The World Cup Ends Soon - The Fuck Am I Meant to Do With My Life? Watch the Premier League? Oh Dear God

We're As Unexcited For The Premier League Season As We've Ever Been... Here's Why

Well, yesterday was weird. For the first time in very nearly a month, we weren’t treated to a World Cup game on Wednesday evening, leaving millions scratching their heads and trying to remember what they did before the world’s biggest sporting event came to town.

Worse still, British wildcard Arthur Fery won in straight sets to reach the Wimbledon semi-finals, a game which was done by about six o’clock, meaning we couldn’t shift to another sport to get us our fix of late-night drama.

With just eight games and 10 days left of the greatest show on earth, we football fans are slowly, painfully having to face a question we procrastinated on since the start of the tournament – what do we do with ourselves when it ends?

There is nothing like the World Cup: the moments, the outrageous goals, the unlikely storylines and even less likely underdogs, combined with the passion, pain, joy and suffering of supporting your own nation, all add up to an experience incomparable to literally anything else, which means that when it ends, the earth’s population of 7 billion people enters a worldwide depressive episode.

Does anyone else feel like the Premier League shouldn't be starting in 6 weeks?

— Harry (@HarryPascoe6) July 9, 2026

To make matters worse, the ever more divisive Premier League starts in a mere six weeks, creeping up on us when for the entire summer, many of us have put off even thinking about it for a blissful couple of months. Will it even be watchable anymore?

Different Worlds

Naturally, international and domestic football are two very different worlds. For the most part, national teams meet up four or five times a year and, the majority of the time, play hugely one-sided games – international opponents rarely play at similar levels.

On the other hand, club football is where the majority of a player’s legwork is done – 38 league games a season, and with at least two other games in each cup competition, it’s where you prove yourself as a player and as a person.

However, thanks to the vastly larger workload, different sides' approaches to the game can become dull, jarring, and at times frustrating, with Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal team of last season one of the finest examples of recent years.

Their preference for stoic defending and clean sheets over exciting attacking play quickly made them boring to watch, while their endlessly infuriating focus on scoring from corners, free kicks, and every other kind of set-piece quickly drew plenty of criticism and derision, with fans protesting that it wasn’t the right way to play football. They have an excellent point – as soon as Gabriel Magalhaes is your star player, you need to take a long look at yourself in the mirror.

They may have won the league, as well as reached the Champions League final, but neither improved the club's global reputation. If anything, it got worse, as their reputation for the dark arts, corners, and defending started to precede them, along with sighs, looks of boredom and a swift pivot in conversation.

Find out the fixtures schedule for the first five weeks of the 2026/27 season 📺👇

— Premier League (@premierleague) July 7, 2026

The World Cup could not have been more different up to now. Thanks to the lack of familiarity between most of the teams at the tournament, each and every game has been an absorbing and adventurous contest, with even the smallest sides proving unpredictable and every nation bringing something new.

While Arsenal produced an endless string of 1-0 wins throughout last season, the World Cup has given us a smorgasbord of goalfests, from 2-2s to 5-1s, 4-2s to 7-0s.

Naturally, Arsenal are not the only side to blame when it comes to making the English game a chore to watch – in truth, most English sides now play with an over-coached, tentative, and most offensively boring approach, while Spanish, French, German and even Italian sides boast a more exciting style these days.

Whichever side of the fence you fall on, we share your sentiment that a small part of us doesn’t want the Premier League to restart.

Surprise Factor

Then we come to the ability of both competitions to surprise us. Not to go against the overarching argument or anything, but the last Premier League campaign proved one of the most unpredictable in years.

Sunderland finished seventh, qualifying for the Europa League in the process; Chelsea finished mid-table; Brighton and Bournemouth also secured European football; and Tottenham only avoided relegation on the final day of the season. By all accounts, a charmingly chaotic campaign that had us all on the edges of our seats.

However, campaigns like that only come around once in a blue moon, and many are expecting the 2026/27 campaign to return to the boring old status quo of big six, mid-table, and relegation fodder, with perhaps only a lower league FA Cup run as the saving grace of an otherwise drab season. It's all just a bit miserable, and it truly can leave you drained enough to become uninterested.

With the World Cup, on the other hand, it has always been impossible to know what to expect. Who saw Cape Verde avoiding a 90-minute defeat at the tournament and almost eliminating the reigning champions? Who predicted Germany to fall at the first knockout hurdle against Paraguay of all nations?

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT! 😱

Sidny Cabral's SUBLIME curler gets Cape Verde back on terms pic.twitter.com/JjrJH9zick

— ITV Football (@itvfootball) July 4, 2026

It’s not just this tournament either – unpredictability goes back a long way when it comes to the World Cup. Germany 7-1 Brazil? Lampard’s infamous 2010 ghost goal? Morocco reaching the 2022 semi-finals? Zidane’s headbutt?

Of course, you can never predict exactly what drama is going to unfold, but one thing you know for certain is that drama, on-field or off-field, is always going to occur. You do get the same in a sense when it comes to the Premier League, but never in terms of results; we never truly witness any huge surprises.

Instead, drama arrives in different forms: needless VAR controversies, raging managers in post-match press conferences, and off-the-record quotes somehow getting onto the record and going viral. In any event, the majority of the drama cannot be considered ‘football-related’, because that’s what the Premier League is. More shade than substance.

The Premier League is brilliant in so many ways – we all support a club, meaning that we have skin in the game, and that makes it very hard to unplug from it when it starts, regardless of how vehemently you may hate some aspects.

But when you place the World Cup and the English top flight, it really is no contest. The level of football, the range of styles, the potential for upset, the moments, and the excitement at each and every game are why the World Cup is known as the greatest sporting event on earth, and it is high time the Premier League took a leaf out of its book.

Identity Shift?

If the Premier League dispenses with the boring, overly cautious, absurdly tactical approach and simply allows players to play to their strengths, it instantly becomes more entertaining, and as if that weren't positive enough, the rest of the things that make the World Cup what it is would follow shortly after.

There is no doubting the quality of the Premier League – no other league has anywhere near the influence the Premier League has on the tournament, with 67 goals and 54 assists to its name. However, when you compare the type of football played by these players at the World Cup against how they operate for their clubs, the comparison is night and day.

🚨 𝗡𝗘𝗪: The Premier League is the highest-scoring league at the 2026 World Cup.

Players from Premier League clubs have scored 63 goals so far, more than any other league. pic.twitter.com/J9dQhRTcQL

— The Touchline | 𝐓 (@TouchlineX) July 8, 2026

But this insistence on excessively regimented, defence-heavy, unadventurous clowning around is fast losing its grasp on the English football-following public, and without an identity shift, the Premier League will slowly start to lose its appeal.

Granted, we’ll still watch it, but there’s as little hype for the upcoming as we’ve ever seen …