Was surprised at how candid some of them were with the film rolling. Apparently the only times when there were actual camera people and crew was during the games filming the pitch. The rest all small pre-placed cameras, which would explain things.

Love it though...just a really interesting look inside.

Was 100% on Rose’s side btw until it came out that he wants to play...but he thought he was too good for Bournemouth or Newcastle.

I almost liked Dele too (ffs...puke). That scene where they were ranking chocolate bars...footballers are just like us!

Why so grim?

1. Liverpool
2. Chelsea
3. City
4. Spurs
5. United
6. Wolves
7. Leicester
8. Arsenal

rest who knows

We have done nothing to address our massive deficiencies and should struggle. If we stay up I suspect it'll be because some other sides are terrible.

Actually scrub that, we have Moyes, and we know that winning is what he does.

Because we played like a steaming pile of turd for almost all of last season and if not for us being pretty damn clinical and our opponents very much not we would have finished something like 12th.

I like Doherty and Hojbjerg but don't think this is enough for us to suddenly become brilliant again.

Chelsea allowed almost 50 goals. Really want to see evidence they can defend before even being confident they're 3rd

I can see this, but I think they may get by skin of their teeth. Palace were absolute garbage after the restart. Maybe they were checked out knowing that there was nothing to play for, but Palace love the yo-yo and this is now their longest stretch in the top flight iirc.


As of right now, I'm having a hard time seeing Pool repeat as Champions. They haven't added anyone that I can recall this window, have played a lot of intense matches over the past few years, and this will be a season where depth gets tested quickly due to it being a more condensed schedule.

I can actually see a third place finish behind City and Chelsea if there are some injuries and if they don't at least bring in a few bodies for depth. That said, if Salah+Firminio+Mane are healthy for the bulk of the season, they will terrorize backlines for fun and will push for the title again.

United have a lot of dead wood still on the team and VdB has been the only addition while Chelsea have added a good amount of talent. Chelsea will still leak in goals this year, but they'll also score a metric ****ton

I mean I somewhat agree with this.

I need to see it first. I think/hope our attack is gonna be elite and our defence will be better but if kepa plays greater than 10 games in goal there's no way we win the league as he just let's too many in. Unless he is a new man this season.

I think we'll be 3rd but a lot closer than last year.

It's a fair point. And while conceding 54 league goals is pretty dire, I do think there's grounds for optimism, even defensively.

- We underperformed our expected stats quite significantly last season, both due to Kepa being terrible and the defense being poor and looking lost much of the time.

- We're bringing in 3 players who, defensively, are clear upgrades to their last season counterpart, Chilwell, Silva and Mendy (or any other GK in the world).

- Hopefully we won't have to deal with injuries to important defensive players.

Granted, it could easily go the other way, too. Mendy could be a bust, Silva could get a terrible injury, Kanté could continue to be riddled with injuries. But even then I think our balance will be much better just by virtue of having top players in the attack, which means we don't have to attack so relentlessly with virtually everyone except the CBs to create anything that resembles a chance.

Either way, as long as we score 6 or 7 goals per game it isn't going to matter a whole lot - I hope.

Without checking I thought Chelsea only conceded 48 last year. 54? Jesus, you're just not winning the league unless you cut that by half.

I've just been taking a look, and I'm actually a little surprised that this may not actually be the case. Now, let me say that I think City and Pool are the teams that are almost certainly to occupy the top 2 spots like they have, but, 8 out of 11 sides that have won the title since the 2010 season have let in 32 or more goals.

Mind you, Chelsea would still need to see a drop of at least 15 goals conceded to even have a hope and a prayer of making this a reality, but we aren't seeing the defensive records of the late-00s right now determining a title. Chelsea would also have to score about another 15-20 goals to get in the range needed as well, but still.

Chelsea's defense was poor but they're not a 1.5 goal conceded/game bad team.

Yes Kepa and all that but even more important than that is that kante was missing for half the season

If i had to bet, i would bet on Chelsea conceding less before betting on Chelsea to score more

Disagree with 1st obviously, city's got it

Chelsea was really, really poor on set piece defending, something like 8% of corners ended up in their net. I'm excited to watch them, but definitely not sold yet. Also not super sold on United with their lack of depth, the hectic schedule and their inability to so far add to the squad.

lol

I certainly don't think we're winning the league unless virtually all stars align.

I expect our defense will improve quite a bit, last year we underperformed our xGa by 13 which is twice as much as the second worst in the league. Silva is a top tier defender and leader and Mendy is not Kepa, and just by that alone we should see a lot of improvement. If we can concede in the area of 35-40 goals that would be quite good, and I don't think that's particularly unlikely.

Set pieces - and crosses in general - were a major weakness. I think we conceded the most goals per corner against in the league, but that is somewhat mitigated by us not giving many corners away. But yeah, it's definitely an area to improve on.

Mendy is going to improve that immensely as his strongest aspect as a keeper is dominating on corners and set peices.

Kepa was something like 11 goals below his expected average based on quality of shots faced.
Mendy was 2 goals above average in ligue 1 lady season. So if he can replicate that then we should see an improvement on that alone.

I don't think he's gonna be great and will probably be a below average prem keeper. But his biggest strength is set pieces which was our biggest issue. We looked like we were gonna concede any time the other team had a corner.

Our defence was bad but we did only give up the 3rd least amount of shots. Its just they all seemed to go in

He wasn't below average, it was all time low. He was the worst in post shot xg by almost double of the next keeper. He was also worse than anyone the year before, and the year before that. FB Ref doesn't seem to track psxg before then, but you get the idea.

Who said he was below average?

He was 11 goals below the average which is all time low.

He had the worst save percentage of any keeper in the prem over like 10 games or something stupid. Which is my point. Mendy can be average or below average and it'll still be an improvement.

Unless kepa has gone through some immense off season whereby he's a changed man

Oh nvm sorry I misread your post.

Forget xG, just go straight to McGoldrick scored twice

Who outside of the top-4 from last season has made big enough gains in the window to overtake United? United definitely need to Get a ride of some dead wood at CB and RB, but I’m having a hard time seeing Arsenal/Spurs/Leicester atm overtaking United given that all of those clubs will have depth issues as well with the condensed schedule. It’s possible that Wolves could make a move since they won’t have the EL to worry about, but we’ll see there.

Plus United will have their strongest MF in a while and even though we can absolutely use an upgrade at CB, our GA was third best last season. A full season of Bruno+adding VdB should secure 4th for United (we’re now all
About the 4th place trophy, whoooooooo. /sigh)