- The Assist
- Posts
- The Assist: The new season is here!
The Assist: The new season is here!
Look ahead to the Community Shield, the season start in the EFL Championship and beyond.
The 2025/26 season is well and truly upon us and we thought it was high time we brought back The Assist, your weekly guide to all the top games you need to follow across the weekend in your FotMob app.
Whether you’re a new reader or a returning regular, welcome.
Traditional curtain raiser
In England, the new dawn is celebrated, as always, with the traditional half-friendly, half-competitive contest between last season’s FA Cup and Premier League winners played at Wembley.
Long gone are the days when the sides would share the honours in the event of a draw, the Community Shield is now more akin to the Super Cup-format that outsiders will recognise as being aped in most other football playing nations.
Arne Slot’s all-conquering Reds have famously spent big this summer and fans will be keen to see how new signings like Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekititke and Jeremie Frimpong fare at the home of English football.
For FA Cup holders Crystal Palace, it might just be nice to get some game time under their belts after the ongoing saga around their qualification for European competition has dominated thoughts over the summer. In the afterglow of their maiden major trophy win back in May, Palace were Liverpool’s opponents on the final day of the season, when the latter finally lifted the Premier League trophy in front of the Kop at Anfield.
On Sunday, one of these sides will get their hands on another piece of silverware.
The Championship returns
After Leagues One and Two got underway last weekend, it’s time for England’s always hyper-competitive second tier to catch up. Proper football is back.
And in a division full of historic clubs where the difference in financial clout can be massive, there’s a host of interesting match ups across the opening weekend - starting with Ipswich Town’s trip to newly promoted Birmingham City on Friday evening.
While there’s no sign of Tom Brady or his fellow investors getting a squad number at Birmingham, as Ed Sheeran has for the Tractor Boys (No. 17 if you’re asking), there will be plenty of eyes on this one. Will the cash-injected Blues be able to compete with the kind of sides who, like Ipswich, have returned to the division with their coffers swelled by parachute payments from time spent in the top flight?
Southampton vs. Wrexham, another clash between a side dropping in to the league and a side just coming up, takes place on Saturday lunchtime - read on for more on that one in the section below.
And on Sunday, crisis club Sheffield Wednesday start what will probably be a very long and fraught campaign when they go to Leicester City, where fan discontent is also on the rise after their relegation and a perceived lack of boardroom strategy when it comes to the rebuild.
The fact that they can meet as equals on the opening weekend of the Championship season is one of the main reasons why Rob McElhenney decided to buy a football club. You just don’t get this sort of thing in the NFL.
Wrexham have bought well this summer, adding experience and proven class, most notably in Conor Coady, Kieffer Moore and Danny Ward. But I do think that talk of a fourth consecutive promotion and an ascent to the Premier League is a little hasty. I’m still quite impressed that they burned through League One so quickly, I really thought they’d get jammed up in there for a few years while they continued to transition. Bigger sides than them (Leeds, Sheffield United, Nottingham Forest) have all struggled to get out. Speaking as a Southend United fan who saw his side bounce from League Two to the Championship in successive seasons (we are now the ones to be marooned in the fifth flight) I can tell you that the gulf in quality is vast, vaster now than it was back when we were there in 2006.
Southampton have their own North American angle in Damion Downs, a towering striker recruited from FC Köln in the summer. He scored a neat finish from a tricky angle in the dying stages of a pre-season defeat to Espanyol and could be exactly what the Saints need. They’ve also brought in a new manager, Will Still, the Belgian born super-nerd who has clawed his way up the game from humble beginnings and who had a very reasonable season at Lens last year, finishing 8th in Ligue 1. Lens dramatically underperformed their xG, scoring nearly 12 goals fewer than the numbers suggested. They were unfortunate not to qualify for Europe.
A prediction? Wrexham could win this game on a tide of goodwill and momentum. Southampton will finish higher in the table.
Iain Macintosh is one of the most prominent voices in UK football podcasts and can be heard discussing the top news story every week day as part of his new venture, Route One - listen here or wherever you get your podcasts
North of the Border
The new season is already a week old in terms of Premiership games played in Scotland and four-time reigning champions Celtic are one of only three sides on maximum points.
On Matchday Two, the Hoops travel to Aberdeen, the side who looked closest to disrupting the Old Firm hegemony for the majority of last season. The Dons eventually slipped down the table but they did stop Celtic winning a domestic treble by beating them on penalties in the Scottish Cup final.
Celtic will be out for revenge, then, but Aberdeen could do with laying down a marker against one of the big sides, with the SPFL likely to be more competitive this season. They found that out last weekend, losing 2-0 to a Hearts side who are now enjoying a boom having come under the minority ownership of Tony Bloom, the mind behind Brighton and Union St. Gilloise’s recent successes.
Derby Day in Florida
Over in the United States, where the football, sorry soccer season rests for no one, MLS returns following the completion of the mid-season distraction that is the league phase of the Leagues Cup, the annual competition where MLS sides face off against Mexico’s top club teams. To celebrate, the highlight of the round is the all-Floridian tie between Eastern Conference rivals Orlando City and Inter Miami.
Both of the franchises managed to progress having gone unbeaten in the Leagues Cup league phase, but Miami did see star turn Lionel Messi take a knock that kept him out of their midweek game, and possibly rules out any involvement for the goat at the weekend as well.
Instead, keep an eye on Miami’s latest import Rodrigo De Paul. The Argentine has hit the ground running with two assists and a goal in the three games he’s played since his move from Atlético Madrid.
Orlando beat their state rivals convincingly when they last met back in May (3-0) and with the attacking pairing of Luis Muriel and Martín Ojeda scoring five goals between them in midweek, the Lions will be looking to them to do the business again.
Telstar, a club formed in 1963 shortly after the satellites of the same name were launched by NASA in the United States have not played in the Eredivisie, the Dutch top division, since the 1977/78 season!
Following an astounding play-off victory in May, that saw the White Lions belie their seventh-placed ranking to defeat top flight Willem II, the modest club with a home ground that holds around 5,500 people are back, promoted for the first time in nearly half a century. And they start with something of a baptism of fire - an away trip to Ajax, the most decorated club in the Netherlands.
Watch out for a certain Ronald Koeman Jr., who will likely line up in goal for the newly promoted side. He is the son of exactly who you think he is.
For a more in-depth, overarching look ahead to the new campaign in the EFL Championship, check out the thoughts of broadcaster and lower league expert Sanny Rudravajhala.
Following their back-to-back-to-back promotions, Wrexham’s ‘Hollywood fairytale’ will face it’s toughest test yet in the Championship, but with a very different looking squad going in to the season, Graham Ruthven argues that anything could happen.
How will the Bees get on without the manager who got them to, and then established them in the promised land of the Premier League? That’s a question Alex Roberts has been looking in to this week.
Get your weekly schedule in order and add your club's fixtures directly to your calendar. Just head to a club's team page, then scroll down to "Sync fixtures to your calendar" at the bottom.
Not using the default calendar app on your phone? You can choose from multiple calendar app options on team pages via the web.