The new season is upon us and, typically, the players we all get excited about are the new arrivals. There’s nothing quite as intoxicating as the unknown and you’re able to project your own sense of optimism onto a player you don’t know much about: they could be everything your team has been missing.
But what of the players that are already here? Those who also carry with them a sense of the unknown, who come into 2024-25 after a tricky 2023-24? Will these players of great promise and, in some cases, absolutely proven ability bounce back and show us their worth? Or was last season the beginning of the end and the promise will not be fulfilled?
Here are 10 players to re-watch this Premier League season…
You always keep your eye out for potential new stars at international tournaments, even in this age when it’s very hard for a player to go completely under the radar. However, during the Netherlands games at Euro 2024, you were often struck by their thrusting, direct, skilful left-winger and wondered whether he could do a job in the Premier League.
That left-winger was of course Cody Gakpo, but it was easy to mistake him for someone new given he was a relatively peripheral figure at Liverpool last season. He never had what you would call a ‘run’ in the team (his longest streak of Premier League starts was four, at the end of the season) and when he did play it was rarely on the left.
In fact, he only started one league game on the left of a front three, most of his time coming through the middle, with Luis Diaz generally starting from the flank. As the graphic above shows, he is more productive when coming off the left, so you wonder whether Arne Slot — who will have seen him at closer quarters in the Eredivisie, where he did play wide more often — will put him there more often.
The news that Erik ten Hag was staying at Manchester United looked like an extremely adverse development for Jadon Sancho: there seemed to be no way back for the winger after his falling out with the manager last season. But with relatively little fuss, the two apparently met in the summer, bygones were deemed bygones, everyone shook hands and the situation was resolved in a pleasingly grown-up manner.
Now that Sancho is back in the fold, where will he play? One thing United are not short of is wide options: there’s Amad, Marcus Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho and Antony, plus Joshua Zirkzee can play anywhere across the front line. Could he play through the middle? Rasmus Hojlund, Zirkzee and Rashford are more proven options there. Restoring his personal relationship with Ten Hag was one thing, but claiming a spot in the first team might be even tougher.
You could include about half the Chelsea squad in this list, but for the sake of brevity and variety, we’ll stick with one. Moises Caicedo definitely improved towards the back end of last season, peaking with that extraordinary goal from halfway in the final game, but for most of the season, he was nowhere near the player Chelsea thought they were buying.
The above chart shows the difference in his output between his last season on the south coast and his first at Stamford Bridge. The numbers tell you a couple of things: that he was worse at basically everything after Chelsea spent north of £100million on him, but also that he is capable of so much better.
Will having a season under his belt, playing for a new manager, with the pressure of that transfer fee slightly further away, mean he will be closer to 2022-23 than 2023-24 in 2024-25?
The word is that Jack Grealish is back on it after a lacklustre season that not only saw him become a peripheral player at Manchester City but miss out on England’s Euro 2024 squad. The end of last term was so bad that he was barely even considered for selection, but over the summer he appears to have reset himself and is back to go again.
“From what I’ve seen so far, one week here and in pre-season on tour, I love it,” Pep Guardiola said recently. The City manager tends to be fairly ruthless with his selection: despite Jeremy Doku having a strong first season and there being a plethora of other wide options in the City squad, Grealish will be back as a key man again if his pre-season work continues.
The accepted general wisdom is that Arsenal won’t win the Premier League until they sign an elite centre-forward, but that’s not entirely true, as long as they get goals from other sources. Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz and Leandro Trossard kept up their end of that deal last season, all bettering the previous season’s tally, but Gabriel Martinelli only scored six times and was on the bench more often than not, post-March at least.
The chart above indicates that his underlying numbers haven’t changed enormously in the past few seasons: he’s basically getting chances at the same rate and taking more or less the same number of shots, the difference being that last season he didn’t turn as many of those shots into goals as before. Arsenal will be Manchester City’s main challengers again, so if Martinelli returns to the form of a couple of seasons ago, it will be a massive help in overhauling the behemoths.
Ivan Toney is still at Brentford, which feels weird and rather unexpected. This might change before the end of the transfer window, but there aren’t too many obvious landing spots for him — certainly if he wants a significant step up and is to stay in England.
While his cameos at Euro 2024 were certainly impressive, his domestic season after returning from his gambling suspension was pretty odd: he scored in four of his first five games back but then didn’t find the net in the remaining 12 games. Has that put teams off? Are they just waiting for him to be a free agent next summer? It’s difficult to tell, but it’s been a strange summer for a player who was pretty openly talking about moving for most of last season.
Given the circumstances, it feels like the job Sean Dyche did last season hasn’t been fully appreciated: taking a club with a whacking great points deduction who were also going through ownership-related uncertainty to comfortable safety was remarkable enough. That he essentially did it without a functioning centre-forward is even more so.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin looks like the sort of striker you’d design in a lab, but the perfect theory malfunctioned last season: he scored seven goals in 26 games, which isn’t horrendous on the face of things, but two of those were penalties and he underperformed his xG more than anyone else in the Premier League. Will that turn out to be just a statistical quirk or a sign of something slightly more serious?
Speaking of footballers designed in a lab, Evan Ferguson looks like what would happen if you asked a crazed scientist to build you an Alan Shearer for the TikTok generation. Big, strong, powerful shot, a good touch: basically perfect, in theory. However, this will be Ferguson’s third season in the Brighton first team and while the first (10 goals in 25 appearances) suggested the eye test was quite right and he could be the Premier League’s next great centre-forward, the second (six goals in 36 appearances) gave cause to wonder a little more.
Ferguson won’t be 20 until October, so absolutely nobody is panicking, and the start and end of his 2023-24 campaign were disrupted by injuries. He might not be fit enough for the early weeks of the season, but when he is ready, it will be fascinating to see how he fares under Fabian Hurzeler.
This week, Ange Postecoglou ruled out the possibility of using Dejan Kulusevski as a central forward, either as a classic No 9 or a false one. Having just signed Dominic Solanke and with Richarlison and Son Heung-min as options there, too, that was no surprise. The question this raised is: where does Kulusevski fit?
For most of the first year he was at Spurs, his role was firmly on the right flank, but towards the end of last season, he was all over the place: on the right, on the left, in midfield, as a No 10.
That uncertainty might increase this season, with Solanke’s arrival presumably meaning Son will move permanently back to the left and youngsters Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall providing more options in midfield. Does he need to pin down a definitive position? Is he going to be Tottenham’s attacking Swiss Army Knife, slotting in wherever is required? Could he take James Maddison’s place after his indifferent form after returning from injury?
Nottingham Forest had been chasing Ibrahim Sangare for a long time, so when they eventually secured his signing for a club record £30million last summer, hopes were high. However, Sangare’s first season at Forest started badly, tailed off a little in the middle and the less said about the ending the better.
He looked uncertain initially, the rapid and decisive forward passing that Forest thought they were getting decidedly absent. Then, in November, he contracted malaria while on international duty, which is enough to stick a broom in the spokes of anyone’s season, then he went to the Africa Cup of Nations but returned with an injury and thus missed another month. By that point, other midfielders were ahead of him in the pecking order and he barely played for the rest of the season.
But everything Forest first saw in him is still there and while there was some suggestion they should cut their losses this summer, they look like they’re going to persist with him. If they were right, then he is certainly one to watch.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
