In 1992 a young Arsenal fan wrote a book about the experience of being a young Arsenal fan. His name was Nick Hornby and his book, Fever Pitch, launched a handy career.
There have been other Hornby books. And films of those books. The genre-initiating book inspired a fever of similar accounts, often in foreign locations.
Even if you weren’t an Arsenal fan, the book became a model for how fans relate to their clubs.
Fever Pitch turned on a simple but compelling premise. Other than a handful of Liverpool obsessives, it was widely assumed before Fever Pitch that supporting a club was subservient to life. Life was about work, relationships, children, community, holidays. Supporting, say, the Arsenal (as the diehards would have it), or a Spurs, was secondary.
Hornby turned the notion on its head. Supporting Arsenal wasn’t subservient to life. It was life. As he said in the book: “I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow.”
The quote is an allusion to poet TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, in which the poem’s narrator talks about measuring out his life with coffee spoons.
It is, therefore, a poem, we infer, about domestic ordinariness. By extension Hornby is talking about how domestically ordinary being an Arsenal fan is. The lot of the fan is a prosaic one. It is not a wild rush of league titles and visits to Istanbul for European Champions League ties.
I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow
— Nick Hornby
Much humour and pathos derived from the fact that there are more — proverbially speaking — away fixtures to Swindon than there are home ties to Manchester City in any given season. The life of a fan, says Hornby, is basically a veil of tears.
As he went on to say later in the book: “What impressed me most was just how most of the men around me hated, really hated, being there. As far as I could tell, nobody seemed to enjoy, in the way that I understood the word, anything that happened during the entire afternoon.”
So, there we have it. Supporting a team in the English Premier League (EPL) is an exercise in self-flagellation. There’s an unpalatable truth here. As the Premier League for 2025/2026 is revving up on the grid, all you are letting yourself in for — if, say, you’re a Spurs fan — is another season of cautious hope building slowly to incautious hope and, just maybe, wild expectation.
This is followed by what exactly? If you’re a Spurs fan, it will be crushing disappointment. It’s always like this. It always will be.
You could be a contemporary Arsenal fan. They finished second in the Premier League in three consecutive seasons. Last year they compounded their fans’ heartbreak by beating Real Madrid 5-1 on aggregate in the Champions League quarterfinals, looking like a troupe of brilliant circus performers in the process. But what happened next? Their assault on the title peak evaporated and they were beaten by Paris St-Germain over both legs in the Champions League semis.
Last season began very differently for the team. Mikel Arteta, their gaffer, had a plan. This involved a degree of bloody-mindedness we don’t always associate with Arsenal. In a September fixture against Man City, Arsenal’s German midfielder, Kai Havertz, shoulder-charged City’s Rodri on the halfway line. It looked innocuous. “Shoulder-charge” might be unfair, though the Spanish defensive midfielder fell to the ground.
Twenty minutes later, during a City corner, Rodri again went down. The injury to his right knee was confirmed later to be anterior cruciate ligament damage. With Rodri hobbled, City’s defence of their three-year Premier League-winning run was hobbled. A Rodri-less City are rather like a bacon and egg toasted sandwich without the bacon. They are not the same.
Whether this is being overly conspiratorial, it’s ironic that Arsenal’s major challenge came not from Pep Guardiola’s City, who finished in third. Rather it came from Liverpool, rejuvenated by manager Arne Slot after Jürgen Klopp’s departure.
This time round it’s difficult to see the title not going to one of the three teams already mentioned. Liverpool will want to hold on to their title, Arsenal will want to finally win it and City will want to prove they still have their mojo after having temporarily mislaid it.
All three have been active in the transfer market, but the signing of signings so far goes to Liverpool. They paid £100m for Bayer Leverkusen’s Florian Wirtz in the off-season, and he is already the talk of the town. One of 10 children, Wirtz, 22, comes from a footballing family in North Rhine-Westphalia, where his father is the chair of a women’s football club in the district.
If they don’t defend their title, Liverpool will at least have the honour of being the Premiership’s sexiest side
What makes Wirtz so exciting? He’s astonishingly quick, he has two good feet and his preseason friendlies have brought a kind of sweeping dazzle to the Reds. And let’s not forget Wirtz’s former teammate at Leverkusen Jeremie Frimpong, who is also heading to Anfield, as is Eintracht Frankfurt’s Hugo Ekitike.
Like Wirtz, Ekitike, 23, is young, quick and exciting. He’s different, too; he’s French, has a creamy dollop of French flair and is mostly left-footed. If they don’t defend their title, Liverpool will at least have the honour of being the Premiership’s sexiest side with these two in their midst.
Last year they scored 86 goals, 17 more than Arsenal and 14 more than City. With Wirtz and Ekitike firing together this season, that number could go up in flames.
Arteta, interestingly, has looked to home and the Basque country for his major preseason signing — Martín Zubimendi, Real Sociedad’s holding midfielder. Maybe Arteta reckons he’s got enough flair at the moment. Zubimendi, 26, will bring balance and composure, and it will be fascinating to see whether he complements fellow midfielder Declan Rice or gets in his way.
City’s big signing in the off-season is also a midfielder: the Dutch international Tijjani Reijnders, bought from AC Milan. The Italian club has suffered in recent years, operating under the shadow of neighbours Inter, but in Reijnders it has sold the real deal. A more combative player than either Ekitike or Wirtz, he’ll add muscle to City.
Amid all this breathlessness, it’s important to ask if anything fundamental has changed since Hornby’s day. Back then he wrote that “the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score” — and there’s no reason to believe this has changed.
Only one of 20 teams will win the title, but that’s a false statistic. No more than one of six or seven teams (at the outside) will win the title, with Leicester’s win in 2015/2016 the outlier that proves the rule. More likely, the winners will come from the trinity mentioned earlier.
With the likely result preordained, fans of the Aston Villas, Newcastles and Nottingham Forests of this world will have to content themselves with secondary prizes such as places in next season’s Europa Cup. If that seems a little pat, it’s also one of the EPL’s unfortunate truths. Another truth is that big money will always trump little money and that marginal decisions are likely to go the way of the powerful rather than the weak.
Once weak, then strong under Roman Abramovich, and later a laughing stock under American owner Todd Boehly, Chelsea might be worth a little flutter this season if you’re a betting man. The team finished fourth in 2024/2025, two points behind City and only five behind Arsenal, which suggests that a better result might be possible.
Chelsea spent big in the window but didn’t splash out, buying just two strikers: Brazilian João Pedro from Brighton & Hove Albion and Jamie Gittens from Borussia Dortmund, who was bought for £48.5m.
Not many people know that Chelsea’s Italian coach, Enzo Maresca, played in Italy, Spain, England and Greece as an attacking midfielder, and was once Guardiola’s assistant at City.
He’s been good at Chelsea and seems to humour his flaky owner, Boehly. Chelsea scored only 64 goals last season, the least of the top five. Maresca knows that league titles are not won with 64 goals. Let’s see what Gittens and João Pedro can do.
Perhaps they’ll disappoint their fans into corrosive bitterness à la Hornby, but, who knows, maybe this season will see the Chelsea of Didier Drogba reinvented?
With Liverpool playing Bournemouth on Friday in the season’s opening fixture, we’re about to see.
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