Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football in England.
This was the weekend when the Premier League’s 2025-26 campaign began with wins for the usual title-challenging suspects — that will be Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal — and saw Sunderland make a raucous return to the top flight with an emphatic 3-0 victory over West Ham United.
Here, we will evaluate Arsenal’s largely unheralded victory over Manchester United at Old Trafford, try to make sense of Pep Guardiola’s too-many-players conundrum at Manchester City and reflect on a dispiriting start for three clubs who might already be afflicted by early-season feelings of dread.
There was something striking about Mikel Arteta in the build-up to the new season. In his media briefings he looked consciously upbeat — “super excited”, “can’t wait”, a lot of smiles, radiating positivity, appearing more determined than ever to dictate the tone and mood around his Arsenal team.
At the final whistle at Old Trafford yesterday, he looked elated. There were aspects of their 1-0 win over Manchester United he didn’t enjoy — the number of balls they lost in midfield — but what he loved was the way his players responded to their mistakes, “time after time in an incredible way”.
