Figuratively Everything You Need to Know About the 2024-25 Premier League Season

Somehow, the 2024-25 Premier League season starts tomorrow. Your boy (me) has written four preview pieces:

-Is there any world where Erling Haaland doesn’t lead the league in goals?

And so, you have a situation where, as measured by goals to xG, more than 100 players finished their chances more efficiently than Haaland last year, but he still easily led the league in goals. He just gets on the end of so many more high-quality chances than anyone else in the league. Thanks to Man City's ability with the ball and his ability without it, Haaland's goal-scoring baseline is higher than the ceiling for most other players.

-The 50 best players in the Premier League, ranked:

And here we enter the portion of the programming where every player feels like they're ranked too low. This isn't an indictment on Rice in any way. He's one of the best midfielders in the world. He's good at ... everything? His presence on Arsenal pretty much directly coincided with them going from being a "Hey, that's fun that they challenged for the title" team in 2022-23 to an "OK, yes, this is genuinely one of the best teams in the world" side in 2023-24.

Rice is a fantastic ball winner. His ball-carrying and his passing get better with each successive season. He's physically dominant. He never gets injured. He started taking set pieces last year? Oh, and he scored seven goals and added eight assists.

The only warning sign: Rice played over 4,000 minutes last season across all competitions and then spent the entire summer chasing the ball around as England struggled to control games at Euro 2024.

-The field is favored over Manchester City. Here’s why:

-Bill Connelly and I previewed all 20 teams and predicted their finishing positions:

For years, Dyche's Burnley teams would make nerds like me bang our heads against our Cheeto-dusted keyboards in our parents' windowless basements. "They cannot continue to concede this many quality shots," we'd shout. It's simply unsustainable for a team to cede such a large proportion of chances to their opponents like this. And then Burnley would, simply, continue to cede a large proportion of chances to their opponents and do something like, say, finish seventh in the Premier League.

Eventually, it became clear that Dyche's teams were doing something that xG models couldn't pick up on. They always had a ton of players behind the ball, and early xG models were not able to account for player positioning, so Burnley would concede fewer goals than their xG totals suggested. Once the models got better, Dyche's teams became less mysterious. But now, it's happening again -- just in the opposite direction.

Enjoy the games, all!