the pitch because they wanted to support their football club without supporting what was being done to it.

One supporter eventually stopped even doing that. He kept attending away matches but couldn’t bring himself to go to Northampton anymore.

His explanation was devastatingly simple.

“It broke my heart.”

There were periods when supporters genuinely wondered whether Coventry City would survive at all. One fan responding to this week’s retrospective said there were times when he feared there simply wouldn’t be a club left to support.

That puts football complaints into perspective.

And it is why Mark Robins deserves enormous credit for what followed.

Robins returned in 2017 with Coventry heading into League Two. They won the EFL Trophy, then won promotion from League Two at the first attempt. Slowly, painstakingly, a football club that had spent years lurching from one disaster to another began functioning like a football club again.

Recruitment improved. Data became part of the process. The structure became more professional. Coventry climbed.

League Two became League One. League One became the Championship. Eventually Robins took them to within a penalty shootout against Luton Town of completing one of the great journeys through English football.

He didn’t quite get to finish the job.

I wasn’t particularly convinced when Coventry sacked Robins and appointed Frank Lampard, and I suspect plenty of Coventry supporters felt exactly the same.

Fair play to Lampard, though. He deserves enormous credit.

He initially took them into the play-offs before Sunderland stopped them, then last season Coventry simply took off. They played aggressive, entertaining, free-scoring football and secured promotion with three matches remaining.

Now they are back.

And perhaps the most satisfying part is that Coventry City are back in Coventry and finally own their own stadium. The club bought it for £25 million last summer and have since spent more than £100 million strengthening Lampard’s squad for the Premier League.

They might stay up. They might go straight back down. That’s football and we’ll find out soon enough.

But tonight they walk out against Arsenal as a Premier League football club for the first time in 25 years.

For my dad and for thousands of Coventry supporters who followed them through Highfield Road, the Ricoh, Northampton, Birmingham, League Two, administration, protests and everything else, I imagine there will be a moment when the result almost feels secondary.

One supporter made the point better than I could.

“Enjoy the good times, and never take your club for granted.”

Football has changed beyond recognition since Coventry disappeared from the Premier League in 2001.

But they’re back.

Twenty five years after that homemade sign appeared at Villa Park, John Mullaney was right after all.

It just took a little longer than expected.

Newcastle, Villa and the Convenient Villain of Financial Rules

I understand why Newcastle United and Aston Villa supporters are frustrated.

Actually, let me go further than that. I think there is a legitimate problem here.

The Premier League’s new Squad Cost Ratio rules link spending on players and coaches to revenue. Clubs can spend up to 85%t of relevant income domestically, while UEFA operates a stricter version for clubs competing in Europe.

The obvious danger is that football creates a glass ceiling.

Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and the other established commercial giants have spent decades building enormous revenues. Allow everyone to spend a percentage of what they earn and, unsurprisingly, the richest clubs can spend considerably more.

That deserves scrutiny.

What I struggle with is the idea increasingly pushed by some Newcastle and Villa supporters that every player they sell is evidence of some grand conspiracy designed to protect the traditional elite.

Sorry, I’m not buying it.

Newcastle are perhaps the most obvious example.

When Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund arrived in 2021, Newcastle were fighting relegation. Since then, they have spent heavily, reached the Champions League twice and won a domestic trophy.

That is extraordinary progress.

But Newcastle United having extraordinarily wealthy owners does not automatically make Newcastle United an extraordinarily wealthy football club.

There is a difference.

Revenue matters, and Newcastle’s commercial operation needs time to grow. Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United didn’t create their global audiences and commercial revenues overnight.

Newcastle CEO David Hopkinson has called SCR “the most unfair salary system I’ve ever heard of”, arguing that linking spending power to revenue makes challenging the established clubs uniquely difficult.

There is merit in that argument.

There’s also an inconvenient fact.

Newcastle voted for SCR.

More importantly, I don’t accept that financial regulation is primarily responsible for the departures of their best players.

Alexander Isak wanted Liverpool. Anthony Gordon wanted to leave. Sandro Tonali wanted Tottenham and Roberto De Zerbi. Bruno Guimarães wanted Arsenal.

That’s football.

Liverpool are a bigger club than Newcastle. Arsenal are a bigger club than Newcastle. Tottenham have greater commercial revenues and the attraction of London.

Newcastle have encountered the football food chain.

Villa supporters are experiencing something similar.

Ezri Konsa moving to Arsenal isn’t evidence that the Premier League has ordered Villa to surrender one of their best defenders. He is a London born Arsenal supporter being offered the opportunity to play for his boyhood club.

Morgan Rogers wanted Chelsea.

Youri Tielemans had a release clause and wanted the contract Manchester United were prepared to give him.

Ollie Watkins potentially taking an enormous final payday in Saudi Arabia would hardly be UEFA’s fault either.

Villa have also spent years making choices.

Some have been excellent. Others haven’t.

They have invested heavily since returning to the Premier League, sometimes spending significant money on players who contributed very little. They have carried an enormous wage burden and repeatedly sold talented academy products while spending elsewhere.

At one stage their wages reached around 96 per cent of revenue.

Eventually choices have consequences.

Ironically, Villa are hardly leading the revolution against SCR anyway. They voted for it, and a senior Villa figure has described the Premier League version as “quite an elegant solution”, while acknowledging that no regulatory system will ever be perfect.

This is where some of the outrage begins to lose me.

When Aston Villa could take Ollie Watkins and Ezri Konsa from Brentford, was everybody demanding that football protect Brentford?

When Newcastle signed Tino Livramento from Southampton, were Newcastle supporters campaigning against the financial inequalities allowing them to do it?

Of course not.

Football supporters tend to discover their opposition to the food chain at precisely the moment their club becomes somebody else’s dinner.

There is another uncomfortable truth here.

Some of these sales might actually be excellent management.

Villa have players approaching 30 who want expensive new contracts. Giving somebody four or five more years because supporters don’t want to lose them can feel ambitious today and look disastrous three years from now.

Sometimes selling is the ruthless decision successful clubs make.

If you buy a player for £12 million and eventually receive £117 million for him, I’m struggling to see the tragedy.

Take the money, reinvest it and try to find the next one.

Newcastle are effectively doing something similar. Their squad and wage structure are being reset, while substantial money has still been spent on replacements. They may temporarily have moved backwards, particularly in midfield, but they should emerge with greater flexibility to attack future transfer windows.

This isn’t me pretending the system is fair.

It isn’t.

The numbers are uncomfortable. Across 33 Premier League seasons to 2024-25, the club with the largest wage bill won the title 18 times. The second highest won nine. Leicester City remain the only champions from outside the top four wage payers.

There is also a legitimate concern that SCR could make matters worse. Even if the traditional Big Six were restricted to spending 70% of revenue while everybody else could spend 85%, their vastly larger revenues would still allow them to outspend most competitors.

Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish warned before implementation that selling would become increasingly important for ambitious clubs, while historical modelling suggests considerably more clubs would have exceeded SCR’s 85% threshold than actually breached PSR.

So, yes, let’s debate the rules.

Let’s debate whether tying spending to revenue entrenches historic advantage. Let’s debate UEFA’s regulations, the enormous disparity in commercial income and whether football needs something closer to a genuine salary cap.

What I won’t accept is rewriting every Newcastle or Villa transfer as something imposed upon them by a sinister cartel.

Both clubs have climbed enormously over recent years. Both have spent aggressively. Both have made excellent decisions and bad ones. Both are substantially stronger organisations than they were a decade ago.

There is a route towards becoming genuine members of football’s elite.

It simply takes time.

Chelsea and Manchester City accelerated that journey through levels of owner spending that eventually helped convince football it needed stronger financial regulation in the first place.

Newcastle and Villa supporters were hardly celebrating that model when somebody else was doing it.

The argument now cannot effectively become:

We didn’t like them buying success, but we’d quite like permission to do it ourselves.

Keep growing revenues. Keep improving recruitment. Build the infrastructure. Develop young players. Sell brilliantly. Reinvest intelligently.

It isn’t as exciting as somebody writing a blank cheque.

But if Newcastle or Villa eventually break through that glass ceiling doing it properly, nobody will be able to dismiss what they achieved.

And surely that would make it worth considerably more.

Cody Gakpo, Replace Him Before You Sell Him

I find the Cody Gakpo debate slightly strange.

There seems to be a determination among some Liverpool supporters to place players firmly into one of two categories. They are either brilliant and untouchable or rubbish and should be sold immediately.

Gakpo sits somewhere in between, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

He is a good footballer with proven Premier League output who has already contributed significantly to Liverpool winning major honours. He is also 27, has obvious limitations and could command a substantial transfer fee at a point when Liverpool are rebuilding their attack.

That makes selling him a legitimate conversation.

It doesn’t make selling him now a sensible decision.

Gakpo was excellent during Liverpool’s 2024/25 title winning season, scoring 18 goals and providing six assists across 49 appearances. Last season was considerably poorer, but he was hardly alone in regressing.

Some of the criticism was fair.

He became painfully predictable at times. Receive the ball on the left, move inside, shoot. Defenders knew what was coming and Liverpool’s slow attacking football gave them plenty of time to prepare for it. His partnership with Milos Kerkez never developed properly either.

I’ve certainly had moments where I’ve screamed at the television for him to release the overlapping full back rather than cutting inside for another shot.

That doesn’t erase everything else he has done.

There are already signs that Andoni Iraola might have found a better way of using him. Gakpo has operated more frequently in the inside left channel during pre season, with the full back providing width. He has been able to drive through central areas, become involved in the build up and vary his attacking movements rather than living on the touchline.

He has looked good.

Pre season comes with the usual enormous health warning, but I’d at least like to see whether this version of Gakpo survives contact with the Premier League before deciding he has no place in Iraola’s Liverpool.

More importantly, have we looked at the squad?

Liverpool’s attack is currently nowhere near strong enough to casually sell a proven goalscorer.

Mohamed Salah has gone. Hugo Ekitike is still recovering from his Achilles injury. Federico Chiesa and Harvey Elliott have hardly forced themselves into the conversation during pre season. Victor Muñoz has arrived, but numerically he replaces Salah. Liverpool are still pursuing Bradley Barcola and have explored Ibrahim Mbaye.

And here we are discussing selling another attacker.

No thanks.

If Liverpool sign Barcola and another serious attacking option, the conversation changes completely.

Until then, Gakpo stays.

This is where the order of events matters enormously to me.

Replace him before you sell him.

I don’t want Liverpool accepting a big Tottenham offer and then spending the final days of the window scrambling around Europe trying to replace somebody who has already left.

Get the players through the door.

Then talk.

Gakpo’s versatility matters as well. With Ekitike unavailable, he is arguably Liverpool’s most credible alternative to Alexander Isak at centre forward. He can play from the left, through the middle and potentially around Florian Wirtz in more central positions.

That has value across a long season.

There is another part of this discussion that often gets forgotten.

What does Cody Gakpo want?

If Liverpool sign Barcola, Gakpo is entitled to look at the situation and wonder where he fits. Barcola naturally operates from the left. Muñoz and Rio Ngumoha also prefer that side. Gakpo is 27, theoretically in the prime years of his career, and may have absolutely no interest in spending them as a rotational option.

If that’s his position, I wouldn’t create roadblocks.

Gakpo has never struck me as a problem. He has played different positions, contributed goals, won trophies and generally got on with his job.

If he tells Liverpool he wants to leave because Tottenham are offering him a more prominent role, fair enough.

But Tottenham pay properly.

Liverpool have no contractual need to sell and would be strengthening a Premier League rival. Spurs aren’t getting a discount because Gakpo might fancy the move. A substantial offer should be the starting point for any discussion.

This doesn’t need to become complicated.

If Gakpo wants to stay, I’m perfectly happy keeping a versatile attacker with proven output who appears to suit Iraola’s football better than he suited what we watched last season.

If he wants to leave, and Liverpool have already signed serious replacements, I wouldn’t stand in his way.

There is a deal to be done under those circumstances.

What Liverpool absolutely cannot do is sell another established attacker while the squad remains incomplete and then congratulate themselves on receiving a good fee.

Cody Gakpo isn’t a player Liverpool need to sell.

He isn’t a player they should be frightened to sell either.

Get the replacements through the door first. Then ask Cody what he wants.

If he wants to stay, excellent.

If he wants to go and Tottenham are prepared to pay properly, shake his hand and wish him well.

Just don’t sell him and tell us afterwards that there is still time to explore the market.

Match of the Day Still Matters, Just Not Like It Used To

There are certain sounds from childhood that stay with you.

For generations of football supporters, the Match of the Day theme was one of them.

Saturday night had a rhythm. You went to the match, listened to the scores on the radio, waited for the newspaper reports and eventually sat down to watch Match of the Day. If you hadn’t been at a particular game, there was a decent chance those highlights would provide your first proper look at what happened.

It was an appointment.

For me, it no longer is.

I didn’t watch Match of the Day once last season. That wasn’t some protest following Gary Lineker’s departure because, in truth, I had barely watched it for several years before he left.

I simply don’t need it in the way I once did.

That is the real problem facing Match of the Day. It can change presenters, rotate pundits, cut budgets or freshen the format, but none of those things alters the fundamental transformation in how football supporters consume the game.

By Saturday evening, I already know what happened.

I’ve seen the goals. I’ve seen controversial decisions replayed from twelve different angles. I’ve probably watched somebody analyse the tactical mistake that created a goal. I’ve read supporters arguing about it. I’ve listened to the manager. I’ve seen the statistics.

If something particularly interesting happened, somebody has probably already made a podcast about it.

Then Match of the Day arrives.

This isn’t necessarily the BBC’s fault. The world around the programme has changed.

There was a time when Match of the Day controlled access to something valuable. Today it is competing for our attention with live football, social media, YouTube, club channels, podcasts and countless other sources of analysis.

That makes the Premier League’s continuing approach to the Saturday 3pm blackout look increasingly absurd.

Someone living in Singapore can legally watch every Premier League match live.

Someone living a few miles from Anfield cannot legally watch Liverpool playing a 3pm Saturday game on television in their own country.

We are still applying a restriction whose origins stretch back to the 1960s to a sporting product transformed by global broadcasting and the internet.

It feels draconian.

The original principle is understandable. Protect attendances further down the pyramid by preventing televised football competing directly against matches played at 3pm.

I simply don’t believe the modern reality works like that anymore.

If Liverpool are playing at 3pm and the match isn’t legally available in Britain, Liverpool supporters don’t suddenly think, “Fair enough, I’ll go and watch Tranmere instead.”

They find another way to watch Liverpool.

Illegal streams are easily accessible. Everybody involved knows they exist. The blackout has therefore created the ridiculous situation where one of the most sophisticated sporting competitions on earth effectively encourages some of its most committed domestic consumers towards piracy by refusing to sell them the product legally.

That cannot be sensible.

The Premier League has spent decades creating an insatiable appetite for itself.

It has marketed every rivalry. Every transfer. Every manager. Every controversy. Every weekend is presented as an event. Broadcasters spend enormous sums telling supporters that the Premier League is the greatest sporting entertainment product on earth.

Then Saturday afternoon arrives and suddenly the message becomes:

Sorry, not today. We’ve got this rule from 1960.

Modern media doesn’t work like that.

Scarcity once made Match of the Day powerful. Abundance has made it optional.

That doesn’t mean I want it to disappear.

Far from it.

Match of the Day still has a place because there remains value in a well produced highlights programme that packages an entire Premier League day into something coherent. Not everybody wants to spend Saturday checking scores, clips and social media. Plenty of people still enjoy sitting down at night and allowing somebody else to curate the day’s football for them.

There is value in familiarity too.

Good presenters matter. Good pundits matter. Authority matters. Alan Shearer has that because he has lived the game at the highest level and has spent years developing a relationship with the audience.

The BBC should protect that quality rather than assuming the Match of the Day name itself guarantees relevance.

It doesn’t.

Gary Lineker’s departure inevitably removed another layer of familiarity, but I don’t think putting him back in the chair tomorrow would suddenly have millions of people like me organising Saturday night around the programme again.

That world has gone.

The danger for the BBC is misunderstanding the difference between importance and habit.

Match of the Day remains important.

The habit has been broken.

Once audiences discover they can get what they want elsewhere, persuading them to return simply because something used to be an institution is enormously difficult.

Football Focus discovered that.

Match of the Day is a far stronger brand, attached to a far stronger product, but it cannot assume immunity from the same forces.

Tonight the Premier League returns.

Millions of us will watch matches live over the weekend. We’ll follow scores on our phones, argue about referees online, watch clips, listen to podcasts and consume an extraordinary amount of football before Saturday night arrives.

Some will still hear that famous theme tune and settle down for Match of the Day.

I’m glad they will.

I might even watch occasionally this season.

But it will be because I choose to, not because I need to.

That distinction explains almost everything about where Match of the Day now sits in British football culture.

It still has a place.

It’s simply no longer at the centre of the room.

Let The Games Begin

Maybe that is the strange thing about football returning.

The fixtures look familiar. The stadiums look familiar. The theme tunes still sound familiar.

But the game around them keeps changing.

Coventry have travelled through 25 extraordinary years to get back here. Newcastle and Villa are discovering that ambition brings its own frustrations. Liverpool still have major decisions to make before the window closes. Match of the Day remains part of the furniture, even if fewer of us are sitting in front of it.

And I will probably spend most of the weekend doing exactly what I have spent the summer pretending I would not do.

Watching football, checking transfers and getting annoyed at Liverpool.

Some habits, apparently, are harder to break than others.

There is something strangely unsettling about finally getting the quiet you have spent months wishing for.

Football has occupied almost every spare corner of my life for as long as I can remember, and the last few months have been particularly relentless. Yet for the second week running, I have barely watched any live sport.

At first, I enjoyed it.

Then I started wondering what was wrong with me.

This part of August normally feels like the moment when sport begins cranking itself back into gear, yet there has been a peculiar emptiness this year. The Scottish Premiership is underway, although I have paid embarrassingly little attention to it. La Liga returns this weekend and that will certainly tempt me back.

I also wonder whether the Commonwealth Games scheduling has missed an opportunity. This sporting chasm before the Premier League returns feels precisely the kind of space a major multi sport event could have occupied. Instead, I’ve found myself catching up on television, including The Pitt, and discovering the novelty of evenings where nobody is trying to sell a midfielder for £80 million.

Work, admittedly, has offered little respite.

We are preparing to bring EPL Index properly onto YouTube in the next few days, which has meant plenty happening behind the scenes. Anfield Index continues its relentless daily existence too, despite Liverpool apparently deciding that the most entertaining transfer strategy is to do absolutely nothing and leave everyone trying to find new ways of discussing it.

Credit to the team, they have somehow managed.

Perhaps the absence of actual football has also given me more time to think about the bigger questions.

Can Arsenal become the rare champions capable of defending their crown, and would Victor Osimhen transform the equation? Should Chelsea really reject £120 million for Enzo Fernandez? Are Liverpool quietly telling us exactly what they think about Alexis Mac Allister without ever saying it publicly?

And finally, thank goodness, La Liga is back.

Maybe I’ve had enough quiet after all.

Can Arsenal Go Again? Osimhen Could Provide the Answer

Winning a league title changes a football club. Retaining one tells you considerably more about it.

Arsenal spent years climbing towards the summit, suffering enough near misses to make you wonder whether Mikel Arteta’s project would ever receive the validation it deserved. Last season it finally did. Twenty two years after their previous Premier League title, Arsenal were champions again.

Now comes the harder examination.

Only Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City have successfully defended the Premier League title. Arsène Wenger never managed it. Jürgen Klopp never managed it. Great teams have discovered that reaching the summit and remaining there require different qualities.

I think Arsenal can do it.

I might even make them favourites.

But there is one glaring weakness that still bothers me.

They need more goals.

Arsenal scored 71 in the league last season, the lowest total by champions since Leicester City a decade earlier. More strikingly, 25 came from set pieces and only 42 from open play.

That is extraordinary.

You can admire their set piece excellence while recognising the danger of relying upon it to that extent. Championship teams need different routes to victory. They need to be capable of overwhelming opponents when the carefully rehearsed corner does not produce an answer.

There are mitigating circumstances.

Bukayo Saka and Kai Havertz had injury problems. Viktor Gyokeres should be better after a year adapting to English football. Eberechi Eze has another season within Arteta’s system. Christos Tzolis has looked promising. Ethan Nwaneri and Max Dowman are another year older.

Then there is Bruno Guimaraes.

What a signing that could prove to be.

Put him alongside Declan Rice and Martin Odegaard and Arsenal possess a midfield capable of bullying most opponents in this league. They have strengthened an area that was already formidable.

Yet I keep coming back to the attack.

Arsenal clearly recognised the issue themselves because they went after Vinicius Junior. As I wrote last week, I thought they were being played during that particular saga, but I certainly did not criticise their ambition.

Vinicius was precisely the calibre of footballer they should have been targeting.

He stayed at Real Madrid and suddenly the alternatives looked considerably less exciting.

Now Victor Osimhen has entered the conversation.

That changes things.

If Arsenal can genuinely sign Osimhen, I would go and get him.

No hesitation.

He has scored 59 goals in 74 appearances for Galatasaray. He is 27, physically imposing, experienced and capable of giving Arsenal something they desperately need, a forward around whom opposition defenders have to construct their entire afternoon.

Galatasaray’s interest in Gabriel Martinelli could even create the circumstances required to make it happen.

That would be ruthless recruitment.

Martinelli has been a fine player for Arsenal, but champions cannot become sentimental. If moving him helps create the opportunity to sign Osimhen, Arsenal should seriously consider it.

There will inevitably be questions about how Osimhen fits alongside Gyokeres and Havertz.

Good.

Those are exactly the problems elite clubs should have.

Arsenal have spent too many years worrying about whether their squad was deep enough. They are now champions. Their questions should be about how many elite footballers they can accommodate while chasing the Premier League and Champions League simultaneously.

Last summer Liverpool demonstrated the danger at the opposite extreme. They changed too much after winning the title, spent enormous money and somehow emerged with a less balanced team. Arsenal do not need that kind of revolution. Their foundations are stronger than that.

They need one or two acts of aggression.

Osimhen would qualify.

Arteta has spoken about looking into the eyes of his players and finding the same hunger that carried them to the title.

I understand that.

But hunger alone does not retain championships.

Quality does.

Arsenal have already proved they can win the Premier League. Now they have the opportunity to prove this was the beginning of something rather than the culmination of it.

Sign Victor Osimhen and my view becomes considerably stronger.

Forget asking whether Arsenal can go again.

Start asking who is going to stop them.

Enzo Fernandez: £120m Is Too Much for Chelsea to Refuse

There is a point in every transfer negotiation where admiration for a footballer has to give way to arithmetic.

For Chelsea and Enzo Fernandez, I think £120 million is that point.

Let me be clear, Enzo is a very good footballer.

He was one of the few players who emerged from Chelsea’s miserable tenth placed season with his reputation enhanced. He then carried that form into the World Cup and reminded everyone why Chelsea were prepared to spend more than £100 million on him in the first place.

The numbers support the argument for keeping him.

Enzo created 68 chances in the Premier League last season, third highest in the competition, and produced 51 passes which broke the opposition defensive line. He also developed an extremely useful habit of arriving in the penalty area and finished with 10 league goals.

Manchester City’s interest therefore makes perfect sense.

But £120 million?

I’d sell him.

Immediately.

Chelsea’s dilemma with Enzo has always been that he does lots of things very well without convincing me there is one particular role in which he is genuinely world class.

Play him deep and you benefit from his passing range, vision and ability to progress possession, but his defensive limitations become more obvious.

Push him higher and he can create chances and arrive in the box, but I don’t see an elite attacking midfielder.

Use him box to box and his energy becomes valuable, although you are still left wondering whether that is really a £120 million footballer.

I seen a Chelsea supporter this week describing him as a “Jack of all Trades but master of none”.

It is harsh.

It is also difficult to dismiss completely.

Chelsea have another reason to consider taking the money. Their squad has changed.

Morgan Rogers has arrived and offers attacking qualities from the left, while Cole Palmer remains the obvious creative reference point. Chelsea therefore do not necessarily need to find another footballer capable of reproducing every element of Enzo’s game. They can redistribute those responsibilities across a better balanced midfield.

That might actually make them stronger.

The complication is Xabi Alonso.

If I supported Chelsea, I would be fascinated to see what Alonso could do with Enzo. Few coaches could be better equipped to refine the game of a midfielder whose greatest qualities revolve around seeing passes, controlling possession and understanding space.

Give those two a year together and perhaps we’re having a very different conversation next summer.

But football does not operate in laboratory conditions.

If Manchester City are prepared to meet Chelsea’s £120 million valuation now, you have to make the decision now.

There is also the question of whether Enzo actually wants to be there.

Chelsea have already endured controversy surrounding him, and there have been suggestions of interest in moving elsewhere. A new manager inheriting a team that finished tenth has enough problems without spending months wondering whether one of his biggest players is fully committed.

If Enzo wants Chelsea, keep him unless somebody pays an extraordinary price.

If he wants out, £120 million represents an extraordinary price.

That money gives Chelsea options.

They have already looked at Alex Scott, whose mobility and relentless availability could offer Alonso a different midfield profile, although Bournemouth have rejected a £64 million bid.

Chelsea could pursue one midfielder, strengthen another position and still potentially emerge with money left from the Enzo deal.

There is obviously another side to this.

Selling one of your best players to Manchester City carries risk. Pep Guardiola may have gone, but strengthening a domestic rival with a footballer entering his prime is hardly ideal.

Yet clubs get themselves into trouble when fear of what a player might become elsewhere prevents them recognising an exceptional piece of business.

Enzo Fernandez is good enough that Chelsea should have absolutely no desire to give him away.

I’m simply not convinced he is so irreplaceable that they should reject £120 million.

At £80 million, I keep him.

At £120 million, I thank Manchester City very much and ask where they would like him delivered.

Alexis Mac Allister, Liverpool Have Already Told Us What They Think

Sometimes a football club tells you everything without saying anything at all.

I wrote last week that Liverpool should be prepared to make a ruthless decision on Alexis Mac Allister. Nothing I have seen since has persuaded me otherwise. In fact, the more I look at the situation, the more convinced I become that Liverpool have quietly reached much the same conclusion.

There is an elephant in the room.

Mac Allister arrived at Liverpool in the summer of 2023. So did Dominik Szoboszlai. So did Ryan Gravenberch.

Three midfielders, three major components of a complete rebuild.

Fast forward three years and Szoboszlai has a shiny new contract. Gravenberch has a shiny new contract. Mac Allister has two years remaining on his existing deal and there isn’t even a murmur of negotiations over another one. Liverpool deliberately prioritised extensions for the other two.

That tells me plenty.

Liverpool can say they have no intention of selling him. Andoni Iraola can praise him publicly and say he wants to keep his best players. Until somebody actually puts serious money on the table, what else would you expect them to say?

My reading is different.

At the right price, Alexis Mac Allister is absolutely for sale.

That should not be interpreted as criticism of everything he has achieved at Liverpool. He has been a wonderful footballer for the club. During the 2024/25 title season, there is a perfectly legitimate argument that Mac Allister was Liverpool’s best and most important midfielder.

I thought he was magnificent.

I also thought he was miles below those standards last season.

There were explanations for that. Liverpool’s press was dreadful and regularly left the midfield trying to defend enormous spaces. Mac Allister actually covered more distance and more high intensity distance than he had during the title winning season, so some of what we saw was a consequence of a dysfunctional system rather than simply a player physically deteriorating.

Context matters.

It doesn’t make the question disappear.

I have also seen plenty of praise for Mac Allister’s World Cup. I don’t share it.

I thought he was average.

Argentina reaching another final naturally amplified perceptions of individual performances, particularly within a team illuminated by Lionel Messi’s brilliance. Mac Allister worked extremely hard. The data tells us that. He covered 90.6km during the tournament, with only Rodri covering more.

Impressive numbers.

They don’t describe what I watched.

I didn’t see the Mac Allister who controlled matches during Liverpool’s title season. I didn’t see a tournament that made me sit back and reconsider everything I had thought during the previous nine months.

And now Iraola presents another problem.

Liverpool are changing.

The central midfielders in Iraola’s system have to press high, attack the opposition build up and then make repeated recovery runs when that press is beaten. It is an exhausting job requiring athleticism as well as intelligence.

Mac Allister averaged 852 metres of high intensity running per 60 minutes of ball in play last season, ranking 63rd among 90 Premier League midfielders. Iraola’s Bournemouth midfielders operated at considerably higher levels, Tyler Adams at 1,041m, Alex Scott at 1,147m and Marcus Tavernier at 1,250m.

That doesn’t mean Mac Allister cannot play for Iraola.

It does make me question whether you build Iraola’s Liverpool around him.

And this is where sentiment has to leave the room.

Mac Allister turns 28 in December. He has two years remaining on his contract. His value will decrease with every transfer window that passes. Liverpool have already renewed two midfielders from his recruitment class and shown no indication that Mac Allister will receive the same treatment.

What exactly are we waiting for?

I’m not advocating chucking him out for £40 million. I’m not suggesting Liverpool should weaken themselves late in a transfer window simply to bank some money. Curtis Jones could also depart and losing two experienced midfielders without suitable replacements would be reckless. Liverpool’s current reluctance to sanction another midfield departure is perfectly understandable.

But a serious offer changes everything.

If Atletico Madrid, or anybody else, arrives with the kind of money that allows Liverpool to reshape the midfield for Iraola, I take the conversation very seriously.

Liverpool should be looking for the next great version of their midfield while Mac Allister still possesses enormous market value, rather than waiting until the decision becomes obvious to everybody.

Great teams evolve before decline forces their hand.

Liverpool have already given Szoboszlai their backing.

They have already given Gravenberch theirs.

Mac Allister is still waiting.

I don’t think that is an accident.

Sometimes football clubs tell you what they are thinking without saying a word.

La Liga Is Back, and It Feels Like Box Office Again

There was a period when La Liga felt like the centre of football’s universe.

Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were producing numbers that belonged on computer games. Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho turned El Clasico into something approaching ideological warfare. Barcelona had Xavi, Iniesta and Busquets. Real Madrid had Ronaldo, Benzema, Modric and Kroos.

Even the supporting cast was ridiculous.

Then the lights dimmed.

The stars departed, Barcelona’s finances became a recurring soap opera and the Premier League’s spending power increasingly swallowed the transfer market. Spain continued producing wonderful footballers and Real Madrid continued collecting European Cups, but La Liga itself lost some of its old magnetism.

I think we’re about to get some of it back.

The new season begins this weekend and there are storylines everywhere.

Start with Barcelona.

Hansi Flick’s side are attempting to win a third consecutive league title, something only Guardiola’s great Barcelona team have achieved in La Liga this century. There is a delicious historical symmetry here because the man who eventually stopped Guardiola completing four in succession is now back in Madrid.

Jose Mourinho.

Back at Real Madrid.

Football really does love recycling its greatest arguments.

Mourinho is 63 now and thirteen years have passed since his first spell ended. Apparently he has returned a calmer figure. There has been no grand presentation, little noise and none of the public warfare that characterised his first reign.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

Personally, I hope not very long.

Mourinho without conflict is like darts without beer. Technically possible, perhaps even healthier, but you suspect something important has gone missing.

More importantly, he has inherited a serious squad.

Madrid have spent €240 million this summer on Yan Diomande, Marc Cucurella, Bernardo Silva, Denzel Dumfries, Ibrahima Konate and Carlos Espi. Vinicius Junior has signed his new contract, despite Arsenal apparently spending half the summer convincing themselves he was heading to north London, while Kylian Mbappe and Jude Bellingham remain among the headline acts.

That is an extraordinary amount of talent.

Barcelona have their own superstar.

Lamine Yamal is still only 19.

That sentence becomes more absurd every time you write it.

He returns as a World Cup winner, alongside seven Barcelona team mates who were part of Spain’s victorious squad. Pedri and Pau Cubarsi were there too, and Rodri could yet join them if Barcelona complete the move from Manchester City that I wrote about last week.

There are questions around Flick’s attack following Robert Lewandowski’s departure and Ferran Torres moving towards PSG. Anthony Gordon has arrived for €80 million, Karim Adeyemi for €22 million, and opportunities will exist for somebody to become Barcelona’s next major goalscorer.

Then there is Atletico Madrid.

They have invested more than €100 million in Morten Hjulmand, Lee Kang-in and Alejandro Grimaldo, with Cristian Romero also expected to arrive. Yet everything hangs over Julian Alvarez, whom Barcelona want and Atletico understandably have little desire to sell.

That alone gives us three clubs worth following closely.

Look further down and the league becomes even more interesting.

Athletic Club have Edin Terzic attempting to harness that extraordinary Basque identity. Real Sociedad are defending Copa del Rey winners. Villarreal finished third last season. Celta Vigo have built something intriguing around homegrown talent.

Then come three names that make anyone of a certain footballing vintage smile.

Racing Santander.

Deportivo La Coruna.

Malaga.

All three are back in La Liga after long absences. Deportivo have even signed Pierre Emerick Aubameyang at 37, while Sergio Canales has returned to his hometown club Racing sixteen years after leaving for Real Madrid.

I love that stuff.

Football spends so much time discussing valuations, PSR, contracts, ownership models and commercial revenue that occasionally it is worth remembering why we became obsessed with the sport in the first place.

Characters. Clubs. Rivalries. Great players. Great stadiums. Stories.

La Liga suddenly has plenty of them again.

Barcelona are trying to make history. Madrid have rebuilt and brought Mourinho back to stop them. Atletico are spending. Yamal is becoming the face of a generation. Historic clubs are returning from the wilderness.

Spanish football feels interesting again.

And somewhere in Madrid sits a supposedly calmer, wiser Jose Mourinho.

Give it three weeks.

Bring The Noise

Perhaps that is the thing about an empty evening. You appreciate one because you remember what relentless noise feels like. Give me two weeks of them and I’m soon searching for the remote.

The break has probably done me some good. I’ve watched some television, worked on getting EPL Index ready for its next chapter and enjoyed watching the Anfield Index team somehow manufacture compelling Liverpool discussion during a transfer window in which Liverpool appear determined to provide them with absolutely nothing.

Now I’m ready for football again.

La Liga will provide the appetiser this weekend, Mourinho alone should guarantee some entertainment, and then the Premier League machine will start turning again.

Soon enough I’ll probably be complaining that there are too many matches, too many transfer stories and nowhere near enough hours in the day.

For now, though, bring back the noise.

It has been a strange week in football.

For a summer that usually delivers constant rumours, negotiations and dramatic transfer twists, the market has felt unusually quiet. I expected far more movement by this stage, with clubs beginning to show their hand and big deals starting to fall into place.

Instead, we have had a quieter period.

Perhaps that is not the worst thing.

After months of constant noise, endless speculation and every possible rumour being analysed from every angle, football occasionally benefits from a moment where the volume drops.

This week, I found myself stepping away from the usual rhythm. I have not watched any live sport, which is almost unheard of given the amount of time I spend immersed in football. The previous few weeks have delivered an overload of sporting action, from the World Cup and pre season friendlies to darts, cricket, tennis, golf and athletics.

Sometimes you need that reset.

Sometimes you need to step back from the results, the transfers and the arguments to remember what actually makes sport special.

The stories.

The characters.

The moments that stay with us.

That is probably why this week’s Gibbs’ Game has taken a slightly different route. Rather than focusing on transfer speculation, the biggest stories have been about the people shaping football and the decisions that could define the next era of the sport.

The battle between UEFA and FIFA is not just about one proposal. It’s about trust, power and who should be responsible for protecting the game.

Mohamed Salah’s move to Trabzonspor is not simply about a player changing clubs. It’s about legacy, happiness and how we judge the final chapters of greatness.

Vinicius Junior’s new Real Madrid contract tells a story about the power of elite clubs and how even the biggest challengers can sometimes become part of somebody else’s negotiation strategy.

And Rodri’s potential departure from Manchester City offers the chance to appreciate one of the greatest midfielders of his generation before the curtain closes on another remarkable chapter.

Four very different stories.

One common theme.

Football is shaped by people.

The players who create memories. The managers who build teams. The executives who make decisions. The leaders who determine where the game goes next.

That is what I wanted to explore in this week’s column.

Because sometimes the quiet weeks reveal the most important stories.

FIFA Has Lost The Trust Of Football

Last week, I wrote that football needed to find a way to protect itself from Gianni Infantino.

This week, it feels like the rest of the football world has started asking the same question.

The difference is that supporters have been frustrated for years. Now, football’s most powerful institutions are no longer simply expressing concerns behind closed doors. They are publicly challenging the direction of the game and the leadership of the man responsible for guiding it.

UEFA has refused to withdraw its threat of a World Cup boycott. It has gone further, making clear that confidence in Infantino’s presidency has been lost and pushing towards a vote of no confidence or a credible challenger for the FIFA presidency.

This is not a disagreement over a minor administrative decision.

This is a crisis of trust.

I have made my feelings about Infantino clear. I believe football needs new leadership before more damage is done to a sport that belongs to supporters, players and communities far beyond the boardrooms where these decisions are made.

The latest controversy began with FIFA’s attempt to create a commercial subsidiary that would allow private investment into its competitions. That proposal has now collapsed under the weight of opposition, but the fallout has become something much bigger.

The problem was never simply the idea itself.

The problem was the way it was handled.

UEFA’s position is revealing because it is not merely asking FIFA to abandon this one proposal. It wants guarantees that similar attempts to open major competitions or governance structures to private ownership will never happen again.

That tells us everything.

The issue is not one decision. It is the fear of where the next decision leads.

For too long, football has been told that every expansion, every commercial opportunity and every new revenue stream represents progress. Yet somewhere along the way, the people running the game have forgotten a simple truth.

Football’s value comes from what it means, not just what it generates.

The World Cup is not powerful because it creates enormous income. It is powerful because of what it represents. It is memories, identity, pride and belonging. It is generations of supporters watching their countries compete on the biggest stage.

It should never become another investment opportunity waiting to be packaged and sold.

The wider concerns around FIFA only strengthen the argument that this is about much more than one proposal.

Reports of host cities chasing promised legacy payments after helping stage FIFA events have raised further questions about priorities and transparency. Cities and taxpayers carry significant responsibilities when hosting major tournaments, while FIFA remains the organisation controlling the majority of the commercial rewards.

That imbalance is difficult to ignore.

FIFA has always argued that its mission is to develop football around the world. That is an important responsibility, and the funding it provides to smaller associations has undoubtedly helped grow the game in many countries.

However, financial support cannot become a substitute for accountability.

A governing body cannot expect everyone to accept every decision simply because money is being distributed.

Leadership requires trust.

And trust has been damaged.

Infantino’s response has been to insist he retains the full support of FIFA’s leadership team following crisis meetings in Morocco. FIFA has acknowledged mistakes were made around the failed proposal and promised a review of the process.

But apologies after the fact do not automatically repair confidence.

When major stakeholders feel excluded from decisions affecting football’s future, the damage is already done.

That is why UEFA’s position matters.

This is not simply a battle between European football and FIFA. It is a warning sign that the foundations of football governance are becoming increasingly unstable.

Football needs leaders who understand they are custodians, not owners.

They are temporary guardians of something much bigger than themselves.

Gianni Infantino may still have support from some within FIFA, but the most important question is not whether he can survive another political battle.

It is whether football can afford another chapter under the same leadership.

Right now, too many people who care about the game are asking the same question.

And that should concern everybody.

Mohamed Salah Chose Happiness, And Football Should Celebrate That

There was something strangely beautiful about watching Mohamed Salah walk into a Turkish stadium this week.

Not because of the destination.

Not because Trabzonspor represents the highest level of competition he could have chosen.

Because of the reaction.

A player who had just closed one of the greatest chapters in Liverpool’s modern history walked into a new stadium and was greeted like a king. Thousands of supporters filled the ground, songs were sung, flares lit up the night and Salah looked genuinely moved by the welcome he received.

That matters.

Football has become so obsessed with status, leagues and trophies that we sometimes forget the simplest part of the sport.

Players want to feel loved.

For Mohamed Salah, perhaps that is the most important part of this decision.

As a Liverpool supporter, I wanted Salah to stay forever. Of course I did. How could anyone who watched his years at Anfield want anything different? He arrived with something to prove after his difficult spell at Chelsea and left as one of the greatest players ever to wear the shirt.

That is the reality.

Whatever happens next, nothing can change what he achieved.

Two Premier League titles.

A Champions League triumph.

257 goals in 442 Liverpool appearances.

A place alongside the very best players in the club’s history.

His final year was difficult. That cannot be ignored. Liverpool changed. The team around him changed. His numbers dropped and questions emerged about whether we were seeing the beginning of the decline that eventually affects every great player.

That is football.

Nobody stays at their peak forever.

The mistake is allowing one difficult season to rewrite everything that came before it.

Salah’s Liverpool legacy was already secure.

The fascinating part about this move is that it challenges the way we think about great players approaching the end of their careers.

When Lionel Messi went to Inter Miami, there was a wider narrative about growing football in America. When Cristiano Ronaldo moved to Saudi Arabia, it became linked with a much bigger sporting and political project. Salah’s move feels different because it feels personal.

He has chosen a place where he has immediately become the centre of attention.

A place where supporters are desperate to celebrate him.

A place where every goal, every performance and every moment will be appreciated.

There is nothing wrong with that.

In fact, I think it is wonderful.

Football supporters often talk about players chasing money, but we rarely consider the other side. The pressure, expectation and relentless scrutiny at the very highest level can be exhausting. Perhaps Salah looked around and decided that his final years should be about enjoyment, happiness and feeling valued.

If that is the case, who are we to criticise?

The reaction in Turkey says everything. Salah spoke about the welcome being an experience he had never had before and thanked supporters for the love they had shown him.

That is the greatest compliment any footballer can receive.

Not every chapter of a legendary career has to end at the very top of the mountain.

Sometimes the most fitting ending is simply finding somewhere that appreciates everything you have already achieved.

Mohamed Salah gave Liverpool supporters unforgettable memories.

Now another group of supporters get the privilege of watching him.

And if he scores goals, wins trophies and walks away from football feeling appreciated, then that is a decision worth celebrating.

Liverpool fans should wish him nothing but success.

Because some players leave behind statistics.

Others leave behind feelings.

Mohamed Salah belongs firmly in the second category.

Arsenal Were Used As Leverage In The Vinicius Jr Saga

There was a brief moment this week where some Arsenal supporters allowed themselves to dream.

And who could blame them?

Vinicius Junior is not just another transfer target. He is one of the most recognisable forwards in world football, a player who has delivered on the biggest stages and helped Real Madrid win the biggest prizes.

The idea that he could leave the Bernabeu and arrive at the Emirates was the kind of transfer fantasy that gets supporters believing anything is possible.

Then reality arrived.

Vinicius Junior signed a new contract with Real Madrid until 2032.

The dream disappeared.

The interesting part is not that Arsenal wanted him. In fact, they deserve credit for aiming at this level. The interesting part is that some supporters convinced themselves they were genuinely close to pulling off one of the biggest transfers in Premier League history.

They were not.

They were being used.

That might sound harsh, but this is how elite football operates.

When one of the world’s best players is approaching a contract decision at Real Madrid, every possible source of leverage is explored. Interest from Arsenal, a Premier League champion with serious financial power, was the perfect tool to force Madrid into action.

And it worked.

Real Madrid have now secured one of their most important players for another six years. Vinicius has committed his future to the club where he has scored 128 goals and provided 100 assists in 375 appearances, winning three La Liga titles and two Champions Leagues.

This was always the most likely outcome.

Players leave Real Madrid when Real Madrid decide they are finished with them.

They rarely leave in their prime because another club offers them an attractive opportunity.

Arsenal’s interest was real. Their ownership were prepared to push for the Brazilian if he became available, and Vinicius was open to considering the move if he chose not to renew.

But that is a very different thing from Vinicius actively wanting to leave Madrid.

That distinction matters.

Arsenal supporters should be honest about what happened here.

This was not a player choosing between two equally attractive projects.

This was Real Madrid versus Arsenal.

For all the progress Mikel Arteta has delivered, for all the trophies and all the impressive recruitment, Real Madrid remain the ultimate destination in club football. Walking away from the Bernabeu at 26 years old, when you are one of their biggest stars, requires a very different motivation.

Perhaps the biggest compliment Arsenal can take is that they were even considered a realistic alternative.

That tells you how far they have travelled.

A decade ago, Arsenal were searching for players who could eventually become world class.

Now they are trying to sign players who already are.

That is progress.

However, there was also a touch of delusion surrounding the confidence that this deal was happening.

Vinicius Junior was never some unhappy superstar desperate to escape Madrid. He was a player negotiating from a position of enormous strength. Real Madrid knew his value, Vinicius knew his value and Arsenal’s involvement helped create the pressure required to get the agreement over the line.

Everyone got what they wanted.

Madrid kept their superstar.

Vinicius secured an improved contract.

Arsenal reminded the world they can compete financially at the very highest level.

The only people left disappointed were those who genuinely believed this was ever more than a possibility.

And that is football.

Sometimes a club is not rejected because it is not big enough.

Sometimes it is simply being used as the negotiating table where somebody else signs the deal.

Arsenal have arrived at the top table.

They just discovered that Real Madrid still own the best seat in the room.

Rodri Deserves To Be Remembered As A Manchester City Great

There is something slightly uncomfortable about the possibility of Rodri leaving Manchester City.

Not because the transfer itself feels surprising.

At 30 years old, with a desire to return to Spain during his career, the idea of Rodri eventually moving back home always felt inevitable.

What feels strange is that a player who has been so central to one of the greatest teams in Premier League history could potentially walk away without the kind of celebration his contribution deserves.

Rodri has never been the type of footballer who demanded attention.

He was not the player with the flashy highlights every week.

He was the player who made everyone else better.

That is often the fate of midfielders who control football rather than simply dominate headlines.

Manchester City have produced some extraordinary individual talents during their era of success. Kevin De Bruyne created moments of brilliance. Erling Haaland has rewritten goalscoring records. Phil Foden has emerged as one of England’s brightest attacking players.

Rodri was the foundation.

He was the reason the whole structure worked.

His seven years at Manchester City have delivered four Premier League titles, five domestic cup victories and a Champions League triumph in 2023, where he scored the winning goal in the final.

Those achievements alone would define most careers.

For Rodri, they almost feel like the minimum expectation.

The reason is that his influence went beyond medals.

He controlled the rhythm of matches. He decided when City accelerated and when they slowed games down. He could drop between defenders, break up attacks, dictate possession and produce passes that changed the entire shape of a match.

His ability on the ball has made him one of the finest passers of his generation, while his defensive positioning and tackling allowed City to dominate games while remaining protected against counter-attacks.

That combination is incredibly rare.

The modern game has become obsessed with attacking numbers, but players like Rodri remind us that football is often decided by the person who controls everything happening before the final pass or the final shot.

The next chapter appears likely to take him back to Spain.

Barcelona are exploring a deal, with Rodri reportedly attracted by their football style and the opportunity to reunite with several members of Spain’s World Cup winning squad.

From a football perspective, Barcelona actually makes enormous sense.

Hansi Flick’s side share many similarities with Guardiola’s Manchester City, built around possession, territorial control and midfield dominance.

Rodri would not be moving somewhere requiring him to reinvent himself.

He would be moving somewhere that understands exactly what he does best.

That is why this feels less like an ending and more like a natural progression.

Manchester City supporters should appreciate what they have witnessed.

Football careers move quickly. The best players are often appreciated properly only after they have gone.

Rodri’s importance to City should never be reduced to the goals he scored or the trophies he lifted. His greatest contribution was giving one of the best teams in football history the balance required to become almost impossible to play against.

Every great team has a player who represents its identity.

For Manchester City, that player has been Rodri.

If he does leave this summer, there should be no bitterness.

There should be gratitude.

Because some players arrive and help a club win.

Others arrive and change what winning looks like.

Rodri belongs in that second category.

Final Whistle

Football has always been about stories.

The arguments, the emotions, the unforgettable moments and the characters who make the game feel bigger than the 90 minutes.

This week has been a reminder that the biggest stories are not always found in transfer announcements or record fees.

Sometimes they are found in the battles over the future of the game.

Sometimes they are found in watching a legend begin a new chapter.

Sometimes they are found in appreciating greatness before it disappears.

That is what Gibbs’ Game is all about.

A weekly look beyond the headlines, exploring the decisions, personalities and moments shaping football.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Friday.

Football Needs More Baresis and Fewer Infantinos

There are weeks when football feels wonderfully uncomplicated. A brilliant goal, a memorable victory or a young player announcing himself to the world can remind us exactly why we fell in love with the game in the first place. Then there are weeks like this one, when the headlines force us to look beyond the results and ask far bigger questions about the sport itself.

Over the past few days we have said farewell to one of football’s greatest ever servants, watched one of the Premier League’s finest modern managers leave behind a club he fundamentally changed, debated whether one of Liverpool’s own academy graduates has reached the end of his journey at Anfield and witnessed fresh concerns about the direction of the game’s governing body.

On the surface, those stories have nothing in common.

To me, they are all chapters of the same conversation.

Every one of them revolves around leadership, responsibility and the values that underpin football. Who protects the game? Who serves something greater than themselves? Who understands that success is measured by more than trophies, transfer fees or television contracts?

Those questions have never felt more important.

Football has always evolved and it always will, but progress should never come at the expense of the qualities that made the sport worth caring about in the first place. This week reminded me that football remains capable of producing remarkable people and unforgettable moments. It also reminded me how quickly those same values can be eroded when ambition, ego and commercial interests begin to occupy centre stage.

That is why these four stories matter. They are not really about Franco Baresi, Eddie Howe, Curtis Jones or Gianni Infantino.

They are about the game itself.

Football Cannot Keep Rewarding Power

For years I have tried to give FIFA the benefit of the doubt.

Football is a global game, and governing it was never going to be simple. Balancing the interests of Europe against South America, Africa against Asia, elite clubs against developing nations, has always required compromise. Not every decision would please everybody. That is simply the nature of leadership.

There comes a point, however, when compromise becomes capitulation.

I believe we reached that point some time ago.

My issue with Gianni Infantino has never been about personality. It is about priorities. Every significant decision during his presidency seems to have been driven by one overriding objective, make football bigger, wealthier and more commercially valuable. Those ambitions sound harmless enough until you begin asking who actually benefits.

Players certainly do not.

Supporters rarely do.

The game’s traditions almost never do.

Instead, football finds itself trapped in a relentless pursuit of expansion, as though every competition must become larger, every calendar must become busier and every tournament must somehow generate another revenue stream.

The latest proposal surrounding the future commercial rights of the World Cup should concern every supporter, regardless of which club or country they follow.

This was never simply another business discussion.

It represented another step towards treating football’s greatest competition as a financial product rather than a sporting institution.

The World Cup has always been football’s crown jewel. It belongs to generations of supporters who have built lifelong memories around it. It belongs to children dreaming of pulling on their country’s shirt. It belongs to communities who still measure time by Italia ‘90, France ‘98 or Qatar 2022. It should never become another asset whose future is shaped primarily by investors looking for returns.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the past week has been the resistance.

European football objected.

Asian football objected.

North American football objected.

Senior figures walked away.

That matters.

Football has always been a fractured sport, full of competing interests and political manoeuvring. It is remarkably rare to see so many powerful organisations pulling in the same direction. When that happens, sensible people should stop and ask why.

To me, the answer is obvious.

Trust is beginning to disappear.

For too long, each new initiative has been presented as progress. Expand the World Cup. Expand the Club World Cup. Add more fixtures. Create more tournaments. Generate more commercial opportunities. Every proposal is marketed as another leap forward for football, yet very few seem designed to improve the actual experience of playing, watching or supporting the game.

Growth has become an obsession.

Football has become the vehicle.

There is a dangerous assumption that bigger automatically means better.

History tells us otherwise.

The greatest World Cups were not remembered because they generated record revenues. They are remembered because of Maradona weaving through England, Zidane dominating Brazil, Iniesta settling a nation’s nerves or Messi finally lifting the trophy that completed his story.

Nobody remembers the balance sheet.

Everybody remembers the football.

That is why I find Infantino’s vision increasingly detached from what supporters actually cherish. Football has never needed to become the world’s biggest entertainment product. It already was. Its power has always come from emotion rather than economics, from belonging rather than branding.

Once governing bodies begin treating heritage as something that can be monetised, they risk destroying the very thing that created the value in the first place.

Leadership should not be measured by how much money enters the game.

It should be measured by how well the game is protected for those who inherit it next.

Right now, I fear football is being managed by people who understand finance far better than they understand football.

That worries me far more than any television deal or sponsorship agreement ever could.

Franco Baresi Was Football’s Last Great Libero

There are footballers whose greatness can be measured in medals, appearances and statistics.

Then there are those who leave something far more valuable behind.

Franco Baresi belonged to the second group.

His six Serie A titles, three European Cups, more than 700 appearances for AC Milan and a World Cup winner’s medal will forever occupy their rightful place in football history. They tell us he was successful. They tell us he was consistent. They tell us he was one of the finest defenders ever to play the game.

They do not begin to explain why his passing feels so profound.

I first remember watching Baresi as a young boy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, around the time Italian football became a weekly event for British supporters. Serie A was the glamour league, AC Milan were arguably the finest club side on the planet and every weekend brought another opportunity to watch a footballer who seemed to operate on an entirely different level from everyone around him.

He never looked like the prototype centre half.

He was not the tallest.

He was not the fastest.

He was certainly not the most physically intimidating.

Instead, he possessed something infinitely rarer.

He saw football before everyone else did.

Watching Baresi was like watching somebody play chess while everybody else was still learning draughts. Every interception arrived seconds before danger had fully developed. Every tackle was perfectly judged because he had already worked out where the attack was heading long before the striker himself. There was no desperation to his defending. No theatrical lunges. No recovery challenges celebrated like goals.

He simply prevented situations from ever becoming emergencies.

That is a talent statistics can never properly capture.

Modern football celebrates defenders who recover brilliantly after mistakes have been made. Baresi celebrated something altogether different.

He removed the mistake before it existed.

People often describe him as one of the greatest defenders in history.

I have always thought that sells him slightly short.

He was one of the greatest footballers in history.

The position happened to be defence.

What made Baresi extraordinary was that his influence extended far beyond stopping goals. Every attack seemed to begin with him. He stepped confidently into midfield, dictated the rhythm of possession and distributed the ball with the composure of an accomplished playmaker. He embodied the libero, not merely as a tactical role, but as an art form. Football has produced many outstanding centre backs since his retirement. It has never truly replaced the player Baresi represented.

Perhaps that is why his career resonates even more today.

He belonged to one club.

Rejected as a youngster elsewhere, he devoted two decades to AC Milan, remaining loyal through triumph, disappointment and even relegation. His famous number six became inseparable from the club itself because he had become inseparable from its identity. In an era where players often become brands before they become legends, Baresi became something wonderfully old fashioned.

He became synonymous with belonging.

There was another quality that always struck me.

Humility.

For all his brilliance, Baresi never appeared interested in becoming the centre of attention. Leadership came naturally because it was earned rather than demanded. Team mates followed him because they trusted him completely. Opponents respected him because excellence has a habit of transcending rivalry. Few players have been admired so universally across football.

His career contained heartbreak too.

The image of him returning heroically from serious knee surgery to captain Italy in the 1994 World Cup Final remains one of football’s greatest acts of determination. That he then missed in the decisive penalty shootout somehow made him even more human. Nobody remembered the miss for very long because everybody remembered everything else he had given to the game.

Football feels a little poorer today.

Not because there will never be another outstanding defender.

There will.

But there will never be another Franco Baresi.

Football has always produced players capable of stopping greatness.

Franco Baresi was one of the precious few who embodied it.

Newcastle Have Been Here Before, That Is Why It Hurts

There are football clubs that expect success because history tells them it is inevitable.

Newcastle United have always been different.

Their supporters have spent generations believing that tomorrow might finally become the day everything changes. They have filled St James’ Park through relegations, false dawns and ownerships that tested every ounce of their patience. Hope has never been optional on Tyneside. It has been essential.

That is why Eddie Howe’s departure feels so significant.

Managers leave football clubs every season. Some are sacked, some move on and some simply reach the natural conclusion of their work. Howe’s exit carries a different emotion because, for a while, he made Newcastle supporters believe that the cycle had finally been broken.

When he arrived in 2021, Newcastle were drifting towards relegation. Confidence had evaporated, ambition had become a distant memory and the club resembled a sleeping giant that had forgotten how to wake itself.

Within months everything had changed.

Survival became the first victory.

Champions League qualification followed.

Then came Wembley.

For supporters who had waited seventy years to celebrate a major domestic trophy, that afternoon was about far more than lifting silverware. It was about release. Generations of frustration disappeared in a single afternoon because Eddie Howe had delivered something many supporters had begun to fear they would never witness.

He will forever be remembered for that.

Sadly, football has a habit of asking what comes next before anybody has properly celebrated what has just happened.

Momentum stalled.

Recruitment became increasingly uncertain.

Key players departed.

Targets were missed.

Questions replaced optimism.

None of those problems belonged exclusively to Howe, but managers inevitably become the public face of everything that goes wrong. That is one of football’s oldest and cruellest traditions.

Reading between the lines over recent months, it became increasingly obvious that something had shifted.

Howe looked like a man carrying the weight of an entire football club.

He had spoken previously about how management consumes every part of your life, about the stress, the endless demands and the difficulty of ever truly switching off. It was impossible not to wonder whether Newcastle had gradually become too heavy a burden for even somebody as meticulous and committed as he is.

Sometimes the most successful managers do not fail.

They simply run out of themselves.

That is how this feels.

There is an understandable temptation to focus immediately on Matthias Jaissle. He arrives with an exciting reputation, a modern tactical identity and teams that play with intensity, aggression and courage. Newcastle may well have appointed an outstanding young coach. His philosophy shares enough similarities with Howe’s pressing game that supporters should at least recognise some familiar principles from day one.

The problem is that appointments alone do not guarantee progress.

Supporters have heard promises before.

They have seen ambitious projects before.

They have watched fresh starts dissolve into uncertainty before.

That is why I feel genuine sympathy for Newcastle supporters today.

For a brief period, it genuinely looked as though the club had escaped its own history. Stability had replaced chaos. Leadership had replaced confusion. The future appeared carefully planned rather than permanently improvised.

Now uncertainty has returned.

Perhaps Jaissle will prove to be inspired.

Perhaps Newcastle will emerge stronger.

I hope they do.

English football is better when Newcastle United matter.

But there is an undeniable sadness that the optimism created by Eddie Howe has once again given way to familiar questions about direction, recruitment and identity.

For all the wealth now surrounding the football club, supporters are once again being asked to believe that the next chapter will be different.

They have heard that story before.

Curtis Jones Deserves Honesty More Than Excuses

Few things divide a football fanbase quite like one of its own.

When a homegrown player succeeds, there is a natural sense of pride. We have watched them grow from academy prospect to first team footballer, celebrated every milestone and convinced ourselves that they somehow represent the club more authentically than somebody signed for £80 million from elsewhere.

Curtis Jones has enjoyed that connection for years.

He has earned it.

Born in Liverpool, developed at Kirkby and responsible for some genuinely memorable moments in a red shirt, Jones has lived the dream every young Liverpool supporter imagines. His winner against Everton, his role in title winning squads and his willingness to take responsibility in difficult moments have ensured he will always have a place in the club’s recent history.

That should never be forgotten.

Neither should it prevent honest discussion about where things stand today.

Football can be a ruthless business because it constantly asks difficult questions.

Has a player improved?

Does he still fit the manager’s vision?

Would the club become stronger by keeping him or by selling him?

Those questions are uncomfortable, particularly when they concern local players, but avoiding them serves nobody.

The scenes following Liverpool’s pre season victory over Wrexham inevitably became the talking point rather than the football itself. Jones’ visible frustration, his confrontation with Dominik Szoboszlai and the subsequent debate across social media created exactly the sort of distraction Liverpool generally work so hard to avoid.

Nobody outside the dressing room knows precisely what was said.

Nor should we pretend to.

Football is an emotional profession. Tempers flare. Team mates argue. Elite athletes demand standards from one another that most of us can barely imagine.

One disagreement should never define a footballer.

What it can do, however, is reinforce a wider conversation that has existed for some time.

Curtis Jones finds himself at a crossroads.

At 25 years old he is no longer the exciting youngster waiting patiently for opportunities. He is entering what should be the very best years of his career, years in which potential has to become consistent influence. Liverpool, meanwhile, are evolving once again under Andoni Iraola. The demands are changing, competition for places is increasing and sentiment rarely survives when elite clubs begin planning for the future.

That is why this summer feels so important.

If Jones remains, he needs to become an undisputed starter rather than a useful squad option.

If Liverpool believe that will not happen, then perhaps the fairest outcome for everyone is to allow him the opportunity to become the leading midfielder elsewhere that many have long believed he could be.

There should be no bitterness if that day comes.

Not every academy graduate becomes Steven Gerrard.

That does not make them failures.

It simply reflects the extraordinary standards required to remain at one of the biggest football clubs in the world.

Supporters often speak about loyalty.

Real loyalty sometimes means recognising when change benefits everyone involved.

Whatever happens next, Curtis Jones deserves to be judged on his contribution over the past decade rather than one emotional moment after a friendly in North America. Equally, Liverpool must make the decision that best serves the team rather than the story.

Football has room for sentiment.

Successful football clubs rarely allow it to shape their future.

Football Will Always Belong to the People

Football will continue to change. Money will become more influential, transfer fees will climb even higher and governing bodies will continue searching for new ways to commercialise the sport. None of that is likely to stop.

What must never change are the values that made football matter in the first place.

Integrity. Loyalty. Leadership. Community.

Those qualities cannot be bought, licensed or sold.

This week reminded me that football still produces people who embody those ideals. Franco Baresi devoted his life to one club. Eddie Howe gave everything to another. Curtis Jones now faces difficult questions about his own future. Meanwhile, those entrusted with protecting the game continue to face scrutiny over the direction they are taking it.

Perhaps that is football’s eternal tension. The game constantly moves forward, yet its greatest moments are almost always rooted in timeless values.

As supporters, we should never stop celebrating the people who leave football better than they found it, nor stop questioning those who risk taking it in the opposite direction.

Because when the final whistle eventually blows, trophies fade, transfer fees are forgotten and balance sheets become irrelevant.

Character never does.

England are out of the World Cup, beaten 2-1 by Argentina in a semi final that looked firmly within their grasp until it slipped away in the closing minutes. Anthony Gordon’s goal deserved to be the decisive moment. Instead, late strikes from Enzo Fernandez and Lautaro Martinez left another generation wondering how a team blessed with so much talent keeps finding new ways to fall short.

This one hurts because it was completely avoidable.

For almost an hour England had controlled the contest. Argentina were aggressive, emotional and desperate to drag the game into a scrap, but Thomas Tuchel’s side stood firm. Even Lionel Messi, capable of changing any match with a single touch, had been reduced to fleeting moments rather than sustained influence.

Then England scored and everything changed after that.

Tuchel Abandoned His Own Principles

The expectation surrounding Thomas Tuchel has never been about qualification campaigns or routine victories. England appointed him because these are the nights that matter. He was supposed to provide the tactical edge that Gareth Southgate could never quite find.

Instead, England retreated.

Rather than using possession to frustrate Argentina or pressing higher to relieve the pressure, England spent the final half hour camped on the edge of their own penalty area. Every clearance became another invitation. Every minute gave Messi another opportunity to pick a pass, drift into dangerous spaces and dictate the rhythm.

It was the one scenario England simply had to avoid.

Messi had barely influenced proceedings before Gordon’s opener. Once England surrendered both territory and initiative, he became the game’s dominant figure. Even without scoring, his fingerprints were all over Argentina’s comeback as England gradually lost control of the match.

Tuchel’s side became a team that invited brilliance into the contest in a way that none of the other “big nations” would.

Familiar Criticism Comes Back To Haunt England Boss

That is what makes the defeat so frustrating.

When Tuchel took charge he was outspoken about England’s performances under Gareth Southgate. He argued that England at Euro 2024 had been “more afraid to drop out of the tournament than having the excitement and hunger to win it.” He also questioned the team’s identity, clarity and freedom, believing they had played “not to lose” rather than trying to win.

Those words now sit awkwardly beside what unfolded against Argentina.

Once England went ahead, there was very little excitement. There was no hunger to impose themselves on the game. There was no visible desire to keep the ball or force Argentina onto the back foot. Instead there was fear, caution and an acceptance that the final half hour would be an exercise in survival.

That approach almost never succeeds against elite opposition.

Argentina sensed it immediately. England became passive, substitutions reinforced the retreat, and the inevitable pressure finally told.

The irony is impossible to ignore. Tuchel criticised Southgate for creating exactly the mentality that caused England’s exit last night.

EURO 2028 Still Offers Hope

Calls for Tuchel to be dismissed are understandable in the emotional aftermath of another painful defeat.

They would also be premature.

England remain blessed with one of the strongest groups of players in world football. Gordon showed why he deserves to be trusted on the biggest stage. Jude Bellingham, Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka are entering the peak years of their careers. This squad should still be capable of competing for the European Championship in 2028.

Unless the Football Association can somehow persuade someone like Pep Guardiola to take the job, there is no obvious candidate who offers greater pedigree than Tuchel.

He deserves the opportunity to put this right.

That opportunity comes with conditions. He cannot abandon his own beliefs when the pressure rises. England did not appoint him to become a more decorated version of Gareth Southgate. They appointed him because he was supposed to be different and against Argentina, he was exactly what he claims to stands against.

After ending a 22 year wait for the Premier League title, Arsenal enter the new campaign in unfamiliar territory. For years, Mikel Arteta’s side were the challengers, chasing Manchester City and falling just short. Now they are the team everyone else is trying to catch.

Winning a title is one thing. Defending it presents a completely different challenge. Arsenal have shown they possess the quality, resilience and tactical discipline to reach the summit, but history shows retaining the Premier League crown is one of the hardest achievements in football.

As preparations continue for the new season, three key questions could determine whether Arsenal can remain champions.

Can they finally add the ruthless forward they need?

As title winners, Arsenal are building from a position of strength rather than trying to fix fundamental weaknesses. Defensively they were immense under Mikel Arteta, providing the foundation for their success. At the other end of the pitch, though, there is still room for improvement.

Bukayo Saka remains one of the Premier League’s elite attackers and clearly possesses all the quality required, but he has struggled to stay fit across an entire campaign. Arsenal also need more consistent support around him.

Viktor Gyokeres frustrated at times during his first season, but still managed an impressive 21 league goals. Those numbers suggest the Swedish striker is capable of delivering, although Arsenal may need to improve the quality and consistency of the service he receives.

The biggest question arguably comes down the left flank. Leandro Trossard is now 31, while Gabriel Martinelli has never quite developed into the player many expected after his early breakthrough. Arsenal still need greater output and reliability from that position.

Morgan Rogers appears to be the club’s leading target to address that issue. Other names, including Rafael Leao and Bradley Barcola, have been mentioned, although moves for either player currently appear unlikely.

The Gunners are also closing in on the signing of highly rated 16-year-old Jeremy Monga, but that is clearly an investment for the future rather than someone expected to contribute immediately.

Gabriel Jesus is expected to leave, which could yet create room for another striker, although there have been few concrete links at this stage. As things stand, Arsenal look set to begin the campaign with Gyokeres and Kai Havertz competing for the central role.

Rather than making wholesale attacking changes, the priority may simply be providing Gyokeres with a more consistent supply line. If Arsenal can improve the creativity around him, they may already have the goalscorer needed to lead another title challenge.

Can Arsenal keep their stars fit for another title defence?

Winning the Premier League despite one of the division’s worst injury records underlined Arsenal’s resilience, but Mikel Arteta knows he cannot rely on overcoming those setbacks every season.

Only five Premier League clubs suffered more injuries than Arsenal last season, with the Gunners losing a staggering 232 player games through injury across the campaign. That constant disruption forced Arteta to regularly reshuffle his side, with key figures including Martin Odegaard, Ben White, Jurrien Timber and Kai Havertz all spending spells on the sidelines.

Arteta admitted during the season that Arsenal had entered a “dangerous circle”, with injuries forcing him to overplay available stars, increasing the likelihood of further setbacks. Reports also suggested the club enlisted an external physiotherapy specialist to help identify why so many players were suffering physical breakdowns.

The solution is unlikely to come solely from changes behind the scenes in the medical department.

Greater squad depth would allow Arteta to rotate players such as Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice and Ødegaard more effectively during busy periods. Fresh legs across the squad would reduce the physical burden on Arsenal’s key performers and lower the risk of another lengthy injury list.

That is why another productive transfer window feels so important. Arsenal do not need to rebuild their squad, but they do need enough quality in reserve to maintain standards when key players require rest.

If the champions can combine their existing quality with improved player availability, they could be an even stronger proposition this season than they were during their title winning campaign.

Can Arsenal avoid a title hangover?

After years of being the hunters, Arsenal are now the hunted. The biggest challenge may not be lifting the trophy again, but dealing with the expectations that come with being champions.

So far, there is little reason to doubt their mentality. This squad has repeatedly shown it can handle pressure and bounce back from disappointment. Winning the title suggests they have developed the psychological resilience required at the highest level.

History, however, shows just how difficult title defences can be.

The last club other than Manchester City to successfully defend the Premier League title was Manchester United in 2009, when Sir Alex Ferguson’s side secured their third consecutive championship.

Since then, clubs including Chelsea, Leicester City and Liverpool have all failed to retain their crowns. In several cases, the drop off has been dramatic. Liverpool, for example, won the title in 2025 before only just securing Champions League qualification the following season despite spending around £450 million during the summer transfer window.

The difference with Arsenal is that they do not appear set for a major overhaul.

Piero Hincapie has joined permanently in a £35 million deal following an impressive loan spell, strengthening an already formidable defence. Beyond that, Arsenal are expected to add two forwards, including the highly rated Jeremy Monga, along with another midfielder.

Names such as Sandro Tonali and Alex Scott have both been linked, suggesting the focus is on adding quality depth rather than making sweeping changes to a title winning squad.

There is also uncertainty surrounding many of Arsenal’s closest rivals.

Manchester City are entering a new era following Pep Guardiola’s departure, with Enzo Maresca taking charge. Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United have also changed head coaches, with Andoni Iraola, Xabi Alonso and Michael Carrick all beginning new projects.

New managers inevitably require time to implement their ideas, even at elite clubs. That could hand Arsenal a valuable advantage during the opening months of the season.

It remains early days and plenty can change before the transfer window closes, but Arsenal appear well placed to mount a strong defence of their Premier League crown.

They have the foundations of an outstanding side, an experienced manager and a squad that has already proved it can cope with adversity. If they can strengthen their attack, keep their key players fit and avoid the complacency that has caught out so many champions before them, there is every reason to believe Arsenal can remain the team everyone else is trying to catch.

When three red cards were shown during the opening match of the 2026 World Cup, it did not take long for questions to emerge.

Had FIFA instructed referees to take a tougher stance? Were officials preparing to crack down on player behaviour throughout the tournament? Could this World Cup become remembered for disciplinary controversy rather than football?

Just a few hours later, those questions already look less certain.

South Korea’s meeting with Czech Republic provided a stark contrast to the drama seen in Mexico City’s opening fixture. In fact, the match was played in such a disciplined manner that the referee did not produce a single card until the 96th minute, when South Korea’s Lee Gi-Hyuk was shown a yellow card deep into stoppage time.

No reds.

No VAR controversies.

No major flashpoints.

Just football.

Suddenly, the narrative around FIFA’s officials appears far less straightforward.

Opening Night Shock

Mexico’s 2-0 victory over South Africa produced three dismissals, the highest number seen in a World Cup match since 2006.

South Africa’s Yaya Sithole was sent off for denying Brian Gutierrez a clear goalscoring opportunity.

Team-mate Themba Zwane followed after a VAR review deemed an off the ball incident to be violent conduct.

Mexico defender Cesar Montes then received his own red card late in the game after bringing down Khuliso Mudau.

Coming after tournaments in Russia and Qatar that each produced only four red cards in total, it immediately caught attention.

Many wondered whether FIFA’s referees had been instructed to adopt a more aggressive approach.

The Bigger Picture

One match rarely tells the full story of a tournament.

South Korea and Czech Republic

demonstrated exactly why caution is needed before drawing sweeping conclusions.

The game was competitive but controlled. Players largely stayed on the right side of the laws and the referee rarely found himself at the centre of proceedings.

The fact that the first booking arrived six minutes into added time suggests discipline may not be the major story some feared after the opener.

Instead, Mexico versus South Africa may simply have been an unusual game that happened to contain several incidents worthy of punishment.

FIFA’s Message Remains Clear

That does not mean FIFA has softened its stance.

The governing body has spent recent years attempting to improve player behaviour, reduce time wasting and eliminate unnecessary confrontation.

Pierluigi Collina and FIFA’s refereeing department have repeatedly stressed the importance of protecting the image of the game.

Officials remain under pressure to deal firmly with incidents involving violent conduct, dissent and cynical fouls.

However, the second match of the tournament suggests referees are not looking to dominate proceedings unnecessarily.

When players remain disciplined, cards appear likely to stay in the referee’s pocket.

A Tournament Worth Watching

The opening game sparked headlines. The second game restored a degree of perspective.

Three red cards in one match remains a remarkable statistic, particularly in the modern era.

Yet one yellow card in the next fixture serves as a reminder that World Cup narratives can change quickly.

For now, it may be too early to talk about a FIFA crackdown.

What the opening two matches have shown is that referees are prepared to act when required, but equally willing to let the football take centre stage when players give them the opportunity.

That is probably exactly the balance FIFA would like to see over the next month.

Rob Edwards has gone, and Wolves have somehow managed to make relegation feel like the beginning of a deeper fall.

There are sackings that carry a hard logic, even when they are brutal. A manager loses the dressing room. A team collapses beyond repair. A plan becomes so obviously broken that sentiment has to be put away. This does not look like one of those moments. This looks like a club taking a bad situation, staring at it for months, planning for the obvious outcome, then acting as though the obvious outcome has arrived as a thunderbolt.

Wolves were already travelling towards the Championship when Edwards arrived. That was the whole point. Nobody serious could have sold his appointment as a rescue mission. It was always more likely to be a preparation job, a grim winter spent measuring the damage, learning the personalities, trimming the squad, setting the tone, and getting ready to attack the division below with a manager who knew the road.

Now he has been removed before he can take the first real step on that road. Wolves have not cleared the fog. They have thickened it.

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Wolves Relegation Plan Now Looks Like A Fiction

When Edwards walked into Molineux, Wolves were not a sleeping giant waiting for the right speech. They were a failing Premier League side, bottom in spirit as much as in standing. Relegation was not inevitable in the mathematical sense, but it was close enough to shape every sensible decision the club made.

That is what makes this sacking so baffling. If Edwards was judged on keeping Wolves up, the appointment was unfair from the start. If he was judged on rebuilding them in the Championship, he has been sacked before the job began.

You cannot hire a man to lay foundations, then dismiss him because the roof fell in before the concrete dried. Wolves knew what they were buying. They bought Championship experience, emotional connection, and a manager whose best work had come when the task required unity and conviction. He was not being asked to polish a title contender. He was being asked to drag a bruised club into a harder league with a clearer identity.

The club had even started to act like a coherent rebuild was under way. Kieran Trippier arrived on a free. Raul Jimenez returned. Andre committed his future. These were not random calendar entries. They looked like the first moves of a squad shaped for a specific campaign, with Edwards right in the middle of the thinking.

That is why this feels so barmy. If those signings had his fingerprints on them, Wolves have now changed the architect while the materials are still being unloaded. If they did not, then the head coach was being used as a smiling front for decisions made elsewhere. Neither version flatters the club.

Edwards Gamble Has Turned On Him

There is sympathy for Edwards, but it cannot be clean sympathy. His choice to leave Middlesbrough now looks dreadful.

He was not stranded there. He was not managing a club in chaos. He was in a promotion race, with his reputation climbing again after the remarkable rise he had overseen at Luton. His stock had survived relegation because people could see the scale of what he had built before it. He looked like a young manager with substance, resilience, and a proper feel for Championship football.

Then Wolves came calling. The emotional pull was obvious. Former club. Familiar place. Premier League badge still on the door. For a manager, these chances arrive dressed as destiny. That is how football traps people. It sells history as security.

Edwards must surely have had assurances. It is hard to believe he would have left a strong position at Middlesbrough for a club in Wolves’ state without being told that relegation would not define him. He must have believed he would be the man trusted to lead the response, once the drop was confirmed and the noise of the Premier League had gone.

If those assurances existed, Wolves have broken faith. If they did not, Edwards misread the room badly.

Either way, he has paid for the move. Seven months ago, he was a manager on the rise, with a compelling story behind him and a promotion chase ahead of him. Now he has another sacking on the record and a question to answer at his next interview. Why did he jump? Why did he trust Wolves? Why did he leave a stable platform for a club that has made instability part of its daily weather?

That does not make him a fool. It makes him another manager who believed a club’s pitch more than its pattern.

Molineux Decision Makers Invite Bigger Doubts

The deeper issue is not Edwards. It is Wolves.

A club can sack a manager and still look decisive. Wolves look confused. They spent money to get Edwards out of Middlesbrough. They backed him publicly. They appeared to involve him in early Championship planning. Then they pulled the plug at a point when consistency was their most valuable currency.

This is not the rhythm of a club with a fixed plan. It is the rhythm of a club reacting to pressure, politics, or both.

Supporters can smell that. They can accept failure when it comes with honesty. They can endure relegation when the plan for recovery has shape. What they cannot stomach is being told there is alignment, then watching the club behave like alignment was a line for a fans’ forum and nothing more.

Wolves supporters have seen enough decline to know when the walls are damp. They do not need lectures about patience from people who keep changing the locks. A relegated club needs to convince players, agents, supporters, and staff that the next season is not a punishment tour. It needs one voice. One plan. One manager whose authority is visible.

Instead, Wolves have created uncertainty at the first point when certainty mattered.

The linked move for Portuguese coach César Peixoto may yet work. Football loves to mock caution. Sometimes the bold appointment becomes the clever one. Wolves, of all clubs, know that foreign ideas can reshape a place when the fit is right.

But the Championship is a cold room for experiments. It is relentless, awkward, and suspicious of reputation. It asks different questions from the ones posed by a sixth placed finish in Portugal. Tuesday night at Preston, Millwall, or Stoke is not impressed by a neat presentation or an agency relationship. The league is not glamorous. It does not care for theory. It leans on you until your plan either hardens or cracks.

Replacing a manager with Championship knowledge before he has a Championship season, especially after building parts of the summer around him, is a huge call. It might be inspired. Right now it looks like another swing from a club that has forgotten how to stand still long enough to build anything.

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Promotion Push Already Feels Compromised

The great danger for Wolves is that this decision damages more than the dugout.

Players who signed because of Edwards will notice. Senior professionals do not need long explanations. They read the room. They know when a club says one thing in May and does another in June. Trippier, Jimenez, Andre, and the rest of that dressing room now have to adjust to a new voice before pre season has even found its rhythm.

That matters. Promotion is not won by talent alone. Relegated clubs often arrive in the Championship with bigger names, bigger wages, and bigger assumptions. Many discover, quickly and painfully, that the division has no respect for parachutes or old Premier League habits. The best sides come down with humility, hunger, and a plan that everyone can understand.

Wolves have begun by tearing up their first plan.

There is still enough quality at Molineux to compete. There is enough name value to attract players. There is enough residual stature for the club to talk about an immediate return without sounding absurd. Yet all of that is fragile. Every relegated club thinks it will bounce back. Many bounce sideways. Some keep falling.

That is the fear here. Wolves do not merely look relegated. They look like a club still negotiating with the reasons they were relegated.

Edwards was not blameless. Five wins from 30 matches is ugly. The football was often limp. There were days when Wolves looked short of structure, confidence, and menace. No manager gets a free pass because the job is hard.

But context matters. He inherited a mess and said as much. Maybe that honesty made people uncomfortable. Maybe those above him wanted a head coach who would sell the rebuild without describing the wreckage. If so, Wolves have chosen comfort over clarity.

That rarely ends well.

The final judgement on Edwards is complicated. He took a gamble that has damaged him. Leaving Middlesbrough, with a promotion race alive and his reputation strengthening, now looks like a poor career call. He trusted the romance of Wolves and the promise of time. In football, romance is cheap and time is usually the first lie told.

The final judgement on Wolves is simpler. They look like a club sinking to new lows with a shovel in their own hands.

This was the moment to show calm. This was the moment to prove relegation had sharpened the thinking. Instead, Wolves have sacked the man they appeared to hire for exactly this next chapter.

Maybe the next appointment will win. Maybe the gamble will come off and this will be remembered as ruthless foresight. At present, it feels like a club tearing pages from its own recovery manual, then wondering why the instructions no longer make sense.

Wolves needed a clean start.

They have chosen another mess.

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The World Cup has always been a stage for football’s greatest moments. This summer, it may also become the testing ground for some of the most significant law changes the sport has seen in decades.

While supporters will naturally focus on the players, the stadiums and the stories that emerge across North America, FIFA’s refereeing department has been quietly preparing a series of measures designed to tackle some of football’s most frustrating habits.

Time wasting, prolonged substitutions, questionable VAR limitations and poor player behaviour have all come under the microscope.

The aim is simple. Keep the ball in play more often, reduce controversy where possible and make the game flow better.

Whether supporters agree with every change is another matter entirely.

The War on Time Wasting Intensifies

Anyone who has watched football over the past few seasons will know exactly where FIFA’s frustrations lie.

Goalkeepers taking an age over goal kicks. Players strolling towards the touchline when substituted. Endless delays that slowly drain momentum from matches.

The governing body believes stronger deterrents are needed.

Under the new World Cup regulations, referees will be able to introduce visible countdowns for delayed restarts.

If a player deliberately wastes time over a goal kick or throw in, there could be serious consequences. A delayed goal kick could be converted into a corner kick for the opposition, while a delayed throw in could be handed to the other team.

That represents a far greater threat than a yellow card.

For years, players have accepted cautions as part of game management. Conceding a corner in the closing moments of a match is a punishment that could directly influence the result.

It is clear what FIFA hopes will happen.

Players will simply stop testing the limits.

Substitutions Could Suddenly Become Riskier

Another major adjustment concerns substituted players.

The instruction is straightforward. Leave the pitch quickly.

Players will now have just ten seconds to exit at the nearest point.

Fail to do so and the incoming substitute will not be allowed onto the field immediately. The replacement must wait until play stops again, meaning teams could temporarily find themselves down to ten men.

That may sound harsh, but FIFA believes the possibility of playing short handed will eliminate deliberate delays.

A recent international friendly between Japan and Iceland provided an early example of how it works. Iceland briefly played with ten men after a player took too long to leave the pitch, and Japan scored before the next stoppage arrived.

Expect managers to be reminding their players about this constantly.

Injured Players Will Wait Longer Before Returning

Supporters in Britain have already become accustomed to players spending a short spell off the pitch after receiving treatment.

That waiting period is now being doubled.

If medical staff enter the field to treat a player, the player will generally be required to remain off the pitch for one full minute before returning.

The change extends beyond the World Cup and will be adopted more widely across football.

There are exceptions.

Goalkeepers, serious injuries, head injuries, collisions involving goalkeepers and situations where an opponent receives a disciplinary sanction will all be treated differently.

Even so, the adjustment is likely to generate debate.

Critics argue genuinely injured players may hesitate before requesting treatment. FIFA believes the benefit of reducing tactical stoppages outweighs that concern.

Has FIFA Finally Targeted the “Tactical Injury”?

One of football’s most discussed modern tactics has been the sudden goalkeeper injury.

We’ve all seen it.

A team is under pressure. The goalkeeper goes down. The physio arrives. Players gather around the technical area. Instructions are delivered. Momentum disappears.

FIFA has not completely eliminated the tactic, but it is attempting to reduce its effectiveness.

During goalkeeper treatment breaks, players will no longer be permitted to use the opportunity to gather around coaches for impromptu tactical discussions.

Whether this proves enforceable remains to be seen.

The tactic itself may still exist. The organised team talk may not.

VAR Is About to Get Even More Involved

For supporters who already feel VAR occupies too much space in football, there is further expansion on the horizon.

The system will receive additional powers in several specific situations.

Corner Kick Reviews

VAR officials will be permitted to check whether a corner kick has been awarded correctly.

The expectation is that technology and existing delays before corners are taken will allow these checks without creating additional stoppages.

Interestingly, the same principle will not automatically apply to goal kicks that should have been corners.

Second Yellow Card Reviews

Players dismissed following a second yellow card will receive additional protection.

VAR will be able to intervene if the second caution stems from a clear refereeing error.

Importantly, this is not intended to create endless reviews over subjective decisions. The threshold remains high.

Off The Ball Incidents Before Corners

One particularly interesting addition concerns fouls before the ball enters play.

Previously, incidents occurring before a corner was taken often escaped VAR scrutiny.

Now, if an attacking infringement directly leads to a goal, penalty or disciplinary action, VAR can intervene.

This closes a loophole that has frustrated officials for years.

Mistaken Identity Corrections

Rare though it may be, referees occasionally punish the wrong player.

Under the new framework, VAR can help correct cases where a booking or dismissal is shown to the incorrect individual.

It may not happen often, but when it does, the consequences can be significant.

Tougher Sanctions For Player Conduct

The final group of changes focuses on behaviour.

FIFA wants to stamp out certain forms of confrontation before they become larger problems.

One notable addition allows referees to dismiss players who cover their mouths while engaging in confrontational exchanges.

The intention is clear. FIFA believes players attempting to conceal abusive or discriminatory language should face severe consequences.

Another potential red card offence involves players leaving the field specifically to protest refereeing decisions.

The move follows several controversial incidents around world football where matches were disrupted by collective protests and refusals to continue play.

FIFA wants stronger tools available before similar situations occur on the sport’s biggest stage.

A Different World Cup Awaits

The 2026 World Cup was already set to be unique.

More teams. More matches. More host cities.

Now it will also showcase a radically different refereeing landscape.

Some of these changes may disappear after the tournament. Others could become permanent features across domestic football in England, Scotland and beyond.

What seems certain is that football’s lawmakers believe the game has reached a point where stronger intervention is necessary.

The next twelve months will reveal whether supporters agree.

One thing is guaranteed.

Referees will have plenty more to think about when the World Cup finally gets underway.

I used to love the World Cup with the sort of daft, greedy devotion that makes no sense until you have lived it.

Spain 1982 sits somewhere in the fog of childhood. Mexico 1986 was my first proper one. I was nine, Liverpool had just won the double for the first time, English clubs were banned from Europe after Heysel, and the World Cup felt like a door being kicked open.

Here were players you had heard about, read about, maybe glimpsed in short bursts on television, walking into your living room as if smuggled in from another planet. Maradona owned it, of course. It was his tournament in the way the moon owns the night sky. He made the game look lawless and holy at once.

Yet it was not only him. Platini, Zico, Michael Laudrup, Enzo Francescoli, names that sounded like spells. I was allowed to stay up for England and Scotland games, which felt like a moral victory in itself. Most of the rest belonged to highlights, memory and imagination.

By Italia 1990, I was hooked. Boarding school made proper viewing awkward. Exams, activities, all those inconvenient interruptions to a global football festival. Still, the tournament seeped into everything. Gazza’s tears. Toto Schillaci’s eyes. Cameroon kicking down the door. Nessun Dorma turning football into opera for people who had never asked for opera.

Then came USA 1994, and for me, peak World Cup fandom.

No England. No Scotland. Oddly, that helped. I watched as a neutral, liberated from dread. I was at college, rich in time if not much else, fuelled by cider, crisps and cheese sandwiches. If two games clashed, two televisions were pressed into service.

That tournament had its own hard, strange glamour. Ireland beating Italy in New York still feels like a fever dream. Ray Houghton’s goal, the Giants Stadium heat, Jack Charlton pacing with that haunted majesty of his. Maradona’s goal against Greece was a final burst of lightning before the lights went out. His celebration into the camera looked thrilling then and tragic almost immediately after.

Bergkamp was silk. Baggio was grace carrying exhaustion on his back. Romario played as if the penalty box were a private room. Stoichkov snarled and scored. Hagi bent games to his will. Brazil vs Netherlands was magnificent. Bulgaria shocking Germany felt like the drawbridge being pulled up on an old order.

Then Baggio missed in Pasadena. Football has rarely looked so lonely.

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Greed has priced out tournament romance

Something went after that.

Part of it was age. Part of it was access. The mystique faded because the world became easier to watch. The best players were no longer distant figures from grainy broadcasts and magazine profiles. They were in Serie A, La Liga, the Champions League and, increasingly, the Premier League. The unknown became known. The rare became routine.

I still followed World Cups. I still cared in patches. Often I only properly arrived around the quarter finals, when the tournament had shed some excess and found its pulse. That is not noble. It is just true.

Even so, I have never gone into a World Cup with less appetite than this one.

World Cup 2026 should feel enormous in the right way. Three host nations. Forty eight teams. One hundred and four matches. Mexico City staging the opener at the Azteca, a ground steeped in football’s deepest ghosts. The United States, Mexico and Canada offering scale, money, stadiums, noise and reach.

Instead, it already feels swollen, expensive and faintly joyless.

The expansion is sold as inclusion. There is some truth in that. More nations get their moment. That matters. No serious football person should sneer at countries beyond the old elite getting a place on the stage.

The problem is the smell around it. Everything feels stretched to maximise inventory. More games, more broadcast slots, more hospitality, more markets, more sponsors, more chances to turn devotion into yield. There is a difference between growing football and carving it into saleable units.

Ticket prices have become one of the tournament’s defining stories before a ball has moved. Dynamic pricing at a World Cup feels like a moral defeat dressed as commercial innovation. Resale fees, transport spikes, hotel costs and late policy wrangles over water bottles have helped create a sense that fans are being treated as walking payment terminals.

Football has always taken money from its public. This feels more brazen. Less grateful. More contemptuous.

That tone runs through the fan reaction as well. Strip away the fury and profanity and a simple grief remains. People who grew up loving this tournament feel it has been removed from them. They speak of boycotts, indifference, disgust, empty seats, corruption and greed. Some will watch anyway. Some will not. Many will hover between principle and habit, which is where football usually traps us.

Politics has walked straight onto pitch

Gianni Infantino is my main bugbear in all of this.

He speaks in the language of uplift while presiding over a machine that looks more and more like a travelling revenue extraction project. The words are always grand. Humanity. Unity. Inclusion. History. The delivery keeps returning to money, access, power and spectacle.

Add Donald Trump to the picture and the stomach tightens.

A World Cup in the United States already carried political weight. With Trump central to the mood around it, that weight becomes heavier. He does not feel like a host of football. He feels like a man who sees the tournament as a stage, with the trophy, the cameras and the presidents of federations all arranged as props.

Football should not pretend it can live outside politics. It never has. Argentina 1978, Russia 2018, Qatar 2022, all carried their own shadows. Yet 2026 feels unusually blunt. Visa restrictions, travel bans, immigration enforcement, the denial of entry to officials, the complications around Iran, the presence of security agencies, all of it presses against the tournament before it has even started.

A World Cup calling itself welcoming cannot shrug when parts of the world struggle to attend. A tournament claiming to represent everybody cannot look relaxed when a referee is reportedly unable to enter because of where he is from. A governing body that talks about inclusion cannot sound convincing while supporters from some competing nations face barriers that others do not.

The World Cup used to feel like one of the few occasions when football could pretend to gather the planet into a single argument. Everyone came with their flags, songs, grudges, hopes and bad predictions. It was chaotic and imperfect, yet it felt shared.

Now the world arrives with lawyers, visa rules, security briefings, border politics, price algorithms and executive boxes.

Climate concerns add another layer of discomfort. A tournament spread across a continent, with teams, fans, media and officials flying vast distances, asks serious questions of a governing body that claims environmental responsibility. Heat will be a football issue as well as a public health one. Players cannot simply run through extreme conditions because the calendar demands it.

None of this means the football will definitely be poor. The ball has a habit of rescuing the people who mishandle it. A great goal can make you forget the boardroom for ten seconds. A fearless underdog can bring back the old thrill. A penalty shootout can still turn the room airless.

That is why FIFA gets away with so much. The game keeps bailing out the institution.

Beautiful game has never looked uglier

Maybe I am just an old grouch now.

That possibility has to be entertained. Every generation believes its own football memories were purer. They rarely were. Spain 1982, Mexico 1986, Italia 1990 and USA 1994 all had politics, money, compromise and nonsense around them. Football innocence is usually something we invent later.

Yet nostalgia does not explain everything.

There has been a shift in scale and tone. The World Cup no longer feels like a tournament first and an industry second. It feels like an industry that permits a tournament to break out in scheduled intervals. The language of growth has eaten the language of joy.

Forty-eight teams may produce stories worth telling. It may also produce long stretches that pass UK viewers by entirely, hidden behind awkward kick-off times and diluted jeopardy. I can already see myself checking scores in the morning, half interested, mildly guilty, waiting for the serious business to begin.

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That is a sad admission from someone who once ran two televisions to avoid missing group games between countries I had no connection to.

USA 1994 gave me a World Cup of abundance without making the game feel cheap. It had heat, colour, chaos and stars. It had Diana Ross missing a penalty in the opening ceremony, Maradona burning bright then disappearing, Hagi painting from distance, Romario prowling, Baggio dragging Italy to the final and then standing alone under the Californian sky.

World Cup 2026 has abundance of a different sort. More matches. More nations. More money. More politics. More noise. More reasons to look away.

The old thrill may still flicker. Some player unknown to most of us will have three brilliant weeks. Some giant will fall. Some match will remind us why we fell for this daft game in the first place. Football remains capable of ambushing cynicism. That is its best trick.

Still, I cannot shake the feeling that the tournament has arrived carrying too much baggage and too little charm.

The World Cup once sold wonder. Now it sells access packages.

It once made the game feel bigger. Now it often makes the people running it look smaller.

I used to count down to this tournament. This time, with two days to go, I feel more weary than excited. The beautiful game has never felt so ugly.

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