Will clubs have much of a pre-season? Goal takes a look at the dates and which teams will be involved as English football looks to rebuild in the aftermath of the pandemic.
The Premier League start date is Saturday September The date was confirmed on July The Daily Mirror reported that the Football Association favoured an August start date, a position that is understood to have been influenced by the fact that England's UEFA Nations League fixtures against Iceland and Denmark are scheduled for September 5 and 8 respectively.
However, Premier League clubs themselves were reportedly more keen on the September start date and it is understandable given that their players will have just played out a gruelling end to the season. In normal circumstances, teams are granted a three-month break from competitive action, with the league season usually concluding in May and starting up again in August. Pre-season, the period when players hone their match fitness, tends to kick off around a month before the first competitive games, but that will be impossible ahead of the season.
At the beginning of the season, they play once a week, on Saturday or Sunday. Not to complicate things—. But as we get deeper into the season, there are cup competitions, like the FA Cup, which is the oldest knockout competition of any sport in the world.
They resume the Premier League the next week. Deeper in the season, there are midweek games because the schedule gets so congested. Ultimately, the top teams end up playing in a number of competitions because they keep winning.
But the basic rule of thumb is that you play once a week on Saturday or Sunday? NBC Sports and the Peacock app. There are four time slots on Saturdays. There's one at am, a few at 10am, another one at pm, and one at pm. The times are a little different on Sunday.
For a parent of young kids, on a Saturday morning is an ideal time. That's a big part of the American fan base, one which NBC highlights: it is a family experience, especially for people with young kids, because they're up early anyway. For me, it's a great way to start the weekend. I wake up Saturday morning and put on a game with my coffee.
I might be watching on and off. I might be really focused on it. But it's a companion as you start your weekend. They don't have playoffs in the Premier League. You get three points for a win, one for a draw, none for the loss. At the end of the season, it's just the league table, which is the equivalent of standings at the end of the regular season. It's just your excellence over the course of the regular season. The cup competitions, which are separate, are usually knock-out competitions in the vein of an NCAA tournament, in the vein of the NFL playoffs, which is: you lose, you go home.
There is something deliciously American about being a wild card team that can get into a playoff and have the same opportunity as the best team in the league. In other words, as long as you're good enough to enter the playoffs, anything can happen. It's sad to me that the Premier League doesn't have that sort of thing. There are many ways in which we tend to think of Europe as more interested in egalitarianism and leveling the playing field in terms of economics, but it's actually very much the opposite in European soccer in that it's a purely capitalist enterprise where the big teams have more money, so they have more money to spend on players.
There is no salary cap. The financial power of the big clubs becomes a self-perpetuating prophecy in a way that it just doesn't happen with, say, the New York Yankees, despite their financial power in U. You can book it that Manchester City will be one of the top three teams next season, just because they have the financial power. They have two teams' worth of top players, whereas the small teams, they can't operate that way, and there's no draft for them to pick first and get the best player.
The cup competitions are the exception. They could win and go to the next round and have a fairytale story. But in the league, it's very much a pitched battle. It's a war over 38 games where having a large army that is highly capable and organized is usually what ends up leading to victory.
Have there been Cinderella stories in the regular Premier League? Leicester City, which is not traditionally one of the biggest clubs in England, did win the Premier League in , which was a shock. There's a dog-eat-dog element to this, beyond just the financial, in that you have to earn a place in the Premier League. The three worst teams in the league every season are thrown out of the Premier League, and they have to go down into the Championship where there's much less TV money, it's much harder to recruit top players, it's very hard to get back into the Premier League.
And then they're replaced by the three top teams in the Championship every season. This fosters a level of necessary competition at both ends of the table. There's no Cleveland Browns going 15 years and wallowing in mediocrity, because they would be two or three levels down in the English tier system of leagues, which has happened to clubs.
It intertwines how the decay of Sunderland as a former shipbuilding community—that is, the hollowing out of this post-industrial city—is tied to the decline of the soccer club, which has a 50, seat stadium, and is now in the third division, called League One which is a perplexing name. They're basically in the wilderness. They are struggling to even get out of that league and they're nowhere close to getting back to the Premier League. That's what happens if you mismanage your club financially, if you have a couple bad seasons.
There are consequences. I'm a New York Knicks fan. There are many seasons in which we probably should have been relegated from the NBA, if only to change the behavior of ownership or at the executive level. I started following the League pretty intensely in It didn't feel fair for me to become a Manchester United fan.
It just felt like—I was already a Yankee fan. It felt like the easiest road possible. At that time, Arsenal were coming off a golden era in their history. The other team that was starting to rise at that time was Chelsea, but they were fueled by, basically, the money of a Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, who took a middling London club, despite its location in a very posh area, and turned them overnight into a contender. For me, Arsenal just seemed like a club with a rich tradition.
They're one of the oldest clubs in England, and they had this revolutionary manager named Herbert Chapman in the s and '30s, who introduced jersey numbers in soccer. I was always going to pick a London team because that's one of my favorite cities in the world. If you're looking for a top team that's competing to win the title, I would recommend Liverpool. They're good, but they don't have some of the same baggage as some of the other top teams.
He talks about this concept of nation-washing, or football-washing, in which Manchester City was bought by the royal family of Abu Dhabi, basically as a cultural olive branch to the western world in which they tried to remake their image as a patron of the art of soccer. And they have spent hundreds of millions of pounds towards that aim and have created a very good product on the field.
But there's some baggage that comes with that, and there's some baggage that comes with supporting Chelsea, which is owned by one of Vladimir Putin's right-hand men.
If you're looking for one of the very top teams, I would never recommend Arsenal, as much as I love them. Liverpool plays in their original stadium, Anfield. It speaks to the heritage of Liverpool fandom where they call themselves Scousers, and they've always considered themselves separate from the rest of England. Man Utd have had the most success with 13 titles in the 28 seasons so far. Arsene Wenger's Arsenal are the only side to have gone the entire Premier League campaign unbeaten.
For more Premier League facts and figures, click here. The unlikely title triumph came a season after the Foxes avoided relegation by only six points. Close Advert.
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