Ten Premier League players to watch again in 2024-25

The new season is upon us and usually the players we get excited about are the new arrivals. There’s nothing quite as intoxicating as the unknown and you can project your own sense of optimism onto a player you don’t know much about: they could be just what your team needs.

But what about the players who are already here? Those who also carry with them a sense of the unknown, who enter 2024-25 after a difficult 2023-24? Will these players of great promise and, in some cases, absolutely proven, bounce back and show us their worth? Or was last season the beginning of the end and the promise will not be fulfilled?

Here are 10 players to watch again this Premier League season…

You always keep an eye on potential new stars at international tournaments, even in this era where it’s very difficult for a player to go completely unnoticed. However, during the Netherlands’ Euro 2024 games, you were often impressed by their direct, skilful and impulsive left winger and wondered whether he could do the job in the Premier League.

That left winger was, of course, Cody Gakpo, but it was easy to mistake him for someone new, given that he was a relatively peripheral figure at Liverpool last season. He never really had what you would call a “run” in the team (his longest run of Premier League appearances was four, at the end of the season) and when he did play, it was rarely on the left.

In fact, he’s only started one league game on the left of an attacking trio, mostly coming through the middle, with Luis Diaz usually starting on the flank. As the graph above shows, he’s most productive when coming in from the left, so you wonder whether Arne Slot – who saw him in tighter spaces in the Eredivisie, where he played wide more often – will deploy him there more often.

The news that Erik ten Hag would be staying at Manchester United seemed like an extremely adverse development for Jadon Sancho: there seemed to be no way back for the winger after his falling out with the manager last season. But with relatively little fuss, the two apparently met up in the summer, bygones were bygones, everyone shook hands and the situation was resolved in a pleasantly adult manner.

Now that Sancho is back in the fold, where will he play? One thing United are not short of is wide options: there’s Amad, Marcus Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho and Antony, plus Joshua Zirkzee, who can play anywhere across the front line. Could he play through the middle? Rasmus Hojlund, Zirkzee and Rashford are more proven options there. Repairing his personal relationship with Ten Hag was one thing, but claiming a first-team spot could be even harder.

You could include about half of Chelsea’s squad in this list, but for the sake of brevity and variety, we’ll stick with one. Moises Caicedo definitely improved towards the end of last season, peaking with that extraordinary goal midway through the final game, but for the majority of the season he was nowhere near the player Chelsea thought they were buying.

The graph above shows the difference in his output between his last season on the south coast and his first at Stamford Bridge. The numbers say a few things: that he was worse at basically everything after Chelsea spent over £100m on him, but also that he is capable of much better.

Does having a season of experience, playing under a new manager and the pressure of a transfer fee being a little further away mean he’ll be closer to 2022-23 than 2023-24 in 2024-25?

Jack Grealish is said to be back after a lacklustre season that not only saw him become a peripheral player at Manchester City but also left out of England’s Euro 2024 squad. The end of last term was so poor that he was barely considered for selection, but over the summer he appears to have reset himself and is back to playing again.

“From what I’ve seen so far, a week here and pre-season on tour, I love it,” Pep Guardiola said recently. The City boss tends to be quite ruthless with his selection: despite Jeremy Doku having a strong first season and there being a plethora of other wide options in City’s squad, Grealish will be back as a key man again if his pre-season work continues.

The accepted wisdom is that Arsenal won’t win the Premier League until they sign an elite centre-forward, but that’s not entirely true as long as they can get goals from other sources. Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz and Leandro Trossard held up their end of that bargain last season, all improving on their tally from the previous season, but Gabriel Martinelli scored just six times and was on the bench more often than not, at least after March.
The above graph indicates that his underlying numbers haven’t changed much in recent seasons: he’s basically taking chances at the same rate and taking roughly the same number of shots, the difference being that last season he didn’t convert as many of those shots into goals as he used to. Arsenal will be Manchester City’s main challenger again, so if Martinelli can return to the form he had a few seasons ago, it would go a long way in helping the giants overhaul their form.

Ivan Toney is still at Brentford, which seems odd and quite unexpected. That could change before the end of the transfer window, but there aren’t many obvious places for him to go – certainly if he wants to make the significant step up and stay in England.

While his Euro 2024 cameos were certainly impressive, his domestic season after returning from his playing ban has been rather strange: he scored in four of his first five games back but failed to find the net in the remaining 12 games. Has this put teams off? Are they simply hoping he’ll be a free agent next summer? It’s hard to say, but it’s been a strange summer for a player who was openly talking about moving on for much of last season.

Given the circumstances, it feels like the work Sean Dyche did last season wasn’t fully appreciated: taking a club with an incredible points deduction, who were also experiencing ownership uncertainty, to comfortable safety was remarkable enough. That he essentially did it without a functioning centre-forward is even more so.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin looks like the sort of striker you’d design in a lab, but the perfect theory didn’t work last season: he scored seven goals in 26 games, which isn’t awful on the surface, but two of those were penalties and he underperformed on his xG more than anyone else in the Premier League. Will this turn out to be just a statistical quirk, or a sign of something a little more serious?

Speaking of lab-designed footballers, Evan Ferguson looks like what would happen if you asked a mad scientist to build an Alan Shearer for the TikTok generation. Big, strong, powerful shot, a good touch: basically perfect, in theory. However, this will be Ferguson’s third season in Brighton’s first team, and while his first (10 goals in 25 appearances) suggested the eye test was right and he could be the Premier League’s next great centre-forward, his second (six goals in 36 appearances) has given cause to wonder a little more.

Ferguson doesn’t turn 20 until October, so absolutely no one is panicking, and the start and end of his 2023-24 campaign have been disrupted by injuries. He may not be fit enough for the opening weeks of the season, but when he is ready, it will be fascinating to see how he performs under Fabian Hurzeler.

This week, Ange Postecoglou ruled out the possibility of using Dejan Kulusevski as a central striker, either as a classic No 9 or a false No 9. Having just signed Dominic Solanke and with Richarlison and Son Heung-min as options there too, this came as no surprise. The question it raised is: where does Kulusevski fit in?

For most of his first year at Spurs, his role was firmly set on the right flank, but by the end of last season he was everywhere: on the right, on the left, in midfield, as a No. 10.

That uncertainty could increase this season, with Solanke’s arrival presumably meaning Son will move permanently back to the left and youngsters Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall providing more options in midfield. Does he need to settle into a definitive position? Will he be Tottenham’s attacking Swiss Army knife, slotting in wherever he is needed? Could he take the place of James Maddison after his indifferent form following his return from injury?

Nottingham Forest have been after Ibrahim Sangare for a long time, so when they finally secured his signature for a club record £30m last summer, hopes were high. However, Sangare’s first season at Forest started poorly, fell off a bit in the middle and the less said about the end, the better.

He looked uncertain initially, the quick, decisive passing forward that Forest thought he had was decidedly absent. Then in November he contracted malaria while on international duty, which is enough to put a broomstick in the spokes of anyone’s season, so he went to the Africa Cup of Nations but returned with an injury and therefore missed another month. By then, other midfielders were ahead of him in the pecking order and he barely played for the rest of the season.

But everything Forest saw in him is still there and, while there was some suggestion they should cut their losses this summer, they look set to persist with him. If they were right, then he is certainly one to keep an eye on.

(Main photos: Getty Images)