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Archives and past articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com. As everyone knows, the best thing about the Premier League is its absurd depth. In England you have an entire country where practically every single town worships. Born and raised by his mother in Manhattan, New York City. His parents divorced when he was two months. His mother (as well as his father) worked in. · Photo: Mike Windle/WireImage, Pierre Roussel/Getty, Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch, and EALEX Photo/Getty Images for SXSW A comedy boom has to.

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The Good Little Teams (And Chelsea): Our 2. Premier League Preview, Pt. As everyone knows, the best thing about the Premier League is its absurd depth. In England you have an entire country where practically every single town worships their local club with an intensity that makes Nebraska’s passion for Cornhusker football look like Nebraska’s passion for Cornhusker soccer.

Because there are so many limey bastards who live and die with the sport they created, and because the ancestors of those limey, soccer- mad bastards conquered much of the known world and exported the sport they created, and because of the insatiable interest both domestic and global in these limey bastards’ home league, the Premier League is the biggest, most famous, most valuable soccer league in the world. All of which explains the unfathomable amount of money that pours into the EPL, which in turn makes each of the league’s clubs incredibly rich, which in turn allows the clubs to spare no expense in building up the best squads money can buy. The Premier League is good because it is rich, and it is rich because it is good. However, not every Premier League club is created equal.

Nor does money necessarily have a one- to- one correlation to any given team’s quality or entertainment value. There are a handful of clubs up and down the league table that do a good job maximizing their relative spending power on savvy player and coaching decisions, which allows them to meet or exceed expectations, whether those be to win the title (like Chelsea last season) or simply to avoid relegation (like last year’s Bournemouth). The flip- side of those smart clubs are the ones that fuck things up and do worse than they could, slipping further down the table than their assembled talent or budget would imply. Sunderland last season were a good example of this.) Then you have teams somewhere in the middle, where either through mismanagement or bad luck or the realistic limitations of their relative size compared to their competitors, they come up with good though slightly flawed teams that might be pretty fun to watch but usually aren’t quite running at optimum efficiency.

This post is for those last kinds of teams. The following clubs vary pretty drastically in terms of history, economic might, and expectations for where they’ll finish in the table. What they share is a similar level of entertainment value that puts them above the dregs of the league, but also certain weaknesses or flaws that prevent them from attaining must- watch status. Being that this is still the Premier League and thus full of compelling teams from top to almost- bottom, all of these teams are worth paying attention to this season. Just maybe not as much as a few others. THE DO BETTER BUNCHChelsea.

I know that Chelsea are the reigning champions, and also that they are third- favorites to win the Premier League this season. I know that they have one of the game’s best managers, one of the EPL’s very best players, and a (recent) history of sustained success. I would not be all that surprised if they won the league again this year, and I’m not saying that they are bad or boring or anything like that. However, Chelsea have had a very strange offseason, and if they don’t make any big changes in the near future, I don’t think they’ll be a particularly fun team to follow. It’s hard to ignore the echoes in this Chelsea team of another Chelsea team of recent vintage. Just two years ago, the Blues were coming off a comfortable title victory, were led by a great manager, and were curiously passive in the summer transfer market, most likely believing that stability and continuity would pull them through and see them to another successful season. What happened instead was one of the most shocking collapses in recent memory as the team got off to a horrendous start to the year and endured almost unceasing torrents of public criticism from a wounded and vindictive José Mourinho, which led to the players eventually more or less mutinying against their manager, getting him fired and themselves an embarrassing tenth- place finish in the table. Watch Mean Creek Full Movie here.

The odds that this year ends as disastrously as that one are pretty small, but the risk of disappointment is real. From a personnel standpoint, Chelsea really haven’t improved their roster this summer, and arguably have even gotten a little worse. They’ve strengthened their defensive line with good young center backs Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen, but they’ve failed to beef up the squad anywhere else. In midfield they lost Nemanja Matić and replaced him with Tiémoué Bakayoko. Bakayoko will probably be really good in the same way that N’Golo Kanté is really good, but his addition is sort of redundant when they already have Kanté.

Matić was a good combination of hard- working, strong, smart, and skilled at passing. Bakayoko is better at the defensive and physical aspects of the game than Matić but his lack of passing ability might limit the attacking prowess of a team that was already fairly uncreative in the middle of the field already.

Either Bakayoko starts next to Kanté and Chelsea suffer attacking- wise, or Cesc Fàbregas comes in alongside those two or in place of one and the team suffers due to Fàbregas’s defensive shortcomings. Either way, it’s not ideal. It’s the same story on the forward line.

Chelsea did invest heavily up top by bringing in Álvaro Morata from Real Madrid, but he’s coming in to replace Diego Costa, who has been excellent for Chelsea. Costa is big and strong and fast and tricky with his feet and a tiger in the box and a bull with his back to goal while holding up the ball—all traits that made him perfect for the highly demanding role Chelsea manager Antonio Conte instructs his strikers to perform. Meanwhile Morata is certainly good, but since he’s never been a regular starter anywhere no one really knows if he can do all the big and little things Conte will request of him. And from a sheer entertainment factor perspective, there’s no way Morata will be as diabolicallyendearing as Costa.

On both functional and aesthetic grounds, Chelsea’s attack has almost certainly downgraded. The transfer window is still open, of course, and Chelsea’s shock loss to Burnley in their season opener might wind up being a blessing in disguise if it allows Conte to convince the moneymen at the club to cough up the dough to bring in the necessary reinforcements. They probably need another central midfielder, at least one more wing back, and could use another forward, too. Chelsea got away with riding their thin squad last year because they didn’t have European play to sap the legs of their regular starters. They’ll need more depth this season to cope with all the additional games that will come from Champions League participation, and if they don’t make the right moves fast, this season could be something of a replay of 2.

Newcastle United. Newcastle, comparatively one of the bigger teams in England and by proxy the world, got relegated from the Premier League two seasons ago in humiliating fashion, and it was very funny.

Then they paid out the ass to keep hold of most of their proven EPL- quality players and coasted to promotion. Now they’re back in the league where they belong with basically the same team that brought them there, hoping to reestablish themselves as safe midtable denizens. It could probably go either way.

If there is a star at Newcastle it is probably their manager, Rafa Benítez. He has proven his ability time and again as a pretty damn good tactical manager who nonetheless often runs the risk of pissing off either his players or his club’s higher- up types with his famously prickly personality. And for a good while now, Benítez has not even tried hiding his frustrations with Newcastle’s leadership.

The problem, in the manager’s mind, is that the club hasn’t done enough to improve in the summer.