Premier League 2026/27: the season of the great reset
The 2026/27 Premier League begins on Friday 21 August with a fixture that sums up the whole season: Arsenal, champions at last, against Coventry City, back in the top flight after twenty-five years away. It starts a week later than usual, to leave 33 days between the World Cup final and the first whistle.
The champions who ended twenty-two years
Arsenal closed 2025/26 on 85 points, seven clear of Manchester City, with a game to spare. It was their first title since 2004, the Invincibles season, and now they face something they have not managed since: defending one. David Raya took the Golden Glove with 19 clean sheets, his third in a row.
Behind them came City on 78, a third-placed Manchester United on 71 who returned to the Champions League with Michael Carrick confirmed in the job, Aston Villa fourth on 65 — who also won the Europa League, beating Freiburg 3-0 in Istanbul for their first European trophy since the 1982 European Cup — and Liverpool fifth on 60.
Ten new dugouts
The remarkable thing about this summer is not the transfers, it is the managers. Pep Guardiola left Manchester City after ten years and Enzo Maresca replaces him. Xabi Alonso arrives at Chelsea, a club that used three different head coaches in a single season. Arne Slot was sacked at Liverpool and Andoni Iraola takes over, which in turn opened the Bournemouth job for Marco Rose.
- Manchester City: Guardiola → Enzo Maresca
- Chelsea: three managers in 2025/26 → Xabi Alonso
- Liverpool: Slot sacked → Andoni Iraola
- Newcastle: Eddie Howe left in late July → Matthias Jaissle, whose first match is at home to Liverpool
- Crystal Palace → Pierre Sage · Nottingham Forest → Oliver Glasner · Fulham → Álvaro Arbeloa
Newcastle's is the most precarious. They lost Anthony Gordon to Barcelona for £69.3m, endured a difficult window and then lost their manager barely three weeks before the opening day. Jaissle's introduction to English football is Liverpool at St James' Park.
A midfielders' market
English clubs have spent over a billion pounds this summer and the pattern is unmistakable: central midfield is this window's premium asset. Morgan Rogers moved from Aston Villa to Chelsea for £117m, Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest to City for £116m and Sandro Tonali from Newcastle to Tottenham for up to £100m, a club record.
And one enormous absence. Mohamed Salah left Liverpool on 1 July after his contract was terminated a year early, ending nine seasons at Anfield. He remains without a club. That is worth stating precisely, because the window does not shut until 1 September and everything above can still move.
The numbers 2025/26 left behind
Erling Haaland won the Golden Boot with 27 goals, in a season his club finished second. Bruno Fernandes recorded 21 assists, an all-time Premier League record, passing Thierry Henry's 20 in 2002/03 and Kevin De Bruyne's 20 in 2019/20. And Everton completed their first year at the Hill Dickinson Stadium, 52,888 seats on the banks of the Mersey after 133 years at Goodison Park.
These are worth keeping in mind when you simulate: last season's top scorer and top creator are both still in the division, and neither plays for the champions.
New spending rules
PSR is gone, replaced this season by the Squad Cost Ratio: squad costs — wages, amortised transfer fees, agent fees — cannot exceed 85% of football revenue, with a 115% ceiling and thirty points of extra headroom for newly promoted clubs. The real change is the policing. Instead of assessing losses over three years in arrears, the league now monitors in-season, with a checkpoint each March.
Who starts as favourite
The bookmakers had Arsenal clearly ahead, City second, and Liverpool and United on the next rung. Those prices date from late May, before Howe's exit and most of the transfer business, so read them as an old photograph rather than a forecast.
England again has five Champions League clubs, a second successive year of the coefficient berth: Arsenal, City, United, Villa and Liverpool. Bournemouth make their first European appearance in the club's history, newly promoted Sunderland return to Europe for the first time since 1973, and Crystal Palace are in the Europa League too: the Conference League winner is promoted into it and cannot defend the title.
"A champion defending for the first time in twenty-two years, the manager of the decade gone from the country, and ten new dugouts: few Premier League seasons have opened with this many questions."
The only way to answer them before August is to play them.
- Simulate all 38 matchweeks of the 2026/27 Premier League and build your final table.
- Change any result and watch the European places and the relegation zone rearrange.
- Use the supercomputer to see each club's title probability.
- Share your final table as an image once you have it.
"Open the Premier League simulator and decide for yourself whether Arsenal go back-to-back."