Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger predicts that the Gunners will be among the honours this season after a six-year drought, although it looks like he will lose his midfield talisman Cesc Fabregas, who looks like he is going back to Barcelona.
Frankly, I cannot see any midfield substitute for the Gunners, even from the greatly talented and precocious Jack Wilshere and the Welsh international Aaron Ramsey.
Ramsey has looked very confident on Arsenal's current tour in the east, but Fabregas contributed just that extra drive and invention to Arsenal's play.
How ironic though that at the very moment when Barca and even their players, such as Xavi who has infuriated Wenger by publicly announcing that Fabregas should come "home", Arsenal should have signed two more Barcelona teenagers. Not for the first time, it does make you wonder about the quality and productivity of the Gunners' greatly expensive youth programme.
Clear answer
Wenger has sometimes complained, by way presumably of implicit explanation, that even by their teens, English youngsters are beyond schooling. Well, Wilshere joined them as a teenager, though I myself deeply disapprove of mere schoolboys being pitchforked into the professional game. The answer seems clear enough.
It will be remembered that Arsenal, to the fury of Paris Saint Germain, some years ago swooped to grasp Nicolas Anelka who, though by then in his late teens, was free to be signed because of French football rules. Eventually the Gunners somewhat patronisingly gave PSG £50,000 (Dh296,130) for Anelka, only to sell this brilliant, but ever dissident player to Real Madrid for over £20 million.
Manchester City for all their money have been beset by problems this summer. Craig Bellamy, for me one of the few outstanding British attackers of this time, has no intention of going back to a club where he was at daggers with Italian manager Roberto Mancini.
Bellamy has never been the easiest of players to handle, but Mancini seems to have undervalued and antagonised him from the beginning. Last season he went back on loan to Cardiff City, but the Championship side have no hope of paying his vast £90,000 a week wages.
The author is a football expert based in England