Ten kneejerk reactions to the opening Premier League weekend: Carrick sacked and more

Michael Carrick is doomed at Manchester United, the top two is set in stone and Newcastle or Aston Villa will finish above Spurs.

Our kneejerk reactions were hit and miss from last season’s opening weekend. Here’s to more of the same.

10) Erling Haaland won’t win the Golden Boot If only there was some mythical, portentous precedent Haaland could have heeded before buzz cutting his brilliance on the eve of the season, seemingly purely to annoy Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

As the Old Testament frequently pondered: Do the Israelites play better without Samson? Does he offer enough off the ball against the Philistines?

That follicle imbalance alone caused Haaland to draw a blank on the opening Premier League weekend for the first time.

Not since his final season with Salzburg seven years ago had the Norwegian failed to score in the first game of a campaign. For only the 11th time in his Premier League career, Haaland had at least five shots in a match and could not convert any of them against Bournemouth.

August is historically the striker’s most prolific month before a regression to the still absurd mean, but this false start has immediately scuppered his annual tradition of setting a record for best scoring start to a Premier League season and mogging Mick Quinn in the process.

No player has ever scored more than 18 goals in a single campaign under Enzo Maresca. While Haaland will snaffle a few here and there when supplied by Rayan Cherki, it might be more sensible to aim for that and let your Jack Hinshelwoods and the Gonzalo Garcias of this world fight it out for the Golden Boot.

9) Mamadou Sangare is the signing of the season In the summer of 2022, Chelsea bid £50m for Romeo Lavia. The Blues trying to sign a teenager is hardly noteworthy in itself, but the fact they offered so much to sign a player Southampton bought for £14m two months prior and had played five games for them was extraordinary.

If no preposterously rich cartel bullies try and tempt Brentford with a similar immediate markup on Sangare in this, the transfer window of Premier League-proven opulence, then it really should be asked precisely what we’re doing here.

There have been seven Premier League midfield transfers more expensive than the club-record deal which brought Sangare to the Bees this summer. Sandro Tonali was among a handful to cost multiple times as much, and the Italian was part of an engine room the Mali international nullified and overpowered with intelligent positioning, crisp passing and relentless energy.

A £39m bargain should not be a thing, especially when so unanimously crowned as such after a single game. But Jordan Henderson walked, pointed and shouted in that Brentford midfield so Sangare could run relentlessly and probably be sold for a nine-figure fee next year.

8) One of Newcastle or Aston Villa finish above Spurs Brentford beating Spurs at home certainly tracked. They were 9th and 17th respectively last season, and 10th and 17th the campaign before that. Perfectly normal result and performance levels, all things considered.

There is some necessary context, like one of those teams investing around £400m on their squad this summer, and poaching the other’s manager in the interim. But in hindsight that really only adds to the Spursiness of it all.

Roberto De Zerbi has fielded questions about the title, his “big ambitions” in north London and how Spurs needed to “act like a shark” in the transfer market. Then the brave new era started with something just as bad, if not worse than anything Ange Postecoglou, Thomas Frank or Igor Tudor served up.

There will be more signings and indeed has to be, with key players returning from the sidelines too. But that result was a reality check as to whether Spurs can turn around persistent underachievement in a single summer.

They will not yet unseat the two clubs who have shared a glass ceiling-smashing Champions League invitation over the past four years.

Newcastle, one of their primary victims over the past few months, looked far better – admittedly fuelled by the most potent hate imaginable – against Liverpool. And only a fool would predict what is to come for Aston Villa, who started last season on a five-game winless run but finished fourth with a European trophy, while qualifying for the Champions League after opening their campaign with a 5-1 thrashing a few years ago.

It is far easier to envisage Unai Emery turning that opening-day mess around than De Zerbi with Spurs.

7) Leeds will qualify for Europe A pre-season hot take rendered really quite lukewarm by the sheer volume of people predicting it: Leeds will qualify for Europe.

Nine Premier League clubs are taking part in continental competitions this season. It has become almost harder not to accidentally stumble into the Conference League. But the post-December transformation at Elland Road, combined with arguably the best and most focused summer of recruitment of any team in the division, only strengthened the sense that Leeds genuinely might be really good.

And victory away at Nottingham Forest solidified the belief that Leeds can maintain the consistent, belligerent excellence of the second half of last season, while falling on the right side of the margins often enough to push higher up the table.

Their players are just massive and there’s only so much you can do against that as an opponent.

6) Brighton win the Conference League – or qualify for the Champions League Perhaps they will one day maintain the time-honoured custom of the middling Premier League team entirely misinterpreting UEFA’s reason for creating a tertiary competition – to give clubs from lower-ranked member countries an opportunity to actually challenge in Europe – and instead just winning it because of the English top-flight’s trickle-down economics.

The removal of the qualifying backdoor which gave failing Champions League or Europa League teams another chance after already failing in one competition, combined with the sheer spending power, player recruitment and coaching acumen in the Premier League, has made finishing 8th or so probably the best roundabout route to a trophy there is.

Brighton have the squad, the manager and the setup to do it, as evidenced by their thrashing of a depleted Aston Villa side and early topping of the table.

The story was of how much Villa have shed this summer, but seasoned vulture feeders Brighton were without £75m of sold players, as well as Big Six targets Carlos Baleba and Yankuba Minteh, with Georginio Rutter up front.

There is a slight and potentially hilarious spanner in the works: Brighton are at 0-0 in a play-off with Tromso heading into Thursday’s second leg, and do not feel entirely beyond a cataclysmic implosion at the AmEx.

But even if that does happen and costs them a rare shot at silverware, it would free up enough of the schedule to make a Champions League push possible; none of the usual runners have put together particularly compelling cases thus far.

5) Liverpool games will involve the most goals They will neither score the most goals, nor concede the fewest. But come what May, games involving Liverpool will have witnessed the most net-breachings of any other side.

At least one more addition is expected to an attack which, if not especially coherent or often even good, is more than capable of conjuring a goal from somewhere. And does have a quarter of a billion pounds worth of creator and finisher to slot in when they finally arrive after joining 12 months ago.

That defence remains something of a shambles, and Alisson behind it is no longer of the requisite calibre to rescue them consistently and regularly.

Might as well ignore the midfield, seeing as Andoni Iraola and the transfer committee seem intent on doing that themselves.

For a bonus point: Everton will win more games than a score-draw-heavy Liverpool this season.

4) Arsenal will win at least two more trophies It will not do to simply predict that Arsenal defend their Premier League crown, even if they never have and Mikel Arteta is aiming to become only the fourth coach to ever do so.

The champions by a deservedly solid margin last season have strengthened further and look uninhibited, while question marks that simply do not exist in Arsenal’s reality hang over every conceivable challenger.

Their capture of the Community Shield handily allows for Quintuple talk to rage on well into the new year, too. Even including that, Arsenal have never won more than two pieces of silverware in a single post-war season. With the best coach and deepest squad in the country, if not continent, that ought to change soon.

3) Chelsea will be the closest challengers It is not often that a general consensus is reached over which side will definitely win the title, and who will absolutely finish second. But the opening weekend, in conjunction with events over the past few months, does appear to have separated two distinct pieces of wheat from some considerable chaff.

And there is a considerable gap between Arsenal and Chelsea too. But the Blues look primed to keep the Gunners honest enough until about November and ultimately reclaim the Put The Pressure On trophy, despite finishing double-figure points behind because Robert Sanchez exists.

2) One promoted team will stay up After consecutive seasons of the promoted teams going straight back down together, Sunderland and Leeds bucked a trend Burnley succumbed to with precious little resistance in 2025/26.

None of Coventry, Ipswich or Hull have the sort of infrastructure which might suggest they can emulate either side in staying up comfortably or even pushing much further beyond that – although neither did Sunderland or Leeds to be fair.

And the pool of susceptible Premier League teams governed sub-optimally enough to sleepwalk into relegation trouble is undeniably shallower.

But Hull look far more capable than initially envisaged, Ipswich have a handy side and a formerly successful firefighter at the helm, and Coventry are bound to get the basics right under Frank Lampard some weeks.

1) Michael Carrick won’t last the season It was the ease with which Hull defended a well-earned lead which surprised the most. The Tigers kept 11 clean sheets in the regular Championship campaign last season – fewer than nine clubs including 20th-placed Blackburn – but mid-blocked Manchester United into oblivion on the opening weekend.

“The easiest thing to do in preparation was using some of the Milan clips, and Leeds the week before played a back three too, so that helped us with players where the systems looked similar,” was the matter-of-fact assessment of Hull assistant Dean Holden, continuing a proud tradition of coaches publicly exposing Manchester United’s tactical shortcomings.

It extended beyond that, too, with Luke Shaw admitting “as a group, collectively, we could prepare better”. For the first game of a new season. Against Hull. An opponent Carrick has now faced seven times, more than any other in his nascent managerial career.

How damning that a Champions League team didn’t expect to have to defend set-pieces properly, that Manchester United still seem to have few answers beyond giving Bruno Fernandes the ball and hoping he can conjure something.

The second half of last season under Carrick was impressive but the caveats were clear: one game a week at most to get ready for, and a series of small wins to rack up after replacing one of the more baffling managers in recent Premier League history.

It turns out that what comes after that might be slightly tougher. Carrick would not be the first caretaker to struggle after being given the keys, but he really ought to be the last.