Possession numbers, the intense physicality and the pure rhythm of games all felt noticeably new as the season began
There has been something oddly narcotic and moreish about the drip-drip of fresh Pep Guardiola content either side of the start of the new Premier League season. Eras come and go. Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But four-part Amazon Prime documentaries make angels of us all.
So we have continued to feast on the Pep-at-City visuals: dead jeopardy, reheated beefs, the uplifting team talks of a departed manager to the departed players of a departed team, and moments that often feel far more gripping than the daily churn of what we must, out of habit, call the real world.
The thought occurred watching all this: has the Premier League found its Tupac? Is Pep just going to keep on doing this, dropping new material, fresh hits, posthumous platinum albums? A bald, thin charismatic man who keeps on releasing his lost tapes. We have exactly the thing, sir. Is he even actually dead?
Probably this won’t happen. But a profound absence is still a profound presence at moments like these. The ghosts continue to pull the strings. This weekend was the first of the new Premier League season. More significantly, it was also the first of the post-Pep era.
This been a genuine era, 10 years in the game and an entire tactical culture shift in the making. Unsurprisingly, there was an odd sense of lightness across those nine fixtures on Friday through to Sunday, of old bonds cast aside, even a little giddiness. Suddenly dad isn’t home. The chair by the door is empty. Let’s all just rip it up a bit, shall we?
This relies on a slightly out-of-date notion of what Guardiola-ism became in its later years. But the fact is, something interesting did happen in those Friday-to-Sunday games. Think of pure Pep-ball and what are you seeing? Possession. Cold, high-craft control. This is a coach who famously said: “My desire is to have 100% possession,” after a 5-1 thrashing of Arsenal in Munich during which Thiago Alcântara complete 122 passes.
Admittedly, Guardiola was speaking out of frustration that day, talking more about not losing the ball at key moments, possession as defence. But these ideas did have a profound mimetic effect in England. During Guardiola’s decade at Manchester City the team that had the least possession in the Premier League would win, on average, only 30-35% of games, a figure that fell as low as 28% in 2021–22, but which had begun to pick up in the last two seasons as even City’s own version of Pep-ball became more mixed and next-gen.
But this weekend the opposite thing happened. In six of nine games played from Friday to Sunday one team took significantly more possession while failing to win. Liverpool had 60% possession plus 27 shots but still just scrambled a draw and looked, frankly, pretty wild. Manchester United had 71% possession and were well beaten by Hull. Tottenham had 60 % possession and lost 3-0. Nottingham Forest had 56% and lost. Sunderland had 62%, Crystal Palace 58%, and both lost.
There were three exceptions to this, all outliers in their own way. Manchester City had 66% possession and won at home against Bournemouth, but spent 84 minutes looking like they were losing. Brighton had 73% possession and beat an Aston Villa team that had made a collective decision to play with their eyes closed and their legs on the wrong way round. Arsenal dominated every metric against a promoted Coventry team that looked, frankly, a little spooked by their first sight of that fresh Everest.
So, a tiny sample size. It may mean absolutely nothing. It could get flipped on its head before we hit September. Also, it is important to note that pure possession stats have rarely dictated with any certainty who will win a game. The top teams always tend to have most of the ball, thus skewing the overall stats.
Otherwise, possession has been a far less reliable guide to victory than, say, expected goals, which speaks clearly to the effectiveness of a system. Whereas simply keeping the ball is often a sign of the opposite of good health, of football as a collective anxiety attack, out there playing with your worry beads, tramping a horseshoe shape into the grass while your opponents mass for the decisive blitzkrieg.
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But it wasn’t just the possession numbers that were notable this weekend. The rhythms of the matches were striking. All three Sunday games featured nine or 10 substitutes in the last 40 minutes or so and a sense of two separate halves, of finishers brought into play, of a broken, episodic tactical to-and-fro in response to shifts in the scoreline and the flow. The World Cup also had that pattern. Maybe this is what football is now.
Mainly there was a striking level of targeted physicality, pre-rehearsed blitz-transitions, groups of players suddenly running forward quickly in formation at certain triggering events. Anthony Elanga’s opener for Newcastle captured this best: 12 seconds, two passes, 70 metres covered in a single perfectly straight line, no off the cuff inventions or what you might call conventional “creativity”, but a perfect moment of planned collective intelligence and breathtaking athleticism.