The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.
You might think it would be Ruben Amorim - looking as lost as ever on the touchline as Manchester City eased to victory in the derby – who would spend hours crouched low to the ground contemplating that thought.
But Pep Guardiola is just as stuck. He is also hovering in the liminal space between glories past and a future he cannot quite make out. There are more similarities between the two managers than it might seem.
Both know the era of positional football is over, that the next great step is either about to reveal itself or is already in our midst and we are simply too close to see it.
Both managers, albeit in very different ways, are keen to embrace something more urgent and direct, having recognised that English football is rejecting the era of static possession and moving towards transitions, counter-attacks, and long balls either by feet or by hand.
The problem, for controlling obsessives like Guardiola and Amorim, is that nobody seems able to work out how you master a tactical landscape that’s leaning into chaos; how to maintain order when disorder is part of the vibe.
This is why we have a Man City team that can thrash Man United with a surprisingly good Borussia Dortmund impression - getting Erling Haaland in behind over and over again - and why that same team can have its midfield carved open by Tottenham Hotspur and Brighton.
Man Utd have more fundamental issues than that, of course, most obviously that their 3-4-3 formation simply doesn’t work in the Premier League. Yet Amorim is fighting a similar battle to Guardiola.
The ultra-vertical trio of Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha, and Benjamin Sesko is designed to race forward in the transition. And it works - except it also completely severs the forwards from the rest of the team, stretching the shape too long, just as Man City’s new attacking midfield (Tijjani Reijnders and Rayan Cherki or Phil Foden) has disconnected the middle from the back.
Liverpool have the same problem. Florian Wirtz is a signing that follows the new trend, hence the wild end-to-end nature of their games this season and Arne Slot’s reliance on late winners. Liverpool’s 100% record does not remotely reflect how their games have felt. The way they are winning is unsustainable.
The way Arsenal win, contrary to popular perception, might be.
All over the division teams are playing more direct football and the only notable exception is Mikel Arteta’s side, whose tendency to play risk-averse, set-piece-focused football looks smarter the more the rest of the division descends into something formless.
If Arsenal do win the title they will do it by effectively outlasting their rivals, sticking to principles of positional football (albeit with the twist of set-piece proficiency) when the challengers have moved on from possession. It’s looking like a good bet right now, or it would if we didn’t know Arsenal would go through stodgy patches.
A safer one is to predict carnage, a lower points tally to win the title, and possibly one or two dark horses coming good.
If there was ever a year for Tottenham to grind their way to unprecedented success this is it, Thomas Frank’s astute tactical mind and rejection of ideology potentially perfect to sneak through the middle while others flounder.
Lower down, Bournemouth’s perfection of the mad-transition football under Andoni Iraola could make them the next Nottingham Forest, or maybe Everton’s conservatism under David Moyes is the antidote.
On the eve of the new season it looked like the Premier League middle class would be squeezed, following enormous summer spending sprees by all of the ‘Big Six’. Just a month later that prediction feels premature.
We await the new world, uncertainty and insecurity the defining feeling of the time. It is fertile ground that feels very similar to that of 2015/16, when the old ways were over but the tactical revolutions of Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp were yet to arrive.
And so in this strange limbo a nagging thought emerges. If a Leicester City miracle could ever happen again, wouldn’t it be in a season that looks just like this one?
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