Xabi Alonso has made it very clear that Chelsea will not be signing a No 1 goalkeeper in this summer’s transfer window.

“I’m very happy with Rob (Sanchez), Mike (Penders) and Teddy (Sharman-Lowe),” the club’s new manager said in a press conference ahead of their pre-season match against Milan in Jakarta, Indonesia, last Saturday.

“Mike is a young goalkeeper who (had) a great season at Strasbourg (on loan for 2025-26). Rob, he has played many years in the club; in Chelsea, as well as the Premier League, he has experience. So to have this security in goal is important.”

The message, echoed in recent weeks by Chelsea sources speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, was clear: you Diogo Costa pushers, stand down.

Alonso’s team selections over the course of Chelsea’s five-game trip around Australia and East Asia have also created the expectation that Sanchez will begin his fourth season at Stamford Bridge as the starter ahead of Penders, who did not play a minute in last weekend’s double-header against Milan and Malaysian champions Johor Darul Ta’zim.

That stance will not satisfy the many Chelsea fans who have lobbied for some time to see an upgrade on the 28-year-old Spaniard, who has been benched on several occasions in the past three years and has failed to inspire much confidence among supporters, even in his better stretches of form.

Last season, Sanchez ranked eighth in the Premier League with 2.7 ‘goals prevented’ (defined by Opta as the number of goals that a goalkeeper was expected to concede as a proportion of the number of goals they actually conceded), but that relatively respectable level of performance has not translated into trust with many Chelsea followers.

Penders is positive by this metric too, ranking seventh in France’s Ligue 1 last season with 3.1 goals prevented. The previous season, his breakthrough campaign in Belgium’s top flight at Genk, yielded a total of 4.3.

Such statistics are more definitive over a much larger, multi-season sample size, but these numbers do at least give cause to believe that the 21-year-old could be a significantly better-than-average shot-stopper for Chelsea.

He already has the valuable endorsement of Christophe Lollichon, the club’s legendary former goalkeeping coach who worked with Petr Cech and Thibaut Courtois.

Lollichon saw Penders up close when his current employers, Dunkerque, faced Strasbourg in the French Cup last season and spoke to him afterwards.

Mike Penders impressed with his shot-stopping at Strasbourg last season (Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images)

“I saw a mature goalkeeper,” he said of the Belgian in an exclusive interview with The Athletic last month. “He has to improve with (the ball at) his feet, but at (his age), he’s very good. He has good positioning, he’s proactive and he wants to learn. I felt this attitude in our conversation. He asked me about the Premier League. We spoke for just 20 minutes but it was very interesting.

“This guy could be the next good one in Chelsea, because for a long time now the goalkeeper position is poor in Chelsea.”

Lollichon’s appraisal of Penders’ mindset was echoed by a Strasbourg source, who described the young Belgian as a hard worker, always eager to study video of his performances and ask the club’s coaches and analysts what he could do to improve, down to the finest technical details. That inner drive, coupled with his outgoing personality, made him well liked and respected.

Penders has just 78 senior professional league appearances to his name, however.

Cech had nearly double that figure when he arrived from French club Rennes as a 22-year-old in the summer of 2003. Courtois had been a league champion in Belgium and Spain, as well as a Champions League finalist, by the time Chelsea brought him back from three consecutive loan seasons at Atletico Madrid at that same age in 2014. So despite being only slightly older than Penders is now, both men were far more seasoned and polished.

None of the above means Penders is not ready to displace Sanchez sooner rather than later this season, but it does help to calibrate expectations.

“I think (competing for the No 1 spot) could be good for both of them,” says Matt Pyzdrowski, a former professional keeper and current coach who serves as goalkeeping analyst for The Athletic. “For Sanchez, it could light a fire under him that there’s a young guy who wants to learn, who’s very talented, and who will take his job if he doesn’t perform.”

Pyzdrowski likes what he saw from Penders at Strasbourg, particularly in adapting to a more expansive role in possession against a more testing level of opposition pressure.

“He’s always been a very modern goalkeeper,” he adds. “He loves playing very offensively in his position, both in the build-up and defensively. In build-up under Liam Rosenior at Strasbourg, he was playing like an inverted centre-back — very, very aggressive in his play, and he was very comfortable in that role.

“You could see his range of passing, specifically how he’s able to go, Ederson-esque, from defence to attack in a second and launch balls quite far up the field, but he’s comfortable with building out from the back as well.”

The graphic below maps Penders’ distribution in Ligue 1 last season.

His passing consisted largely of short balls out to central areas from open play, with the occasional longer hit from goal kicks when favourable circumstances presented themselves:

For the sake of comparison, below is the same breakdown for Sanchez in the Premier League last season.

It is important to note that goalkeeper distribution is always impacted by team style and tactical instructions, but the Spaniard went longer more frequently from goal kicks:

Penders’ 6ft 7in (200cm) stature and huge wingspan also make him a force to be reckoned with when high balls come into his penalty area, which should translate well to the modern, more set-piece-focused Premier League.

“You never know until they’re thrown into the deep end, they either sink or swim, but he has an incredible frame and really good timing,” Pyzdrowski says. “He reads the flight of the ball really well. It’ll be interesting to see how he handles having four or five guys surrounding him in the box, because that’s what was allowed in the Premier League last season.”

There are also some areas for Penders to continue to improve.

“He’s always been a good shot-stopper — the only reason I don’t say great is because there are a few things that he still needs to iron out,” Pyzdrowski says. “Specifically with his positioning. Sometimes he can get pulled a little bit too far towards his near post with wide shots and open up space towards the back post.

“Also, in one-v-one situations, he’s a very typical big goalkeeper in that he tries to use his frame, but he hasn’t really figured out how to control it yet. There are quite a lot of situations where he rushes out of his goal and then maybe the attacker chips him or places the shot around him. It would be better for him to be a bit more calm in his approach instead of just rushing out of his goal.

“He’s young, so this is not strange — it’s part of the development phase. If he can put the tools together, to be able to use that size with a bit more composure, he’ll be very tough to beat.”

Penders produced some hugely exciting flashes at Strasbourg. He also made some errors that would have been scrutinised far more harshly had he been playing for Chelsea. Player development is not an exact science and bringing him along at the right speed will be a delicate balancing act for Alonso, amplified by the pressure to keep piling up Premier League points.

At 6ft 7in, Penders commands his area effectively (Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images)

The good news is that Sanchez is already sounding a positive note about Penders’ arrival.

“I think it is great for him to come here,” he said in an interview with journalists including The Athletic last week. “It is great competition. He has massive potential. I think he is going to be a great goalkeeper in the future — massive.

“You need someone, another choice, to cover and push each other to elevate your level. If you do not have someone who is pushing you every day, you get lazy, and then the performance drops. I think it is always good to have one or two people pushing you every day.”

Alonso appears to be leaning towards playing Sanchez over Penders in goal when Chelsea begin their Premier League season away to west London neighbours Fulham next Monday, August 24, but Pyzdrowski is making no assumptions that the goalkeeping hierarchy will stay that way throughout the campaign.

“I would be surprised if Penders is the starter on day one, just because at his age you don’t want to rush and throw him to the wolves,” he says. “But if things don’t go well for Chelsea at the beginning of the season and Sanchez doesn’t perform, it opens the door.”

Episodes of the Premier League Years, the Sky Sports show that boils down each season into two hours and is arguably the UK’s greatest cultural achievement, often begin with a montage of that season’s new arrivals.

Whoever is putting together the 2026-27 edition might want to start work now, because it could take a while.

From the start of this season, nine of the 20 Premier League clubs will have new managers. That’s the highest number in the division’s history: the next highest was eight, which came in the summer of 2016, when Pep Guardiola arrived at Manchester City, Antonio Conte took over at Chelsea and Jose Mourinho signed up for the Manchester United job.

But there are even more layers this year. Two of the remaining 11 managers, Michael Carrick and Roberto De Zerbi, weren’t in charge of Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur at the turn of the year. Ipswich Town, who have replaced Kieran McKenna with Gary O’Neil, will be the first promoted club since Hull City in 2016-17 to enter the Premier League with a different manager from the one who took them up.

Mikel Arteta and Unai Emery are the only managers who have been at their clubs for longer than three years. Regis Le Bris, who arrived at Sunderland in 2024, is the fourth longest-serving manager in the Premier League. David Moyes, whose second spell at Everton is barely 18 months old, is seventh. Bournemouth’s Marco Rose is 12th, and he has yet to take charge of a game.

Compare this to the start of last season, when the only managerial changes were Thomas Frank moving from Brentford to Tottenham Hotspur and his former side replacing him from within, appointing Keith Andrews. It didn’t take long for the chaos to begin, but 12 months ago, the outlook was steadier.

This is a season of unprecedented uncertainty, and what makes it particularly interesting is how much change there has been at the top.

Five of the ‘Big Six’ — Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur — have installed a new manager since the turn of the year. Xabi Alonso (Chelsea), Andoni Iraola (Liverpool) and Enzo Maresca (Manchester City) arrived this summer, while De Zerbi arrived in April and Carrick took the United job on a temporary basis in January, made permanent in May.

Throw in Newcastle bringing in Matthias Jaissle to replace Eddie Howe, and of the seven teams that have qualified for the Champions League in the last decade, 85 per cent of them have a brand-new or relatively new manager.

And with this newness, inevitably comes a range of questions.

Will Iraola be able to translate his Bournemouth football to Liverpool? Can Carrick turn a good few months as United caretaker into a successful whole season? Will Alonso make sense of Chelsea, a squad so young that he took one look at it and immediately insisted they sign a few adults?

Maresca was hired as a sort of continuity candidate, having worked under Pep Guardiola before. But his City squad already looks very different and much less experienced, and might be even more so by the end of August: will that be a positive or a negative? De Zerbi saved Tottenham from oblivion last season but can that translate into something longer-term? And who knows about Newcastle, who have lost three crucial players and only really brought in promising youngsters, all of whom will be managed by someone recruited from the Saudi Pro League.

It’s one of the reasons that Arsenal are such clear favourites to retain their title: even though you can ask legitimate questions about their forward options, the quality of their first XI and their style of play, they are the most stable and predictable team among the contenders.

The uncertainty extends beyond the biggest clubs too. Fulham, after five seasons with Marco Silva at the helm, have brought in Alvaro Arbeloa, who spent the second half of last season in charge of Real Madrid. But those 28 games represent his only senior experience so far, and he only took charge of his first game of any description last May.

Nottingham Forest pulled off a coup by recruiting Oliver Glasner, but the Austrian is their fifth manager in a year: can you trust them to stick with him if early results go badly? Glasner’s replacement at Crystal Palace is Pierre Sage, who has a good record in France, but moving to a new league is fraught with uncertainty.

Kieran McKenna spent five years at Ipswich and led them to three promotions, so anyone replacing him has a tough job by definition: good luck, Gary O’Neil.

Perhaps all of this is overly negative, and the downsides of these collective risks have been overemphasised. To that point, the last time there was something close to this level of managerial churn was the 2016-17 campaign, and it worked out pretty well for some.

Of the eight new managers, only one — Mike Phelan at Hull — lost their job during the season. Chelsea won the title under Conte after finishing 10th a year earlier, in “the Mourinho season”, as he called it. With Mourinho, United finished sixth but won the League Cup and the Europa League. Guardiola’s first season at City wasn’t regarded as a huge success in relation to the rest of his time there, but they finished a place higher than in 2015-16 and won 12 more points.

Conte won the Premier League in 2016-17 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

On the other hand, Hull were relegated, as were Sunderland, with David Moyes at the helm in his only season there, although there were factors beyond merely the identity of the manager. Watford dropped from 13th to 17th under Walter Mazzarri, and Southampton regressed two places after replacing Ronald Koeman with Claude Puel.

This season, admittedly, we probably do broadly know which teams will be nearer the top and which at the bottom. But even with that in mind, there remains so much uncertainty that it’s impossible to predict anything. Which makes it maybe the most interesting and potentially exciting season in years.

At least one of these new managers is going to flame out spectacularly. At least one of them will be out by November. At least one of them will be a roaring success. At least one of them will probably win a trophy of some nature. Maybe at least one of them will disgrace themselves in an entertaining fashion.

The thing is: we don’t really know, and not knowing is good. That’s a good feeling to enter a season with.

The excitement is cutting through to James Trafford. Leeds United’s goalkeeper does not manage his social media accounts but his friends have kept him informed of the feverish reaction to his arrival.

Forty-five minutes in front of a Croke Park terrace rammed with Leeds supporters, less than a week after becoming the club’s most expensive transfer in history, also gave him an unsubtle insight into the reaction. This club is everywhere, he’s discovered.

“Everyone seems to be a Leeds fan,” he told reporters, including The Athletic, on Friday. “That’s what I figured out.

“I don’t run my social media but my mates tell me there’s a lot of Leeds fans, and they’re all really excited. It’s amazing. Everyone wears Leeds tops (in the city). The only tops you really see — maybe I’ll notice it now — are Leeds tops.”

Trafford, 23, is an immensely level-headed individual. Every answer he gives boils down to a very sensible point of view: he loves playing football, he’s looking forward to doing it with Leeds and there’s nothing he can do about his price tag.

When a club spends an initial £40million ($54.1m) on a goalkeeper, the most ever spent on a British stopper, there is a certain level of anticipation and expectation attached to the player in question. Trafford acknowledges those hopes, but knows it’s not something he can focus on.

“I can’t control any of that,” he said. “I just want to go play football and work as hard as I can, and enjoy it as much as I can.

“People can be excited. It’s brilliant they’re excited and we want to win games of football.”

Trafford, left, shares a joke with his then-Manchester City team-mate Erling Haaland during the World Cup (Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)

The former Manchester City man also does not think it’s especially about him, personally. Trafford suspects the next new signing at Leeds will generate the same kind of excitement, the next dopamine hit.

“It’s brilliant they’re (Leeds fans) excited,” he said. “Any new signing they’d be excited about because it’s just the nature of the world we live in. Everyone always wants the next thing but yes, it’s brilliant they’re excited and I can’t wait to play in front of them all again.”

Trafford, who travelled with England to the World Cup, was available this summer because he was Manchester City’s backup stopper. In interviews, he did not hide his disappointment at sitting out much of the Premier League season.

However, as he said on Friday, he took a lot from being the man between the sticks as City won the FA Cup and Carabao Cup. It showed him the power of persistence.

“It’s a very long season at City because there are so many games, so much travelling,” he said. “Some days were really tough and some days were really, really good.

“It’s just about balancing the emotions and learning from it because it was a totally new experience for me. The first half of the season was a lot harder because the games weren’t so frequent I was playing (in).

“From January to the end of the season, we had a lot of big games. We played Newcastle, or we played Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea.

“We had big games and we were getting closer to winning a trophy. To win the two trophies was a brilliant end to a very tough season because it rewarded me for never giving up.

“It was a season I look back on as a positive season. I learned a lot and got better.”

A goalkeeper of Trafford’s standing was never going to be short of transfer options, yet he believes he has found the correct landing spot.

“It’s the best move for me at this stage in my career and for all the dreams and things I want to achieve,” he said. “This is the thing that puts me in the best stead to achieve all those dreams, and I can’t wait.

Trafford impressed in City’s win over Arsenal in March’s Carabao Cup final (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

“The staff are always wanting to improve. It’s a really good squad that can always improve, and it’s a club that’s just always trying to improve. When everyone’s trying to move in the same direction and are moving, then you’re always going to grow, so that’s the main thing.”

Elland Road is the next box to tick off on his list as a Leeds player. He will almost certainly feature in the final pre-season friendly against Augsburg today (Saturday).

It won’t be his first time there, however. He faced Daniel Farke’s team in September 2024, when Burnley and Leeds went head-to-head for the Championship crown.

True to his form across that entire campaign (16 goals conceded in 45 appearances in that 2024-25 season), he kept a clean sheet.

“It’ll be a lot better playing with the fans than against the fans,” he said. “They’re honestly very, very good. They make Elland Road extremely tough and they improve us as a team, which is the main thing. We’re all really excited to be back in front of them again.”