You can learn a lot from Matchweek 1 in the Premier League.
Last season, Arsenal ground out a 1-0 victory against Manchester United at Old Trafford with an early set piece goal. It taught us how Arsenal were going to win the league, and it taught us that United, who had finished 15th the season prior, were going to be way more competitive than they had been in a couple of years.
Then, Championship playoff winners Sunderland beat West Ham 3-0, presaging the Black Cats making it surprisingly far up the table and the Hammers getting relegated. Chelsea, meanwhile, scuffled to a scoreless draw with fellow eventual midtable finisher Crystal Palace.
You can also fool yourself in Matchweek 1.
Last season, reloaded and revamped defending champions Liverpool looked like the team we expected them to be — unlimited firepower and just enough defensive resistance — in their 4-2 win against Bournemouth. They, of course, finished the season in fifth.
Then, Tottenham dominated Burnley 3-0, in Thomas Frank’s opening match with his new club — he was later fired midway through the season and Spurs finished just two points clear of relegation. Aston Villa attempted just three shots in a lucky home draw against Newcastle — the former finished fourth, the latter 12th.
While every team’s first game is way too early to declare anything with any degree of certainty, we also shouldn’t totally ignore it. But rather than straddling that line and attempting to find nuance within the initial 90 minutes of the season, let’s have some fun with it.
I’ve summoned up plenty of unearned certainty and put together my biggest overreactions to Matchweek 1 of the Premier League’s 2026-27 season. Most of them may ultimately be wrong, but a couple of them will probably end up being right, too.
Arsenal are faves again: Liverpool, Man City, Man United aren’t up to the task
The Gunners started off their title defense by scoring three goals and conceding four … shots.
New signing Christos Tzolis looked like a bona fide starter on the left wing rather than the depth player his meager transfer fee seemed to suggest. Injured England stars Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice looked like not-injured England stars Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice. Kai Havertz was healthy enough to start — and score.
And the right-sided triangle of Saka, midfielder Martin Odegaard and right back Ben White gave Arsenal’s possession game a fluency we haven’t really seen since all three were consistently starting matches together in 2023-24. This passing map shows every player’s every position, and the thicker the line, the more passes between them. Note No. 7 (Saka), No. 4 (White) and No. 8 (Odegaard):
Coventry City do not appear to be what experts on the tactical side of things call “a good soccer team,” and Arsenal were at home, but this Gunners team has an identity, a lot of depth, a long track record of consistency and a bunch of talented players who didn’t even play in the opener.
The absolute worst-case disaster season for this Arsenal side is, what, a second-place finish? Everyone else who finished in the top five last season looked varying degrees of terrible to open the season in Matchweek 1.
In Enzo Maresca’s first Premier League game in charge, Manchester City were losing until the 84th minute against a Bournemouth team that lost their manager over the summer. Rather than trying to continue to do what was working so well under Pep Guardiola for the past decade, Maresca played Marc Guéhi as a midfielder?
Manchester United, meanwhile, lost 2-0 to Hull City, who — by just about every statistical measure — are the worst team to be promoted to the Premier League in the modern era.
Aston Villa? They, well … have you ever been into the monkey house at a zoo? Imagine going into one of those and closing your eyes — none of the primal beauty of the animals, just the dissonant, nonstop screeching. That’s what their opening 4-0 loss to Brighton was like.
And then Liverpool played a Newcastle team that fired their coach a couple of weeks ago, got rid of all of their best players and signed a bunch of inexperienced teenagers and barely-adults. Liverpool needed a breakaway save by Alisson Becker and a 99th-minute penalty from Dominik Szoboszlai just to tie the match. Liverpool played the high-pressing and vertical game that new manager Andoni Iraola wants. It just looked janky as heck.
I mean this in the most humble way imaginable: I was right about everything
OK fine, I’ll break this out into a couple of other overreactions. But if the season ended today, I would have nailed all of the team predictions I made before the season when I pointed out all of the spots where I thought conventional wisdom was misguided.
Among those …
Brighton are going to challenge Arsenal for the title
Two weeks ago, I wrote the following:
… we’re going with Brighton as the team whose likelihood of winning the league is higher than suggested by the conventional wisdom of these betting lines.
I say this pretty much every season, and I’ll say it again: Brighton still have so many talented young players who could make a leap at the same time. And they also have the youngest manager in the league in Fabian Hurzeler, so he could improve, too. On top of all that, they were quite good last season — sixth-best adjusted goal differential (70% goals, 30% expected goals) after the five teams we’ve already mentioned.
One week into the season, well …
Orange are goals, purple are shots, and the larger the circle, the higher the expected-goals value of the attempt.
If you’re going to change your opinion about a team after one game, it should be after they deservedly go up 4-0 at halftime against a team that finished in the top four the season prior.
Which leads us to …
Aston Villa are getting relegated
While I didn’t pick Villa to get relegated, I thought that they at least had the underrated potential for a disaster season because they had the burden Champions League matches to deal with, their underlying numbers last season were closer to the 12th-place team than a top-four side, and they got rid of their best players over the summer. Oh, and that was before Ezri Konsa left for Arsenal and Ollie Watkins didn’t even make the squad for their opening match.
We saw pretty much all of that come together against Brighton. They played horribly and they didn’t get the bounces they got last year. João Gomes‘ red card equals the number of red cards Villa had in all 38 matches last season, and Victor Lindelof‘s own goal — a low-quality chance miraculously turning into a goal — is the kind of thing that was happening to Villa’s opponents in 2025-26.
It already seems like it’s going to be a really long year for coach Unai Emery & Co.
Tottenham are also getting relegated
This shouldn’t even be an overreaction. They finished 17th in each of the past two seasons! Sure, they spent a ton of money this past summer, but the people spending that money are the same people who spent a ton of money building the team that has racked up back-to-back one-spot-away-from-the-Championship finishes!
Much like with Villa, I didn’t predict Spurs to actually get relegated, but I’ve spent a lot of this summer wondering if they changed the rules of the sport without telling me or something. I’ve seen multiple people with large platforms who purport to be soccer experts picking Tottenham — the team that has finished 17th in each of the past two seasons — to finish in the top four. The top four!
I picked both Villa and Spurs as the two clubs whose massive downsides were being ignored most often in conventional wisdom implied from the betting odds. Plus, as I wrote about a few weeks ago, you don’t actually want to win the transfer window. The clubs that do, historically, underperform their preseason expectations.
And, uh, did you see that Tottenham-Brentford game? Spurs had 59% of possession and got outshot 26-9. You really only see that margin when either a top team is playing a relegation side or a bigger team is chasing a game against a team that’s bunkering in to protect a lead. Well, Brentford scored in the 12th minute — and continued to pummel Spurs into submission.
From the stats app Futi, the red line is Brentford, the gray line is Tottenham, the dots are goals, and this is how much expected-goals value each team created as the match went on:
Brentford generated chances in every way possible, too: set pieces, transition attacks, settled possession. Actually, well, maybe this was a top side against a relegation team …
A club will spend more than $100 million to acquire Mamadou Sangare within the next year
I picked Brentford, whose odds were worse than Newcastle, Everton, Bournemouth, Villa and Spurs, as the most likely outsider to qualify for the Champions League next season.
Along with Brighton and Arsenal, the Bees are the most consistent team in England. They know exactly how they want to play, and they have a strong process with a fantastic track record of finding the exact right players to do it. The only reason we don’t talk about them more often is that they have one of the lowest payrolls in the league.
As a team that prioritizes vertical play, pressure, controlling chance quality and set piece excellence, Brentford have tended toward certain kinds of players. They get a lot of the winger-striker hybrids who take more shots than wide players typically do. They like fullbacks who crash into the box. And they go for center backs who are dominant in the air and simply just do a lot of stuff: win tackles, contest headers, play long passes forward and contribute around the opposition penalty area a little bit, too.
These are all player types who are a bit easier to quantify, and that fits the club’s data-heavy scouting process, too. The one kind of player Brentford has never really had is the traditional, ball-dominant midfielder. These players (A) are harder to quantify, and (B) don’t really fit the Brentford approach that kind of just skips over that phase of play.
But this summer they went big (€48 million) on midfielder Mamadou Sangare from Lens. The fact that Brentford were going big on a midfielder was interesting in and of itself, but Sangare fits the mold, too.
Ligue 1 midfielders have traditionally translated really well to England, and Sangare fills the box score with quantifiable things like tackles, interceptions, dribbles, etc. The only part of the game he lacked was a history of progressing the ball up the field consistently with his passing. But again, Brentford don’t really need that.
As we saw against Spurs, they just needed him to do a bit of literally everything else. He was easily the best midfielder on the field, and his run from deep and subsequent cutback opened up Tottenham for the opening goal.
Brentford have consistently figured out how to win the battle around both goals: They generate the highest quality shots every year and they concede the lowest-quality shots every year. If they found a guy who can win the game in the middle, too, then why couldn’t they make a run at the top five in what might be his only season at the club?
