5 Bold Premier League Preseason Predictions, Revisited
Nobody was more wronged by my preseason expectations than likely Player of the Year and Ballon d'Or finalist Erling Haaland
Way back in August, with the dawn of a new Premier League season within us, I offered 5 bold (and I do mean BOLD) takes for how the 2022-23 season would transpire. Time has positively flown, and here we are with yet another season in the rearview mirror. As we tie a bow on 9 months of thrilling football-- culminating in a Decision Day one week ago that saw Manchester City celebrate their third consecutive title, Arsenal and Newcastle celebrate their return to the Champions League, Brighton celebrate clinching their first-ever European tournament play and Southampton, Leeds and 2015-16 champions Leicester mourn their relegation down to the Championship --I thought it might be fitting to look back at how those projections held up. I was eager to wash out the taste of finishing 68/130 on the season for my weekly predictions. That's good enough for just over 50%, which is not an ideal number if you're trying to convince people you know what you're talking about.
Anyways, before we delve into how horribly off-base I was, let me remind you that the title of the original piece foreshadowed the high probability that I look foolish come June. With that in mind, these are 5 things I predicted would transpire, in order of what I expected the least to most foolhardy prophesies would be:
1. Manchester City will 3-peat.
The result: Nailed it!
This was my safest bet, to be fair, and it wasn't particularly audacious to predict that the winners of 4 of the last 5 Premier League titles would win again, especially after making the biggest signing of the offseason. Still, as I said all the way back in August, "if going back-to-back is already hard, going back-to-back-to-back is that much harder." (Case in point, it had only been done twice in the Premier League era, and not in the last 14 years.) Plus, the defending champions were undergoing a rare, small-but-significant changing of the guard, with familiar faces like Raheem Sterling. Gabriel Jesus, Fernandinho and Oleksandr Zinchenko making way for the new wave of talent like Erling Haaland, Julian Alvarez and Kalvin Phillips. All of this may explain why they actually never held the league lead until the last month of the season. But in truth, my confidence that City would ultimately emerge the victors never wavered. Don't believe me? I suppose you weren't privy to my texts to friends throughout the season that stated it, but you can reference my midseason check-in back at the turn of the new year, when Arsenal were still 7 points clear at the top of the table: "While I definitely did not see Arsenal in 1st, [and] City several points back. . . I do still feel fairly confident that City can win the league. The only season since Guardiola's second year with the club in which Man City haven't won was in 2019-20, when Liverpool essentially had the race wrapped up by December. Gun to my head, I'm still betting on the Cityzens to take the trophy."
2. Darwin Núñez will outscore Erling Haaland.
The result: LOL. This might be the most wrong anyone has ever been about anything.
Not much more needs to be said about this prediction, that I didn't already say at my midseason review. By that point, it had already become immensely clear that this take would age incredibly poorly. As a Liverpool fan, I feel defensive about Darwin Núñez, and I am happy to see that most of toxic football Twitter's obsession with labeling him a flop died down as he ended up with a solid, if inconsistent and unspectacular, first season with the Reds, finishing as the team's second-leading scorer. However, if he only narrowly underperformed my expectations as a goalscorer, Erling Haaland shattered those expectations. One defense I will make for myself is that I was not alone in my prediction that some combination of a change in Man City's system, a step up in competition level, and/or injury issues may cause the Norwegian star to have a more turbulent start to his Manchester tenure than expected. Still, Haaland not only bested his fellow big-money summer signing Núñez by a whopping 26 goals, he also took home the Golden Boot award, and oh yeah, broke the single-season Premier League goalscoring record. Sooooo, safe to say my second-"safest" prediction was slightly off.
3. Neither Chelsea nor Manchester United will make the Top 4.
The result: Partial credit?
I was positively prescient with my Chelsea skepticism, but United slightly outperformed my expectations. Despite a jaw-dropping amount of money poured into splashy signings, and not one, not two, but three managerial changes, Chelsea had a shocker of a season, ultimately finishing 12th place in the league (their worst season in 30 years), and exiting both domestic cups and the Champions League before the quarterfinals. I had my doubts about the Blues, and they proved them right and then some. Manchester United, however, ended a topsy-turvy season in 3rd place, rendering my full prediction and skepticism about them slightly off-base. The Red Devils started the year miserably, but experienced a sharp uptick in form last Fall under new manager Erik Ten Hag, so much so that all of a sudden their fans began dreaming of a 'quadruple' race the way their rivals Liverpool had last season. They secured the first trophy in a League Cup Final win over Newcastle, but then began to sputter, exiting the Europa League at the quarterfinal stage, and slipping comprehensively out of the Premier League title race. Though they did end up with only the one trophy, however, they regained enough form down the stretch to keep Newcastle and Liverpool at bay and secure a spot in next season's Champions League. Now, on aggregate, I was much more right about Chelsea than I was wrong about Man United, but I will forgive you if you don't feel up to awarding points that way.
4. Mohamed Salah will tie Thierry Henry's record by winning his 4th Golden Boot.
The result: Not quite as wrong as #2, but very wholly wrong.
The inaccuracy of this prediction has a lot more to do with who won the Golden Boot race than it does Mohamed Salah himself. In a sign of just how insanely good the legendary Salah is, many (Liverpool fans and rivals and pundits alike) agree that this was probably his worst season since joining the Reds. Yet, the Egyptian still finished 4th in the Golden Boot race with 19 goals, added 12 assists in the league for good measure, and was responsible for more goals in all competitions this season than every player in the world except for Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé, who are likely your 1st- and 2nd-place finishers in this year's Ballon d'Or. All that being said... yeah. He did not in fact win his fourth Golden Boot, on behalf of the record-setting year by Erling Haaland, who nearly doubled-up Salah's goal tally this season in the process of breaking his league goalscoring record from 2017-18.
5. Fulham will finish last place.
This was objectively a very bold take, as predicting the last-place finisher is usually much harder than predicting the champions, and even the Top 4 finishers. And, I ended up being somewhat closer on this one than it looked for most of the year that I would be; Fulham lost a lot of steam down the stretch and finished in 10th place, just 5 wins clear of the relegation zone. That said, a terrific first 6 months of the season under Marco Silva saw last year's Championship-winning side acclimate to life in the Premier League surprisingly well. The Cottagers not only comfortably avoided last place, they spent the whole season well north of the drop zone completely.
In the end, my bold preseason predictions only yielded one dead-on projection! If you're feeling generous, you could say I got 1.5/5, and if you're feeling really generous, you could argue I basically batted about 40%. But regardless of how much credit you want to give me for my joint Chelsea-Manchester United prophecy, between the comfortable misses on all things Erling Haaland and Fulham, I really only nailed the not-so-hot take that Manchester City would win again. That form is not just bad, that's arguably relegation zone bad. Oh well. In the words of all my fellow Liverpool fans, next year is our year!
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