Cartilage Free Captain predicts the 2017-18 Premier League table

It’s time to talk tables. We’re three days from the start of the new Premier League season, and as is customary here at Cartilage Free Captain, we gave the writing staff and the readers the chance to vote on what the 2017-2018 Premier League table will look like after the final match. The community ratings are still being collected (over 1000 entries thus far!) and will be posted later this week.

But for now, I thought I’d give all of you the opportunity to once again express to us what awful football fans we all are. You’re all wrong, of course, but don’t let that stop you.

Here is the 2017-18 Premier League final table position, as voted on by the Cartilage Free Captain masthead.

So, let’s dig right in with the analysis.

We all think Manchester City are going to steamroll the league.

Honestly, City had a hell of a team LAST season, but their defense was bad and their team was aging. Now Pep Guardiola’s got a year under his belt, and has spent over £200m on players, including £110m just on fullbacks. On fullbacks, ferchrissake! The preseason friendly in Nashville gave a glimpse of just how scary this City team can be, and the season hasn’t even started yet. Heck, we’re not even sure City are done buying players.

While the vote wasn’t (quite) unanimous, we think City will win the league, and we’re not sure it’s going to be particularly close.

We are worried about Tottenham Hotspur.

The masthead as a collective is routinely pessimistic when it comes to predicting how Spurs will finish. We’ve been Spurs fans a long time. We know how the story ends, and it leads to nothing but pain. In fact, after two consecutive league title chases, this is actually the joint highest we have collectively ranked Spurs in the past four seasons. And we still put them fourth.

It’s a sign of either our collective misanthropy or evidence of our predictive genius that we are predicting that Spurs will return to the Champions League for a third consecutive season next year, and the first in the new stadium. But considering how much the rest of the league is improving and how much Spurs are... not, we are, frankly, scared.

Let’s all have a laugh at Arsenal.

LOL.

We don’t believe in Everton.

Our collective opinion on an Everton side that has sold their best player in Romelu Lukaku but is on pace to spend £150m on transfers this summer (including £50m on Gylfi friggin’ Sigurdsson) is this: Everton fans are going to be so mad when they finish seventh this season. It’ll be great.

Huddlesfield and Brighton are screwed... but they may be fun to watch.

Most of the time, at least one of the Premier League new boys stay up at the end of the season. We think that team will be Newcastle. Huddersfield are outgunned but they have a Pochettino-lite style of play under German-American manager David Wagner and they could be kind of fun. Brighton have Chris Hughton, but it probably won’t be enough to save them from relegation.

We have no idea what to do with the mid-table teams.

There are going to be about seven good-to-great teams in the league this season, and probably about 4-5 really bad ones. The rest? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Take a look at the standard deviance of teams like Stoke City, Newcastle, Crystal Palace, and Bournemouth. We rated them all over the place because we have absolutely no idea whether they’ll be crappily decent, or decently crap. We don’t think any of them are going to surprise anyone, at least in the upward direction. It’s altogether possible that a club like Watford lays an egg and goes down like Sunderland last year.

What do you think of the masthead’s collective wisdom? Have your say in the comments.