Ready, set, stop: The Premier League season of two halves is here

The domestic English campaign will be the first ever to be rudely interrupted by a winter World Cup

INTERNATIONALS: Manchester City's Rodri (left) and Liverpool's Fabinho, both of whom will be jetting off for the World Cup in November. Picture date: Saturday July 30, 2022.

The bible quickly arrives in the post as soon as promotion is secured. This season’s Premier League Handbook runs to 666 pages, and for new inductees to the faith its every word may as well be gospel. For example, there are 15 separate rules on floodlights (which must provide an average illuminance of at least 1000 lux, measured from 96 precise locations on the field). The press box must seat at least 50 journalists (up from 40 in the Championship). Television commentary positions must be at least three metres wide and one metre deep. Kit suppliers must be informed in writing about the Premier League’s ban on minimum pricing. And on and on it goes, a bureaucratic epic that if nothing else demonstrates the extent to which this product is curated, delimited, plotted out to the tiniest degree.

Order out of chaos: this is the very essence of the Premier League, in many ways the very essence of football. You plan and you scheme and you train in the distant hope that after nine months, a little truth finally emerges from the melee. But it never quite turns out that way. There is always some eventuality or circumstance that has not been anticipated in advance, some untameable force that only becomes apparent in retrospect. Given a long enough timeline, chaos always wins.