5 Bold Premier League Preseason Predictions, Revisited

Manchester City lifting the trophy at season's end is becoming an annually safe bet

Way back in August , with the dawn of a new Premier League season within us, I offered 5 bold takes for how the 2023-24 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 two weeks ago that saw Manchester City celebrate their fourth consecutive title, Liverpool cap off its successful season with an emotional farewell to their beloved manager, Aston Villa celebrate clinching their return to the Champions League after 40 years away, and Luton Town, Burnley and Sheffield United mourn their immediate relegation down to the Championship --I thought it might be fitting to look back at how those projections held up. Buoyed by my 5.5/5 final week of season predictions, I was eager to see if my full-season projections could mirror my most successful year yet of weekly projections (97.5/150, good enough for 65%, a 12% improvement from last season, but who's counting?).

Anyways, before we delve into how prescient or 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 4-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 5 of the last 6 Premier League titles including the last 3 would win again, especially given they are one of the wealthiest professional clubs in the world. Still, as I pointed out all the way back in August, a 'four-peat' had never been done in Premier League history. Plus, despite the copious wealth at City's disposal, there were no 'Erling Haaland' level major summer signings, and there were the not insignificant matters of Ilkay Gündoğan, Riyad Mahrez and Aymeric Laporte all departing. Throw in injuries to some major players throughout the season, and you can see why their title charge was in serious doubt until the final month or so. The reigning champs actually led the league for less days than both runners-up Arsenal and 3rd-place Liverpool, but closed the year on a 10-match winning streak to take a 5th straight title. Because of course they did. That's how these things go.

2. Six managers will be sacked by Christmas.

The result: Halfway there, but not quite.

If I were to be happy to get any of these predictions wrong, this one would rank up there, as I tire of the trend of hiring and firing managers recklessly simply for not producing results right away. I get it's a cutthroat business, especially when relegation is at hand, but it's absurd to expect a manager to win over all players and implement their gameplan immediately. So when the season kicked off with Wolverhampton dismissing Julen Lopetegui, I rolled my eyes and figured we were in for another crazy carousel season. I was wrong! Fortunately for the good of the game, but unfortunately for my predictions, only three more sackings would take place over the course of the season, with Nottingham Forest's Steve Cooper and Sheffield United's Paul Heckingbottom the only other pre-Christmas casualties.

3. We will have a first-time Golden Boot winner.

The result: Whoops.

For a while, this prediction looked promising, as Harry Kane waltzed off to Bayern Munich just before the season, Erling Haaland dealt with an extended injury absence, and Mo Salah's goalscoring form hit a snag in the second half of the season. But then, coinciding with his team's own imperial march, Haaland turned on the jets down the season stretch, returning from injury with a vengeance to clinch his 2nd consecutive Premier League Golden Boot with 29 goals. The big Norwegian bagged a whopping 9 goals in his last 6 matches, 6 of them in the last 3, to put some distance between himself and a crop of would-be first-timers, such as his teammate Phil Foden, Chelsea's Cole Palmer, and Newcastle's Alexander Isak.

4. Half of last season's Top 4 will not make the Top 4 this season.

The result: Nailed it again!

I'll confess- though this one of my bolder predictions at the season's start, it was the one I actually felt the most confident about. I was confident City would be back, obviously, but wasn't yet a believer in Arsenal, and was an enormous skeptic in both Manchester United and Newcastle's abilities to replicate last season's success. Arsenal may have done their part in winning me over, taking the title race to the last day, but the latter two proved my hesitancy wrong and then some, stumbling to a 7th and 8th place, United's worst-ever Premier League finish. Part of my preseason confidence also rested in faith that Jürgen Klopp's Liverpool would fully bounce back from their disappointing 5th-place finish last year, and that faith was rewarded. Now, full disclosure? No way did I see Aston Villa being the 4th-placed team to knock the others off their perch this year. But hey, a non-specific prediction's all I made, baby, and that non-team-specific prediction was right.

5. All 3 newly-promoted teams will be relegated back down.

The result: Three for three!!

This was objectively a very bold take, as predicting the last-place finisher is often itself much harder than predicting the champions-- especially in this era of Manchester City -- let alone trying to predict all 3. Besides, the specific prediction of the three new promotees floundering had both precedent and expectation working against me: this phenomenon had happened only one other time in top-flight English history, 26 years ago in the 1997-98 season. And most pundits identified several other weaker Premier League teams ripe for the picking than Sheffield United and especially Burnley, who were fresh off a record-setting season in the Championship. But perhaps none of my preseason analysis aged as well as my theorizing about this exact issue, and one passage in particular tastes like a fine wine: "I don't think Sheffield nor certainly Luton Town have the firepower to stay up at this level. And though Kompany has been incredibly impressive in the start to his tenure as Burnley manager, this radical step up in competition (and ensuing slew of personnel changes) might be asking a lot of a relatively young coach." All true; as it turned out, only lowly Luton actually looked like they may have the gumption to stay up, but despite the Hatter's impressive ability to punch above their weight, they joined their fellow recent promotees in going back down to the Championship, and in fact, were it not for the implemented points deductions against Everton and Nottingham Forest, it may not have even been very close.

In the end, my bold preseason predictions only yielded one total miss! If you're feeling generous, you could say I got 3.5/5, and if you're feeling like, you know, you want to be accurate, I suppose you could say I went 3/5. Smh.

The good news is, regardless of your desired level of generosity, completely scoring on three out of the five, including two of the bolder predictions is a serious improvement from the last couple years wherein I was only good for 1 fully accurate take, so I will happily accept it! Just like my beloved Liverpool this past season, we are so back!!