Glory for Manchester United, who lifted the Premier League summer series on Sunday despite twice being pegged back by Everton to draw 2-2 in Atlanta. A degree of relief for West Ham, who beat Bournemouth to finish second in the competition despite all the gloomy prognostications about their campaign to come. In Seoul, meanwhile, there was a very Tottenham moment as they followed the glee of last week’s 1-0 win over Arsenal with a 1-1 draw against Newcastle in which James Maddison was stretchered off with a knee injury described by his manager Thomas Frank as “bad”.
It all looks real, it sounds real and yet everybody knows it isn’t real. That even now, in this age of data and minute analysis, there remains an element of randomness, is one of soccer’s great joys as a sport. But that tendency is magnified in pre-season.
The Premier League has been away for 10 weeks now. For those hooked on its soap opera, the wait is intolerable. The Club World Cup, the England men’s team being dreadful in June as they so often are, the Under-21s continuing their unfamiliar excellence, even the women’s Euros … none of it quite offers the same hit. Obsessing over transfers suffices only for so long; eventually there is a need to see them play.
And so there are pre-season games, and there is is analysis. The best of it is skeptical, acknowledging the absurdity of making judgements on 45 minutes. The worst of it is breathlessly insistent – of Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha, the two senior players United have managed to sign, appearing together against Everton. What does it mean that Rasmus Højlund was only on the bench? Does that mean Benjamin Šeško is more likely to sign? The front three, with Mbeumo dropping deep and Cunha and Bruno Fernandes at times running beyond him, looked fluent. Fernandes and Mbuemo set up Amad Diallo, overlapping from wing-back to score the opener. This is the way Ruben Amorim’s 3-4-3 is supposed to work.
In that, at least, there is a sense of something tangible, a United that is, at last, able to execute their manager’s attacking plan. But Ayden Heaven’s own goal was a reminder that United remain as self-destructive as ever. Perhaps more significant was the equaliser conceded after Manuel Ugarte lost possession, the lack of urgency to get back. Did this happen because it was only a friendly and United are nowhere near peak fitness yet? Or because this is an irredeemably feckless bunch of players?
This is smoke on a foggy day. Will any of it be relevant when the season begins for real? United fans will remember ruefully just how good they looked in pre-season under Louis van Gaal in 2014, only for the season itself to prove anticlimactic.
The problem with assessing pre-season games is that different sides are at different stages of readiness. Some expect to hit the ground running from week one; others are building to peak in March or April, the differences magnified two weeks before the opening day. Some managers are working on specific plans and are less bothered by the whole, some are just hoping to get semi-competitive minutes into their players’ legs.
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In the old days, before Premier League teams went on foreign tours and everybody was desperately promoting themselves to a global audience, pre-season was about team bonding as much as anything else: the team that drinks together wins together, as the adage had it. The stories are legion: the Everton winger Peter Beagrie driving a motorbike through a plateglass window in San Sebastián; Sunderland’s diminutive but extremely tough full-back John Kay terrifying a much larger local who had threatened him by casually eating the antiseptic cubes from a urinal in Bristol; Arsenal’s French midfielder Gilles Grimandi joining five of his English teammates on a night out in Switzerland where the first round comprised 35 pints of lager and a dry white wine. Many managers, you suspect, would quite relish a return to the days, if not of booze, then at least of pre-season being a largely private affair rather than a projection of the club to the world.
Very occasionally something consequential happens, such as Chelsea conceding four in the second half to an experimental New York Red Bulls led by Jesse Marsch in the summer of 2015, the first sign that something had gone badly wrong for José Mourinho’s side since winning the Premier League two months earlier; within five months, Mourinho had been sacked. (It was also the debut first-team appearance for Bournemouth and US national team midfielder Tyler Adams, then 16 years old.)
Pre-season is very much the phoney war, the jockeying, the probing. It matters to the clubs, but to outsiders it is essentially like watching an artist mix his paints. There’s anticipation and a vague technical interest, but it means nothing until it starts being applied to the canvas.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
