Barclays Premier League 2016-17 starts tomorrow and it will be one incredible season with new quality players and, more than ever, quality managers. Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Antonio Conte will battle it out with Arsene Wenger and the title holder Claudio Ranieri.
So let’s play the prediction game, or power ranking if you want to call it that, and see who will finish where in this BPL season. Will it be United with Pogba and Zlatan? Chelsea to reclaim the throne? City with their £50m signings?
Let’s go through the list from 10 to 1.
10 Southampton
The Saints lost Sadio Mane, Graziano Pelle and Victor Wanyama. And even with them, in 2015-16 they were hovering around the 10th position before their incredible March-April-May run which saw them win seven out of last ten and finish sixth. Four points less, and they would have been 9th.
With main players no longer at the Stadium of Light, expect Southampton to sink. So many things went their way in 2015-16 and if we’d only take that away their league positioning would have been much worse. Take away the players too, and you get a team which will be lucky if they don’t go back to the relegation candidate status which has been associated with them for many years.
