The Premier League is nearly upon us and along with the influx of fresh faces and future stars, comes new ideas.

Every season brings with it new tactics and trends as the game’s great footballing minds try to outwit each other all over again.

This time will be no different. Pep Guardiola will look for new ways to get Manchester City back on top. Arne Slot will concoct a fresh plan to keep Liverpool on their perch with a new-look front line, which may or may not contain Alexander Isak. Mikel Arteta has signed a recognised striker at last so things will change at Arsenal too.

So, what new tactical shifts will shape the coming season?

Flying full backs

For years, the Premier League’s trends have evolved in line with what Guardiola decides to do with his City team. Promoted sides playing out from the back, playmaking goalkeepers, full backs into midfield, false nines, the list goes on.

Pep continues to come up with new solutions as his rivals catch up and copy. And football, like many things in life, moves in cycles. Fashions come and go.

One we are likely to see Guardiola and others use much more of this season is flying full backs. The £36.3million signing of attacking, chalk-on-his-boots Rayan Ait-Nouri is a departure from Guardiola’s preference in prior years for his wingers to provide the width while his full backs moved central to overcrowd the midfield.

Towards the end of last season, Guardiola developed Matheus Nunes into a marauding full back and often kept wingers on the bench. If you look at the average positions from Ait-Nouri’s debut against Al-Ain at the Club World Cup, both Ait-Nouri and Nunes pushed high and wide.

This will allow Guardiola to crowd central areas far higher up the pitch with creative, incisive passers while wingers and inside forwards can join Erling Haaland up front. More on that later.

Instead of forming a box of four in midfield like previous seasons, he can now create one in the final third, near the penalty area, where it matters for a City team that scored their fewest league goals ever last season in a campaign under Guardiola.

Liverpool’s signings of both Jeremie Frimpong - who often played as a winger or wing-back for Bayer Leverkusen - and Bournemouth flier Milos Kerkez suggest Slot, too, will use his full backs to give him width to feed Mo Salah, Hugo Ekitike and, perhaps, Isak.

Two up top

The long-awaited return of the big man, little man combination? Long ball to Niall Quinn and a knockdown for Kevin Phillips to run in behind? Kevin Nolan and Kevin Davies? Kevin Nolan and Andy Carroll, come to think of it? Well, not quite.

An already booming trend is the return of the classic centre forward with so many sides opting for an old-school No 9 to lead their line. Haaland, Delap, Chris Wood, Jean-Philippe Mateta, Nicolas Fullkrug... even Ollie Watkins and Isak. Now, there’s Viktor Gyokeres, Benjamin Sesko and  too.

The key for managers is how to get bodies around them. With full backs pushing high and wide, it enables managers to move more attacking players into central areas. In that Al Ain game, City also started with two strikers as Claudio Echeverri joined Haaland up front. It helped City pin the UAE side’s defenders back and create space in the pockets behind.

Chelsea did something similar during the Club World Cup, too, with Pedro Neto often drifting in from out wide to form a partnership with Liam Delap.

Unai Emery has put it to good use at Aston Villa where his width comes from full backs Matty Cash and Lucas Digne, which allows the likes of Morgan Rogers or Leon Bailey to join Watkins up front.

Crystal Palace’s wing-back system under Oliver Glasner allows Eberechi Eze to move alongside Mateta and so far during pre-season Graham Potter has used a similar formation with Jarrod Bowen up top with Fullkrug. Big man, little man.

It will be fascinating to see how Arteta incorporates new striker Gyokeres into his side – a team so desperate for an out-and-out front man but in a system that depends so much on the link-up play of Kai Havertz.

Gyokeres is more renowned for making runs in behind defences to exploit defences. He made plenty of those runs in his first start in Arsenal’s pre-season defeat to Villarreal but his team-mates struggled to find him.

One way of getting the best of both worlds would be to have Havertz play alongside him to link the midfield and attack. Signing their next target Eze would help that combination, allowing him and Martin Odegaard to work their magic in the spaces behind Gyokeres with Bukayo Saka on one wing and full back Myles Lewis-Skelly driving forward on the other.

Getting it in the mixer

The move towards (or is it back) to classic attacking full-backs will likely lead to a further upturn in another aspect of the game long thought to be a dying art: crossing.

Over the last 20 years, the number of crosses Premier League teams put into the box has tumbled from nearly 18 per game in 2008-09 to fewer than 12 in 2022-23 and 2023-24.

And yet last season, for only the second time in the last decade, that number ticked upwards. Back above 12, and the most since 2020-21.

With No 9s now leading the line and teams so dedicated to stopping opponents playing through ever more crowded central areas, getting the ball wide and into the 'mixer' is getting popular again.

Headed shots were on the rise, too, with the 1,510 attempted across last season the most in the six years.

One reason for that is that the delivery from wide areas is better than ever. Players find their targets more frequently. The 21.6 per cent success rate of open-play crosses last season was the highest its been over the last eight seasons, since the data is available, and with the quality of full backs purchased this summer, that will only get better.

Counter kings

Even Guardiola knows football is changing. 'Today, modern football is the way Bournemouth, Newcastle, Brighton and Liverpool play,’ he admitted at the start of the year. ‘Modern football is not positional. You have to rise to the rhythm.’

The City boss has built his many kingdoms on an obsession with controlling space, creating overloads and dominating possession. Where sides would once follow suit, many are now leaving City behind - preferring instead to play up and down the pitch quickly instead of passing it slowly side to side.

That’s why last season, we saw the start of the counter-attack revolution as sides hit opponents quickly and ruthlessly.

Ten seasons ago, even before Guardiola’s arrival at City, teams attempted 171 fast breaks, which stats gurus Opta define as a shot created after a team wins the ball in its own half and then quickly turns defence into attack. In other words, a counter-attack. Last season, the Premier League as a whole attempted 775.

Ten seasons ago, teams scored 38 goals from them. Last season, they scored 112. No side did it better or more frequently than Liverpool while Forest used it to great effect as they rope-a-doped their way into Champions League contention.

Teams are better equipped to deal with opponents playing out from the back these days with more effective pressing across the board. This forced a record number of mistakes, with double the number of errors (641) leading to shots last season than the campaign before (321).

Goalkeepers are more adept at going long to bypass the press. The nine assists by goalkeepers last season was the most in a single Premier League campaign.

If see more full backs bombing forward this term, that could well leave space in behind in wide areas to exploit with fast counter attacks and long balls into the channels.

And the signings of Gyokeres at Arsenal and Ait-Nouri at Man City suggest the two teams most used to keeping the ball and building their attacks with patience could be set to join the fast-break party.