The juggernaut that never goes away

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You will, in all likelihood, have heard the sentence already. You will certainly hear it over and over again Saturday and Sunday, delivered by every pearly toothed host and every red-faced pundit and every eager-voiced commentator. The Premier League, they will say, is back.

This is not true, of course. It is an anachronism, a throwback to the days when soccer had the common decency to take the summer off and hand centre stage over to other sports for a while. The Premier League – all club soccer, in fact – cannot be back because it never really goes away.

Chelsea spent the Olympics signing vast quantities of South American teenagers for reasons that remain moderately opaque. Several of its domestic and European rivals used the European Championship and the Copa América as the perfect cover for hiring and firing sundry, essentially interchangeable managers.

Club soccer is a juggernaut, and the thing about juggernauts is that they do not stop rolling. They do not rest up for a few weeks, take the summer off, have a bit of a rest. That sense of omnipresence is what has turned soccer into less of a pastime and more of a lifestyle choice, a strikingly lucrative cultural touchstone.

And yet those few days before a new campaign begins do somehow feel like the start of a different day. No matter how hard-boiled, how cynical, how self-aware an observer you have become, there is something about the prospect of the new season – new jerseys being worn and new signings being fielded in new stadiums – that captures the imagination.

That we all know how it will play out makes precious little difference. Manchester City – legal complications notwithstanding – will win the Premier League. Arsenal will finish a plucky but ultimately quite distant second. Madrid or Manchester will be home to the Champions League trophy.

There will be championships in all but one of Munich, Milan, Paris and Madrid. Erling Haaland will score a lot of goals. Chelsea and/or Manchester United will fire a manager. Lots of people will complain about the precise meaning of “clear and obvious,” even though those words have not been relevant for several years.

That none of this will diminish the compulsion to follow along is because of soccer’s other great trick: its ability, no matter how predetermined the destination, to find an endless array of new and inventive ways to get there.

And, in that fading, warm glow of preseason optimism, it feels more apposite to focus on that than the careworn and the predictable. And so, just as it all begins, here are stories that might, just might, offer a twist to an otherwise distinctly familiar tale.

Okay, okay, let’s do the court case

Nobody should be under any illusions that the move by the Premier League to effectively take its perennial champion, Manchester City, to court on 115 charges of cheating – let’s put it simply – is a good thing for the competition. There is no positive outcome for the league. If it wins, then the last decade or so of its existence has to be reconsidered. If it loses, its authority to police its members is effectively shot.

(The likelihood is, of course, that Manchester City’s case will be heard in September, its verdict delivered in January, and any subsequent appeals – from both sides – will run on until the Earth finally collapses into the sun, which by that stage might be a blessed relief.)

The solace is scant, and slippery, and perhaps even a stretch, but it is there nonetheless. The other threat that City poses to the Premier League is that its excellence, coupled with its financial prowess, makes the league a little dull. This is a problem for a competition that has always both prided and sold itself on its competitiveness.

The court case, though, introduces the possibility that Manchester City will actually be interesting this season: It is hard to think of another occasion in which a group of players have been tasked with both excelling and proving that all they have achieved is legitimate. And once that is over, there is the thorny issue of whether manager Pep Guardiola will sign a new contract. There is a faint feeling that perhaps an era is drawing to a close.

The end of the Marseille malaise

More than any other major league, France is in desperate need of a new story to tell. The league is shrivelling in the shadow cast by Paris Saint-Germain, and despite its clever marketing strategy as the “league of talents,” it has spent much of the year struggling to find anyone willing to pay to broadcast the latest iteration of PSG’s inevitable procession to the title.

That is a shame, because there is one genuinely interesting side in Ligue 1 this year: Olympique de Marseille. Predicting that Marseille might do well is of course a fool’s errand; no team in Europe is more consistent in finding ways to shoot itself in the foot. But the signs are encouraging: a run to the semi-finals of the Europa League last year, and now the appointment of Roberto De Zerbi, a man who was, until quite recently, one of the most coveted coaches in Europe.

Marseille is most likely not the sort of job De Zerbi thought he might get when he decided the time was right to leave Brighton: Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea all seemed more fitting next steps. That he has ended up at the Stade Velodrome, though, should be a fillip not just to Marseille but to France as a whole. If his team can even create the illusion of a challenge for PSG, it would be of enormous benefit to the league.