Post-Pep Premier League era begins with blast of hyper-managed shock and awe | Barney Ronay

There has been something oddly narcotic and moreish about the drip‑drip of fresh Pep Guardiola content either side of the start of the new Premier League season. Eras come and go. Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But four‑part Amazon Prime documentaries make angels of us all.

So we have continued to feast on the Pep-at-City visuals: dead jeopardy, reheated beefs, the uplifting team talks of a departed manager to the departed players of a departed team, and moments that often feel far more gripping than the daily churn of what we must, out of habit, call the real world.

The thought occurred watching all this: has the Premier League found its Tupac? Is Pep just going to keep on doing this, dropping new material, fresh hits, posthumous platinum albums? A bald, thin charismatic man who keeps on releasing his lost tapes. We have exactly the thing, sir. Is he even actually dead?

Probably this won’t happen. But a profound absence is still a profound presence at moments like these. The ghosts continue to pull the strings. This weekend was the first of the new Premier League season. More significantly, it was also the first of the post‑Pep era.

And this has been a genuine era, 10 years in the game and an entire tactical culture shift in the making. Unsurprisingly, there was an odd sense of lightness across those nine fixtures on Friday through to Sunday, of old bonds cast aside, even a little giddiness. Suddenly dad isn’t home. The chair by the door is empty. Let’s all just rip it up a bit, shall we?

This relies on a slightly out‑of‑date notion of what Guardiola‑ism became in its later years. But the fact is, something interesting did happen in those Friday‑to‑Sunday games. Think of pure Pep-ball and what are you seeing? Possession. Cold, high‑craft control. This is a coach who famously said: “My desire is to have 100% possession,” after a 5-1 thrashing of Arsenal in Munich during which Thiago Alcântara complete 122 passes.

Admittedly, Guardiola was speaking out of frustration that day, talking more about not losing the ball at key moments, possession as defence. But these ideas did have a profound mimetic effect in England. During Guardiola’s decade at Manchester City the team that had the least possession in the Premier League would win, on average, only 30%-35% of games, a figure that fell as low as 28% in 2021‑22 but which had begun to pick up in the last two seasons as even City’s own version of Pep‑ball became more mixed and next‑gen.

But this weekend the opposite thing happened. In six of nine games played from Friday to Sunday one team took significantly more possession while failing to win. Liverpool had 60% possession plus 27 shots but still just scrambled a draw and looked, frankly, pretty wild. Manchester United had 71% possession and were well beaten by Hull. Tottenham had 60 % possession and lost 3-0. Nottingham Forest had 56% and lost. Sunderland had 62%, Crystal Palace 58%, and both lost.

There were three exceptions to this, all outliers in their own way. Manchester City had 66% possession and won at home against Bournemouth, but spent 84 minutes looking like they were losing. Brighton had 73% possession and beat an Aston Villa team that had made a collective decision to play with their eyes closed and their legs on the wrong way round. Arsenal dominated every metric against a promoted Coventry team that looked, frankly, a little spooked by their first sight of that fresh Everest.

So, a tiny sample size. It may mean absolutely nothing. It could get flipped on its head before we hit September. Also, it is important to note that pure possession stats have rarely dictated with any certainty who will win a game. The top teams always tend to have most of the ball, thus skewing the overall stats.

Otherwise, possession has been a far less reliable guide to victory than, say, expected goals, which speaks clearly to the effectiveness of a system. Whereas simply keeping the ball is often a sign of the opposite of good health, of football as a collective anxiety attack, out there playing with your worry beads, tramping a horseshoe shape into the grass while your opponents mass for the decisive blitzkrieg.

But it wasn’t just the possession numbers that were notable this weekend. The rhythms of the matches were striking. All three Sunday games featured nine or 10 substitutes in the last 40 minutes or so, and a sense of two separate halves, of finishers brought into play, of a broken, episodic tactical to‑and‑fro in response to shifts in the scoreline and the flow. The World Cup also had that pattern. Maybe this is what football is now.

Mainly there was a striking level of targeted physicality, rehearsed blitz-transitions, groups of players running suddenly forward quickly in formation at certain triggering events. Anthony Elanga’s opener for Newcastle captured this best: 12 seconds, two passes, 70 metres covered in a single perfectly straight line, no off‑the‑cuff inventions or what you might call conventional “creativity”, but a perfect moment of planned collective intelligence and breathtaking athleticism.

This was the pattern elsewhere too, games defined by rapid breaks, by powerful players sourced for their ability to win duels and to carry the ball, and a weekend that felt like another ratcheting up in the Premier League’s journey into hyper‑physicality.

Isn’t it a trend? Is this the next stage in the league’s narrow but furiously intense evolution? There are several managers in new jobs who have reputations for the game of sprints, blitz‑ball: most notably Matthias Jaissle at Newcastle and Roberto De Zerbi at what was, on Saturday, the least De Zerbi‑ish of Spurs, a Spurs that seemed to have absorbed only the mouse part – play dead, hide, roll over – of that fast‑breaking cat‑and‑mouse football.

There are two things worth saying about this. This is not a rejection of Guardiolaism and positional play. Keeping the ball was always about preparing for the moments when you don’t have it. Guardiola’s later Manchester City team would often win by direct means.

But pure possession can also be boringly risk-averse, a kind of footballing atrophy where everyone just sits quivering on the touchline like a swarm of beached jellyfish at dusk. The spectacle is more gripping when the emphasis is on those transitions either side of the passing patterns.

More specifically, it is also an interesting development for Pep’s successor at City, Enzo Maresca, Coolio to his Tupac, whose methods are still very much pure Pep origins, based in control of the ball and rigid positionism, like the last soldier still fighting the second world war from inside a bush on Iwo Jima in 1976.

Is Maresca ready for this? Is he even ahead of it? He gave a televised interview at the weekend where he spoke about the tension between control and risk, possession and creativity, and where he defined players being encouraged to run into unexpected positions as “chaos”. On Monday morning there were headlines describing the Premier League weekend in those terms. But this isn’t chaos. We’ve seen chaos. We’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, jinking wingers, dogs of war, hitting the space, Lee Chapman, Rod Wallace and Eric Cantona making heavy metal music with two bass guitars and an antique viola. You want chaos. We can give you chaos.

What the Premier League brought at the weekend, the quick breaks, the freedom to attack at selected moments, was more a kind of hyper-managed shock and awe, targeted speed and physicality born out of calculated risk, numbers, data, heavy briefings.

It was also exciting to watch, which is no bad thing in the world’s most tightly contested, space‑averse league. No doubt there will be tightening, a reaction to the reaction, instant counter‑moves and contingency planning. August can also be odd and silly season-ish, the dog days of a World Cup summer. But it did at times feel as if we were in a post‑something moment. If not quite post‑Pep, whose influence will continue to loom, a tactical Machiavelli with plenty of tapes still left in the vault.