Why Some Premier League Clubs Are Flopping Early: The Hidden Problems Behind Poor Starts
Every August the whole country wakes up with a small, hopeful buzz. New shirts, new faces, and the first whistle promise a fresh start.
Fans plan their weekends, managers speak about building blocks, and social feeds fill with optimism.
But by the third league game the shine can disappear. The early weeks are brutal they expose bad planning, fitness problems, and tactical experiments that haven’t been properly taught.
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Those small cracks add up fast, and that’s how we end up talking about Premier League poor starts in September instead of celebrating a new season.
This piece is about those cracks. We’ll look at how bad recruitment, odd tactical choices, dressing-room strife, and bruising fixture lists turn summer hope into early worry.
These aren’t just one-off results, they are signs that something went wrong before the season even began.
Summer signings already showing worrying signs
Matheus Cunha (Manchester United)
Cunha arrived with a big price tag and early hope, but he’s had a mixed opening to life at Old Trafford, flashes of quality, low goal returns, and then a hamstring problem that has kept him out.
Pundits and data analysts flagged his finishing and the club have had to manage his minutes as he recovers.
Bryan Mbeumo (Manchester United)
Mbeumo came from Brentford after a 20-goal season, but analysts warned that a lot of that was an xG overperformance and might not stick.
Early matches showed the same danger, chances created but few returns on the scoreboard, which feeds the “overbought” narrative some writers warned about. The club’s fans still like his work rate, but the stats warranted caution.
Benjamin Šeško (Manchester United)
Šeško is one of the big-name summer captures, but he’s had very limited minutes so far.
Several former pros and pundits have warned he could struggle to adapt immediately at Old Trafford, that kind of early caution is worth noting when labeling someone a “success” this soon.
Alexander Isak (Liverpool)
Isak’s transfer was huge and headline-grabbing, but he missed pre-season and came in short on match fitness.
That means patience is needed, fans expect instant returns from big fees, but analysts and his new manager have both warned that he won’t be ready to deliver straight away.
Missing pre-season and fitness issues are real reasons early form can look poor.
Viktor Gyökeres (Arsenal) — A mixed case
Gyökeres has had bright moments but also criticism from pundits who say he doesn’t yet fit perfectly in Arsenal’s setup.
Some former players publicly questioned his link-up play and how teammates use or don’t use him in certain games, a reminder that a “good player on paper” can still look off the pace in a new team.
This one’s nuanced, recent matches show improvement, but the early questions were real.
Slow Starts Aren’t Just Bad Luck But The Warning Signs Were There
If you’ve been paying attention to pre-season, you start to see the patterns. Training reports, preseason friendlies, transfer delays, and the tone from the manager all give off signals.
Sometimes clubs treat July like a separate life. But pre-season is a preview, not a warm-up. The shape, fitness and clarity or lack of it often carry into the competitive weeks.
In practical terms it looks like this. A team that had a rough pre-season, too many individual drills, constant rotation of roles, or a rushed tactical change tends to be the same team that looks lost when the whistle blows for real.
Injuries that come from a heavy, chaotic pre-season show up in August. Late panic buys who haven’t trained with their new teammates still stand out in game two.
Those early warning signs are real signals that a club either prepared poorly, or hoped deep problems would fix themselves.
Managers and pundits sometimes tried to warn fans before the season started. You hear them on summer podcasts, in interviews, and in training footage.
A manager who is careful with his words in August is often the one who knows there are cracks. The public statements can be hedges or admissions of limits, and they shouldn’t be dismissed as PR.
When someone says, in effect, “we aren’t ready,” that line needs to be taken seriously because, more often than not, it’s the reality you see on the pitch a few weeks later.
David Moyes saying he didn’t have the players he wanted is a blunt example of that kind of pre-season honesty.
Recruitment Gone Wrong When the Transfer Window Fails You
People outside club hierarchies tend to measure transfer windows with a simple metric: how much did you spend? That’s a lazy way of looking at it.
The right signing is not the most expensive one. The right signing is the one that solves a problem. Too many clubs confuse the two.
A few things go wrong in recruitment that show up right away. First, clubs buy players who look good on scouting reports but don’t fit the manager’s system.
You can have two brilliant wingers, but if the midfield is being bypassed and the team constantly concedes in the channels, buying another winger won’t fix it.
Second, clubs sell the players who gave them balance and then fail to replace that balance in time.
Third, the “best available” model take the best player in the market because you can creates squads of talented individuals who don’t form a coherent whole.
Fans smell panic buys. They don’t always have the tactical vocabulary to explain what’s wrong, but they see instincts being traded for quick fixes.
Panic buys also often arrive late, and late signings take time to bed in. That’s not an excuse; it’s a practical problem.
The summer market is noisy. Getting the right profile, negotiating the right deal, and integrating the player are three separate jobs. If the club fails at any of them, the early weeks will feel fragile.
Look at the contrast between clubs that recruit with a clear plan and those that sign on reputation alone.
The former will often have a core identity and a few additions that complement it. The latter ends the transfer window with holes in odd places and a squad that is imbalanced.
Tactics That Look Good on Paper but Collapse on the Pitch
Coaches love intellectual experiments. Fans love to hear about pressing maps, expected goals, and formation tweaks. But complexity is only valuable if the players understand it.
Some managers introduce new pressing triggers, zonal responsibilities and fluid backlines with an expectation that elite athletes will adapt overnight. That rarely happens. Players still need minutes of repetition together.
If the pressing cues are unclear, the side gets stretched. If wingbacks are told to stay high while the two midfielders don’t cover the half-space, you create lanes for opponents to exploit.
Tactics are language. If the grammar isn’t learned, communication breaks down.
The Premier League is unforgiving because opposition teams are good at punishing confusion quickly.
A bit of indecision in midfield leads to a counter and suddenly the narrative is about managerial naivety.
Too often we see managers who have a brilliant idea and no time to teach it. The result is a team that looks like it’s training one thing and playing another.
Case studies are useful because they’re not abstract. Teams that have tried to swap from a direct game to a possession model without personnel have looked slow and disjointed.
Others that tried to play high-risk, high-reward pressing without the fitness or discipline concede soft goals.
When tactics collapse early, it’s often because the club attempted a philosophical shift without the groundwork.
A quiet dressing room problem can wreck a season faster than bad tactics. Football is a human sport.
When players stop sharing a coherent purpose, when leaders feel undermined, when contract negotiations or transfer rumours widen into factions, the team performs like an unglued mechanism.
New managers can clash with established leaders. A veteran who’s been the heartbeat of a dressing room doesn’t change to suit a new system overnight.
If the manager tries to bully or marginalize senior figures, that tension bleeds into training and matches. Then there are contract rows and off-field issues.
When someone in the squad is publicly pushing for a move, or when there is a neon-lit row about wages or bonuses, the team’s focus shifts away from game preparation.
It’s small things that matter. Who controls set-piece routines? Who points out defensive lapses in a calm voice rather than on social media? When those micro-dynamics slip, the club loses the small corrections that win games.
A fractured atmosphere looks like stubborn late-game errors, sloppy marking, or a team that can’t respond when a match turns against them.
Injuries, Fitness, and Training Loads: The Physical Side of a Poor Start
Injuries are part of football. But this isn’t about bad luck so much as bad planning.
Overly aggressive pre-season schedules, heavy pitch time on hard surfaces, and rushed international breaks can combine into an injury list that decimates a team.
Science shows that muscle injuries spike when training loads are inconsistent. If a squad goes from a heavy pre-season program to a heavy schedule with multiple games in short periods, the risk rises.
Clubs that go on long tours or play too many intense friendlies sometimes pay for it with higher early-season injury rates.
Travel, jet lag, and insufficient recovery also add to the problem. Put simply, you can’t build a season’s fitness in a few manic weeks.
Beyond fitness, some clubs have poor medical or sports science setups. Teams that can’t handle load management are at a disadvantage.
This season, teams with limited depth who sustained mid-summer injuries suddenly found themselves scraping for points.
With fewer players able to rotate, fatigue compounds and mistakes multiply. It’s a physical cascade that starts off the pitch and shows up in the standings.
The Brutal Fixture List – How Early Season Tests Can Break You
Sometimes clubs are simply handed a tough opening run. The fixture list can be cruel. Facing multiple top sides in quick succession is a real challenge.
Newly promoted teams also face the sudden jump in intensity and quality, they can be burned quickly by a run of top-six opponents.
The Premier League and fantasy writers flag early fixture difficulty because it matters. Clubs with tough starts feed pressure into managers and players before they have had the chance to settle.
Teams with easier early runs build confidence, grab points, and feed a self-fulfilling cycle of momentum. That makes the fixture list a non-trivial factor.
The psychology of a brutal early schedule is subtle. A club that loses two early games to elite teams might still be tactically okay, but the perception changes.
The crowd at home grows edgy. The press stamps “underperforming” on the front pages.
That emotional pressure can make players rush decisions and managers tinker, which then becomes a bigger problem.
Why Fan Frustration Spreads Faster Online Now
Two or three bad results used to be a micro story. Now it’s global. Social media compresses drama.
Supporters used to vent in pubs and on message boards now have platforms with train-like momentum. Negative narratives gain followers quickly.
When the crowd and online mood turn sour, even routine mistakes feel like confirmation of deep rot.
Managers and players read this stuff. They can be human. A manager reading a stream calling for their firing, or a player seeing comments predicting their downfall, is not immune.
Sometimes the board panics because sponsors or stakeholders start nagging. The pressure becomes corporate as well as emotional.
Fans have always influenced football, but the pace and volume of today’s reaction is damaging when a team is fragile.
The stadium that was once a fortress can feel colder after a series of social media storms.
The human side of football is compressed into 280-character verdicts and reaction videos; that speed doesn’t allow for patient problem-solving.
Money Isn’t Always the Answer Why Some Rich Clubs Still Flop
There is a myth that money solves everything. It doesn’t. Club success depends on coherent strategy, stable ownership, and a footballing identity as much as it depends on investment.
Some high-spending clubs lose sight of identity. They sign names that make headlines but don’t build a structure.
Ownership that changes managers frequently without allowing a project to breathe creates cycles of short-termism. Those cycles build imbalanced squads and erode club culture.
Smaller clubs that have clear scouting, solid coaching, and a stable identity can outperform expectations. Spending helps, but it needs to be married to the right long-term decisions.
This season we have already seen examples of clubs that spent without cohesion and teams with modest budgets punching above their weight.
The lesson that money is an input, not a solution. It amplifies good management and magnifies poor management.
Comparing With Past Seasons: Are Early Struggles Becoming More Common?
If you look back at recent seasons, there are plenty of teams that started poorly and recovered. There are also teams that never recovered.
The difference often comes down to leadership, the board’s willingness to allow a fix, and how quickly the manager can get the group to respond to basics.
Football is cyclical. But the early-season panic culture feels newer. With more media coverage and instant analytics, the small sample sizes of August and September are treated like definitive statements.
Historically, points from the opening 10 games remain useful but are far from absolute. Teams can run into trouble or come out of it, depending on timing and how the club reacts.
But statistically, early points tallies are predictive to an extent, but they’re not destiny. That’s the practical takeaway, a poor start is serious, but it can be overcome if the right steps are taken quickly and sensibly.
What Clubs Can Do to Fix the Rot Before It’s Too Late
If you’re a club staring at ugly headlines, the fixes fall into practical categories.
First, simplify. When tactics fail, you don’t invent new theories. Go back to role clarity. Define responsibilities in plain terms. Players need simple rules they can execute under pressure.
Second, stabilize the dressing room. That means clear communication and re-aligning the senior group.
If the captain or elders are fractured, bring them in and make them part of the solution. Public unity matters. Private honesty matters more.
Third, prioritize fitness and rotation. Don’t risk players for a single early result that costs three months of form.
Load management, clear recovery protocols, and sensible rotation reduce injury risk and fatigue.
Fourth, be disciplined in the market. January signings can help, but they’re often expensive and risky.
If you must buy mid-season, target profiles that fill a clear hole, not headline names that feed the media.
Fifth, manage expectations. Boards and owners should be brutally honest about timelines. Fans want ambition. But panic decisions rarely fix structural problems.
Sometimes clubs just need to calm down and make good choices instead of rushing into panic moves.
Managers often find that going back to basics, tightening the defence, keeping the ball simple, and working on set-pieces, can steady keep the team going.
The challenge is doing that without losing sight of the bigger plan for the season.
Do emergency January signings work? It works sometimes. They can provide a spark and cover a specific hole. But clubs that rely on January to fix a flawed summer are often admitting they failed earlier.
The safer route is to have a plan that anticipates injuries and rotation, so January is for polishing rather than patching.
The Bitter Truth of the Premier League
The Premier League refuses to wait. That’s its charm and its cruelty. Small margins decide the early narrative, and a sense of crisis can snowball quickly.
But remember, early weeks don’t judge the whole season yet. They are just snapshot, and snapshots can mislead.
Some clubs will respond, simplify, and climb away from the worry. Others will double down on vanity solutions and sink deeper.
The teams that get through early pressure are usually the ones that keep their heads, look after the players, and make make decisions instead of chasing headlines.
This season will surprise most of us. Teams with resources may struggle if they lack planning, and smaller clubs that built right may sit comfortably.
The only real certainty is that the Premier League will remain unforgiving. Still, the human side of the game gives room for recovery. Managers are not robots. Players are not stats. Boards are not immutable.
At the end of the day, football asks one simple thing, can you get results this week? But behind that question is everything. preparation, clarity, morale, fitness, and judgment.
The teams that answer yes week after week tend to be the ones who built properly in the summer, who fixed early cracks with honesty, and who never treated money as a substitute for a plan.
Notes on the examples and quotes used above
• David Moyes’ pre-season comments about not having the players he wanted were a blunt pre-season warning that some clubs’ readiness issues are structural.
• Fixture difficulty across the early weeks matters and is tracked by official Premier League discussions and fantasy analysts; a brutal early run can shift pressure onto clubs fast.
• The early 2025–26 season has already shown teams with troubling starts, including clubs struggling to score or win in their opening fixtures and others facing back-to-back heavy opposition.
Examples and match context were reported across match previews and early-season coverage.
• Erling Haaland captured a common player sentiment this season when he said bluntly that performances “are not good enough,” reflecting internal frustration that often follows poor early results.
Over to you, which clubs do you think can turn their slow start around, and which ones are in real trouble this season? Drop your thoughts in the comments section.
