The Weekend Watchlist: Aug. 14-17
The EFL Championship brings the heat, La Liga makes its triumphant entry, NFL preseason rolls along and the FA Community Shield headlines the first weekend that really feels like football is back.
We are not all the way back yet, but we’re getting awfully close.
College football is still a couple of weeks away, the Premier League hasn’t returned, and the NFL is only beginning its preseason, meaning we still have a little while before the weekends become the glorious, unproductive mess so many people across the globe have been waiting months to experience again. Still, there is finally enough happening across the footballing world to spend the next four days bouncing between screens, which is really all I can ask for in the middle of August.
The EFL Championship gets everything started Friday before La Liga joins the party Saturday, giving us our first look at a few of the teams I just spent way too many words writing about in my season preview. There is NFL preseason sprinkled throughout, a wonderful Sunday morning soccer window and even a couple of Monday afternoon affairs worth keeping an eye on before we finally call it a weekend. Your complete slate stretches from Wolves-Blackburn on Friday afternoon through Cardiff-Wrexham and Deportivo-Elche on Monday. Sounds fun, right?
If you’ve read The Saturday Watchlist before, you know the drill. These aren’t necessarily the best games being played this weekend, nor am I attempting to list everything available on television. These are simply the contests I plan on having somewhere on my screens, organized in a way I think makes the most sense to watch them.
Welcome to the first Weekend Watchlist.
Note: All times are CT.
Friday
Primary Screen: Wolverhampton Wanderers vs. Blackburn Rovers — 2 p.m. — Paramount+
Secondary Screen: Tampa Bay Buccaneers at New York Jets — 6 p.m. — NFL Network
What better place to begin our soccer-watching weekend than the EFL Championship, a league that routinely spends 46 matches descending into such delightful chaos and insanity that trying to predict what will happen beforehand feels like a mostly useless exercise? The vibes are great and grand, and I can’t wait to see what this ridiculous collection of clubs has waiting for us this time around.
Wolves and Blackburn enter the season with drastically different expectations. Wolves came down from the Premier League with enough talent remaining to reasonably expect a quick return, particularly with Mateus Mané, André and the returning Raúl Jiménez — a standout on Mexico’s World Cup journey this past summer — among the options available to new manager César Peixoto. Blackburn’s outlook is considerably more grim after a quiet summer leaves the squad in a place where it’s expected to spend the campaign fighting relegation.
Then comes Buccaneers-Jets, which brings us the only rule necessary for watching the NFL preseason: don’t give jack squat about the score. We’re here for rookies, roster battles and the occasional fun story about a player we’ve never heard of. In totality, the NFL preseason is a silly exercise, one I fully expect to disappear at some point in my lifetime. For now, however, just sit back and enjoy that football — at least in some form — is back.
