To a certain extent, the clubs around the top of the Premier League this season feel easy to read.
For instance, it’s a given that Manchester United will be a lot better than it was under David Moyes now that it is under Louis van Gaal—and if it signs Arturo Vidal and another centre-back, it has the materials to get back into title contention, especially given its lack of European football as a distraction.
Arsenal, fresh from dismantling Manchester City in the Community Shield and a summer of upgrading its squad, should be much closer to winning the title than it was last season. It may or may not go all the way, but the difference between those two things will be quite small.
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And then, obviously, Manchester City will be better than it was on Sunday. As always, it will have the biggest squad in the league and it can quite feasibly improve on last season’s points tally simply by winning any of its first three away games, unlike last time around. It, like Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea—which also consolidated and reinforced its squad over the summer—should be one of two teams that set the pace in the Premier League.
Which leaves Tottenham and Everton to play out their annual battle for fifth, sixth and seventh place, occasionally involving the pretense that it’s the battle for fourth. And that’s about it. Predictions are so easy.
Except that isn’t actually everyone, is it? Because Liverpool is also around somewhere too and, sadly, it’s much more difficult to place. In fact, just thinking about what Liverpool will do is an ordeal.
To begin with, it’s a very different team to last season. £75 million’s worth of talent has gone out of the club and almost £100million’s worth has come in. And what’s more, the club will be playing European football, where last season it almost had a free-run at the league. Such big shifts in opposing directions mean anything said about Liverpool is much more speculative than anything said about anyone else.
And its pre-season form has only enhanced the mystery. On Sunday there was a brilliant destruction of Borussia Dortmund, 4-0. But before that there was a 1-0 loss to Roma, a 2-2 draw with Manchester City, a 2-0 win against AC Milan and 3-1 defeat to Manchester United. These don’t form a coherent body of evidence in any direction.
It means that no one is really going to be making an educated guess about what Liverpool will do this season. No one can be very sure that they’re accurately interpreting the information that’s available about this team—it all leads off on too many different paths.
Okay, if you pushed it, you might say that it has more tangible reasons to worry than relax. The loss of Luis Suarez—its best player, top goalscorer and talisman—invokes Tottenham’s loss of Gareth Bale last season: the team could lose a lot of its spark and spend months trying to find it again. The introduction of half a dozen new players reminds you of Tottenham again: what if those players don’t adapt to the club or the league? And you also have to ask if the list of European fixtures now added to its schedule will mean spreading the emphasis too thinly?
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Throw in Steven Gerrard’s age and, quite quickly, you can find yourself putting Liverpool closer to mid-table than the title. But then the annoying list of potential positives keeps turning up every time you think you’ve decided the club is going to be in trouble.
Up front, Brendan Rodgers keeps insisting that Daniel Sturridge will step up in quality yet again now that he has post-Suarez levels of responsibility. And when you watch his goal against Dortmund you’re inclined to believe his manager—the guy’s a great finisher and he doesn’t need Suarez to keep being that. This is the player who actually scored more ‘key goals’ than Suarez last season, if you remember.
Then, behind Sturridge, you just have to start thinking about what Raheem Sterling could do in the next few months to start believing that Liverpool could be title challengers. In the second half of last season he was outstanding. Based on his continued improvement since then, it’s not absurd to think that this season he could be the driving force behind a title bid. Physically, he’s getting stronger and mentally he’s getting more confident. Watch his goals in pre-season for proof of both. He can, theoretically, do anything.
Add in the obvious improvement in defence via the purchase of Dejan Lovren and you start thinking that only really one or two of the new signings has to pay off for this team to genuinely contend for the title again.
The problem, like I say, is that as soon as you start plotting Liverpool’s season out, you can fill out reasons for it going either way—title winners or Europa League losers. It’s really tricky. Liverpool’s a wildcard option; it’s really difficult to read.
Luckily for a league that sells itself on being unpredictable, then, this should actually make its season a great watch. What a nice resolution to this ordeal.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.