The Ultimate 2026-27 Premier League Preview, Part 1: The Storylines Shaping English Football
The reigning champions, ambitious outsiders, returning underdogs and managerial gambles that could define the Premier League season.
The Premier League doesn’t exactly need me to sell it to you.
There’s a reason it has become the biggest domestic soccer league in the world, pulling in players from every corner of the globe, spending ridiculous amounts of money every summer and creating a weekly television product that has somehow convinced millions of Americans that waking up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Some of that is marketing, some of it is money and some of it is simply the fact that the Premier League has more clubs capable of doing interesting things than just about anywhere else in Europe — or maybe even the world.
And heading into 2026-27, there are a lot of interesting things happening.
Arsenal finally got over the hump last season, winning its first Premier League title in more than two decades after three consecutive second-place finishes. Manchester City is entering the post-Pep Guardiola era, Liverpool stole Andoni Iraola away from Bournemouth, Chelsea handed another enormously expensive collection of players to Xabi Alonso and nine of the league’s 20 clubs will enter the season with a different manager than the one they had a year ago. Mikel Arteta, somehow, is now the longest-tenured manager in the Premier League as well as the sole head man to actually win it, which says just as much about the chaos everywhere else as it does about the stability Arsenal has built in North London.
There are fascinating stories further down the table, too. Bournemouth is preparing to play European football for the first time in club history, Brighton will have another crack at Europe after a run of impressive domestic performances, Coventry City is back in the top flight after a 25-year absence and Brentford might have assembled the most talented squad it has ever had. Aston Villa is trying to follow up a Europa League title while replacing several of its most important players, Crystal Palace has to figure out what life looks like without Oliver Glasner and Fulham has made one of the managerial hires that I’m most skeptical about anywhere on the continent.
So, much like I did with La Liga, we’re going to go through every single team and try to figure out what exactly we’re dealing with.
Because there are 20 teams and I have a propensity to write too many words, this is going to be split into two parts. Part 1 of The Football Corner’s Ultimate 2026-27 Premier League Preview covers Arsenal through Fulham, with Part 2 picking up with the other half of the league. We’ll look at who came in, who went out, what each team did last season and, more importantly, the stories and questions that I think will determine where all 20 of these clubs are headed over the next nine months.
Arsenal
Losing the Champions League final to Paris Saint-Germain last May was absolutely devastating — Gabriel’s miss during the penalty shootout has already become one of the most memeable moments of the last several years in sports — but there really isn’t any reason to believe that this operation isn’t once again one of the favorites to lift the trophy when everything is said and done. That’s been the trajectory for Arsenal for several years now, and after finally getting over the hump domestically last season, the question surrounding Mikel Arteta’s team has shifted from whether it can actually win something to just how much it can win.
