Football365

4 September 2026

The third weekend of the Premier League season, and the first to arrive after the madcap finish to a madcap transfer window, brings the first genuinely heavyweight meeting of the new campaign as two of the three realistic title challengers face off in a London derby.

That is the clear headline act, but it is nowhere near the only intriguing element in a round of fixtures that could reveal a great deal about what plenty of sides are going to be this season.

Newcastle, for instance, finally have to face a sensible opponent for the first time, which should tell us whether they are genuinely good or whether Liverpool and Spurs are simply a mess. We should also get a sharper sense of whether Aston Villa are in genuine trouble or merely enduring another shaky opening to what may still become another very strong season.

And Manchester United come up against a proper established Premier League side for the first time just as they enter a two-games-a-week schedule for the first time since losing the 2025 Europa League final.

It has the feel of a weekend that will either confirm or completely destroy several early-season storylines.

With respect to the impressive openings produced by sides like Hull and Newcastle, and by Leeds and Brentford as well, it already appears that there are three believable title contenders this season, and on Sunday we will see two of them go head to head.

Chelsea’s hopes of leaping from mid-table chaos to Premier League champions under a new manager in one move for the second time took a major blow on deadline day, though.

It was not the much-anticipated exit of Enzo Fernandez, who departed on the actual deadline after Chelsea had earlier attempted to impose a pretend arbitrary one, but the fact they did not replace him.

It served as another reminder that, even in a summer when everyone seemed to be behaving like Chelsea and Chelsea themselves were actually slightly less Chelsea than usual, putting together a coherent and fully functioning squad may matter more than it did in the early wild-west phase of Clearlake, but it still is not the main objective.

That remains true even if they have at last relented and agreed to provide a manager with an actual goalkeeper, despite the obvious issue that there is no money to be made from goalkeepers.

Chelsea’s prospects of remaining in the title race now depend more than ever on that hugely important lack of European football. It does at least give them a chance of surviving until January despite very thin midfield options. If by then they have established themselves as genuine contenders, it will be fascinating to see how they tackle the winter window.

Arsenal are unquestionably contenders. Complaints about a less-than-perfect transfer window need to be viewed in context: Arsenal simply had far, far less to do than everyone else.

Part of the reason this summer became so ridiculous is that every other major club in the country is somewhere near the start of its latest rebuild, revolution, or total tear-up-and-start-again exercise.

Arsenal required no such overhaul. They have brought in very good players to fix a couple of minor gaps, and beyond that were entirely right to focus only on adding the absolute top-level talent possible to a squad already capable of winning the title.

The issue with possessing a squad that only a tiny number of players on the planet can improve is that signing those players in any given summer is, in reality, very difficult. Arsenal were ambitious, but none of it quite landed. That is unfortunate, but it does not alter the fact they possess the best and most coherent squad in the country and the clearest vision of how they want to play.

That is already obvious in the way these two teams have gone about winning their first two matches of the season, and in which of those two approaches looks more sustainable.

Arsenal brushed aside poor Coventry and then smothered Aston Villa, cruising to victory and already adding another two clean sheets to their tally.

Then there is Chelsea, swinging wildly and collecting frantic, chaotic wins over Fulham and Brighton despite conceding as many goals along the way as the self-sabotaging, doom-ridden Spurs.

Styles make fights, as the saying goes, and this should be a superb early-season test of how the broader story of this season might unfold.

Team to watch: Aston Villa

Hull now feels exactly the sort of awkward little fixture that could trap Aston Villa, given how both teams have started. Villa, remarkably, are still yet to register a shot on target across two defeats after another summer spent grumbling about the crushing unfairness of pretty much everything.

They also began last season unsteadily, and we all know where that ended up. The only thing Unai Emery does better than winning Europa Leagues is making fools of gloomy early-season predictions.

Even so, if Saturday evening ends with Hull still holding on to a 100 per cent record and Aston Villa still stuck on a zero per cent one, it is easy to imagine how the mood could begin to shift at a club that is developing a deep and, we fear, not especially useful conviction that the world is against them.

We have very little doubt that things will be fine eventually. As long as Emery is still there, Villa’s floor remains extremely high, even if this summer may have lowered the ceiling slightly. But there may yet be a few more uncomfortable days before they reach that point of being fine in the end.

Manager to watch: Matthias Jaissle

Credit to him, because he is doing an outstanding job in circumstances that are close to impossible. The win over Tottenham will have been especially satisfying for Newcastle, but the most notable aspect of it was the way Jaissle’s team, assembled in just a few weeks after losing key players for the second successive summer, looked more coherent and showed the clearer, more recognisable plan and philosophy.

Newcastle have absorbed the basics of Jaissle’s football far more quickly than a Spurs squad packed with hand-picked and eye-wateringly expensive Roberto De Zerbi components.

That victory, coming after a draw against Liverpool that could very easily have been worth three points, has given Newcastle a much stronger start to the season than anybody, including themselves given the way Jaissle was speaking after pre-season matches, could have expected.

The only remaining concern is that they have played two clubs currently caught up in their own mostly self-inflicted disorder. Liverpool and Spurs are both very silly sides right now, incomplete and not quite functioning as they adjust to new realities.

The worry, then, is that what appears on the surface to be two very good Newcastle displays may in truth have been driven more by two desperate performances from their opponents.

We need to watch Newcastle against a sensible team that are not their own worst enemy before making a proper early-season call on them. Bournemouth should serve that purpose nicely.

Player to watch: Bruno Fernandes

It is rare indeed for the player to watch on the first weekend after deadline day not to be a new signing, but it is difficult to look beyond Bruno Fernandes here, and not just because both Manchester United and Everton rather went against the grain in the final days and hours of the window by not bringing in loads of fresh faces.

In Everton’s case, that was certainly not due to a lack of effort. It is strange to look at an Everton side with four points from two games and still feel they are close to a crisis point, but that is genuinely how it seems. There is considerable supporter unrest over how the window unfolded, and losing Iliman Ndiaye is a painful setback that the loan return of Jack Grealish simply cannot fully offset.

Meanwhile, despite all the noise and frustration over the lack of cover at left-back, the striking thing about United is how quickly they appear to have reverted to type: a shaky, unconvincing side unless and until their talisman produces something extraordinary to rescue them.

They have already been beaten by newly promoted Hull and trailed newly promoted Ipswich. Fortunately for them, Bruno Fernandes decided the latter would be one of those matches he would simply win by himself. Three goals and one assist later, United were comfortable 5-2 winners and the wilder early talk of trouble was quietened.

Now he faces one of his favourite opponents, having already produced 11 goal involvements — six goals and five assists — in 13 previous appearances against the Toffees.

Football League game to watch: Preston v Blackburn

This is the Championship at its most authentically football: a Lancashire derby full of history, featuring a home side still looking for their first point of the new season after four matches and visitors who are not doing much better, with their eye-catching win over promotion hopefuls Middlesbrough made even more notable by the fact it remains Rovers’ only success so far.

You cannot argue with that as an early-season slice of Serie A either. Neither side are in the Champions League, both have made perfect starts to the new season, and this has somehow become a remarkably Barclays-coded fixture packed with familiar faces from all across Our League.

Juventus already had Guglielmo Vicario, Lloyd Kelly, Douglas Luiz and Randal Kolo Muani, and this weekend could also hand debuts to deadline-day loan arrivals Pape Sarr and Nick Woltemade.

Meanwhile, Ruben Amorim’s Milan could give Omari Hutchinson his first appearance after his loan-with-an-option move from Nottingham Forest, while already boasting Samuel Chukwueze, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Pervis Estupinan, Fikayo Tomori and the timelord Luka Modric in the squad.