New WSL season starts tomorrow, nü thread. Hoping that, post Euro-glory, this thread will get some more traction than last season.
First game of the season is Arsenal vs Brighton tomorrow night. You should expect a comfortable Arsenal win but at the same time friendlies are completely behind closed doors for the women, don’t even know who they played, so don’t know the extent of each teams’ preparation.
Elsewhere Man United play Reading, City are at Villa Park, West Ham play Everton in probably the tightest match up of the weekend, Leicester host Spurs and newly-promoted Liverpool host Chelsea and will probably get battered.
Not gonna do a whole season prediction thing like in the men’s threads but, much as it pains me to say, it’s likely this season is gonna be a quite straightforward one in terms of outcomes. Chelsea won by a point last season over Arsenal but have strengthened with 4 new signings - defenders Eve Perisset and Kadeisha Buchanan, and midfielders Johanna Kaneryd and Jelena Cankovic. Meanwhile Arsenal have only signed one player this window, forward Lina Hurtig, and tried to make a couple other signings but didn’t manage to pull it off. The one thing we’ve got to hope for is that this is Jonas Eidevall’s second season as Arsenal coach - he made a couple mistakes last season which cost us, which I think he’ll have learnt from, and he’s also had a full season to bed in his style. My prediction is it’ll be close between us but not as close as last time, and Chelsea will probably be at the top for most of the season and we’ll be fruitlessly chasing, which isn’t all that fun really. But here’s hoping I’m wrong. The only saving grace is that Chelsea tried to smash the world transfer record (again) to sign Grace Geyoro from PSG but weren’t successful. That said, they’ll probably do it in January so whatever.
Elsewhere Man City have lost literally all their midfielders. They’ve brought a lot of players in but I can’t see how they’re going to replace a midfield of Kiera Walsh (off to Barca), Georgia Stanway (Bayern) and Caroline Weir (Real Madrid) with anything approaching similar quality. I would’ve said that would open the door of the final CL qualification spot to United, but just today they’ve gone and sold their best midfielder (Jackie Groenen) to PSG, and the English transfer window is already closed so no chance to replace her. So I would expect 3rd place to finish some distance behind 2nd this season - it’ll probably still be City or United who manage it, but the door is open to a Spurs or maybe West Ham or Everton, depending on how their transfer windows went (honestly I don’t know, please fill us in if you do).
AOB?
