Premier League season 21-22 kicks off tonight

The 2021-2022 season of the English Premier League kicks off tonight with the most awaited crowd on the stands. Arsenal will face newly promoted Brentford on the first match of the English football season. 

It’s back. The 20 Premier League teams going head-to-head for the next nine months and the football world can hardly wait .Sure, the Euros captured the public imagination as England made their way to the final but, let’s be honest, most people are club over country. It’s been a bumper summer transfer window off the pitch but after plenty of posturing and throwing cash about like confetti, it’s time to get down to the action on it. Manchester City head into the 2021/22 Premier League season as the defending champions after cruising to the title while playing without fans in the stadium. Hardly a change from normal times, and then Pep Guardiola’s men will take some beating and are odds-on favourites in betting market ahead of Champions League winners Chelsea and Liverpool.

The prospect of Harry Kane and Jack Grealish joining Kevin De Bruyne and co would make City a frightening proposal but anything can happen over the course of a 38-game season. Anything. Norwich, Watford and Brentford are also back in the big time, and it’s last season’s Championship play-off winners that kick off the new Premier League campaign against Arsenal. If you feasted on Euro 2020 with a side helping of Copa America before gorging on some Olympics action for the hell of it, it might feel as though football never actually went away over the summer. But it has been 82 days since a ball was last kicked in the Premier League, which seems an inordinate amount of time considering barely 24 hours seemed to pass without a game taking place after English football restarted in June 2020. Crystal Palace’s bold experiment under their new coach, Patrick Vieira, could legitimately go either way. The same might be said for Newcastle, whose novel approach of doing nothing at all may just come back to bite them. Burnley’s trademark compact style just about worked last season, but against better-rested, better-drilled sides, a thin and ageing squad could finally discover its limits. At this embryonic stage, these six look like the likeliest relegation candidates.

And yet a note of caution should be sounded at this point. There is so much that we still don’t know about this season: not simply in terms of personnel and pre-season form, but the basic contours of what the 2021-22 Premier League will look and feel and sound like. The full time return of fans – still contingent on external variables such as government bungling, viral variants and a potential winter fourth wave – will restore the noise and colour and emotional depth so sadly lacking during those anaemic lockdown months. It should also restore the home-team advantage that was so startlingly reversed last season, when away wins outnumbered home wins for the first time in English top-flight history. West Ham's sixth-placed finish may soon feel like a pandemic memory, like queuing outside Lidl or clapping for the NHS In this respect and others, this season should provide a vivid point of contrast. The luxury of an actual pre-season, with no World Cup in summer 2022, will afford most teams a higher physical and tactical ceiling. This could benefit high-energy counterpressing teams such as Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester City. Then we come to the other Covid-flavoured shadow hanging over the summer: money. Outside the elite, clubs are weathering their straitened circumstances in different ways. Leicester have strengthened again and should challenge for the top four. Another summer of turmoil at Tottenham has seen Nuno Espírito Santo installed and, still no clarity on the future of Harry Kane; Everton are trying to consolidate under Rafael Benítez without any real idea of what exactly they want to consolidate. West Ham’s sixth-placed finish last season may soon begin to feel like a faint pandemic memory, like queueing outside Lidl or clapping for the NHS. Brighton could be a top-half side if they reinvest the £50m they got for Ben White in a decent striker, which they probably won’t. For the 13th season in a row, meanwhile, Arsenal remain all potential.