Flawed, frenetic yet somehow still glorious, the top flight returns and so do the fans. It looks like a four-horse title race and a cast of six will be fighting to avoid the drop
We go again. Thirty-three days after Gianluigi Donnarumma pawed away Bukayo Saka’s penalty at Wembley, exploding not just England’s fragile pretensions to supremacy but our fleeting illusions of national unity, here comes the riposte. The return of the Premier League to our multiple portable devices marks a return to English football not as we would dreamily like it to be, but as it really is: flawed and fierce, fuelled by personality and narrative and billionaires and gambling sponsorships, intensely tribal, consumed by petty arguments and – whisper it – the envy of the world.
This is, perhaps, no longer a fashionable sentiment to express in some quarters. To some, the Premier League – with its 24-hour media saturation, its faint whiff of exceptionalism, its greed, its bombast, its vast unaccountable power and entrenchment of financial inequality – represents everything wrong with the sport. Moreover, there are times – say, while watching Brighton 0 Fulham 0, or yet another feted but fetid early-season stalemate between two title contenders – when the Premier League’s rolling hype machine feels as much curse as blessing.