Manchester City are odds-on Premier League favourites but that confidence looks misplaced

Manchester City will start the season as favourites to win the Premier League, but this doesn’t necessarily make them the ‘value bet’.

Such is the nature of modern football that the reaction was always going to be distinctly binary, but there was little positive that supporters could take from Erling Haaland’s debut for Manchester City in the Community Shield against Liverpool. For the whole of the summer, it has felt as though there has been something approaching a cloud of dread hanging over the Premier League at the thought of this Nordic goal machine joining a team that has been at the cusp of sweeping absolutely everything before it.

Those fears may now have been alleviated slightly. It’s not that Haaland is either incompetent or unable to improve, but his brainwaves seemed so out of synch with his team-mates that it felt plausible to believe that they were operating on entirely different frequencies.

And with less than a week to go before the start of the new Premier League season, that’s more than a minor headache for Pep Guardiola. Points dropped in August cost as much as points dropped in May, and in a climate in which a final points tally in the mid-90s can still not be enough to lift the Premier League title, that matters. There’s no space for a slow start.

Football loves its simple equations, and ‘Manchester City+Erling Haaland = more goals and consequently more trophies’ has a tempting clarity, but as the Community Shield demonstrated it’s seldom quite as simple as that. Coupled with the sales of Gabriel Jesus and Raheem Sterling to Arsenal and Chelsea, the arrival of Haaland is a remoulding of the way in which Manchester City attack, moving from False Nines to Very Definitely A Number Nine.

But such a change requires a lot of work and buy-in from the player’s team-mates, and even with the very best intentions of all involved, it may take some time for this adaptation to run completely smoothly.

Of course, Manchester City are about considerably more than this one particular player, and City’s other attacking arrival looked in far better shape to be integrated into the team. Julian Alvarez’s transfer had been agreed in the January transfer window, but he didn’t arrive from River Plate until the end of the season.

The surge of Haalandmania over this summer has left the Argentinian forward somewhat overlooked, but he showed few signs of being unable to cope with the physicality of the Premier League in that…