Manchester United and Liverpool pre-season panic became historically brilliant campaigns

Summer friendlies: basically just public training exercises and nothing to read very much into, unless you’re a journalist desperately in need of some meaning in the sparse summer months or an Extremely Online football fan looking to score points.

As if to prove it, we’ve trawled back through the pre-season results of the Premier League’s great and good down the years to find examples of iffy-to-bad pre-season results that then turned into superlative campaigns once the scorelines actually mattered.

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Manchester United, 1998/99
Not unequivocally bad by any means: Manchester United hit six against Brondby, four against Brann and eight against an Eric Cantona European XI in a benefit for the families of the 1958 Munich disaster. But there were other results that resolutely failed to point to a side on the verge of winning a famous treble.

Second-tier Birmingham City claimed a 4-3 win over a United side that included Ryan Giggs, Henning Berg, Phil Neville, Denis Irwin and Andy Cole, with Philip Mulryne and Peter Ndlovu both scoring hat-tricks for their respective sides.

The future Treble winners were then held to a 2-2 draw by Norwegian part-timers Valerenga, despite Roy Keane and David Beckham both returning to action, with Paul Scholes and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer both on the scoresheet.

Manchester City, 2013/14
Manchester City were busy tourists in summer 2013, visiting South Africa, Hong Kong, Munich and Helsinki for a series of friendlies, but only really hitting their stride in a 5-3 win over AC Milan.

City lost both their games against local opposition in South Africa – 2-0 to SuperSport United and 2-1 to AmaZulu – and laboured to 1-0 victories over South China and Sunderland in the far east (both clinched by Edin Dzeko strikes), as well as losing 2-1 to Bayern Munich and 3-1 to Arsenal, with Alvaro Negredo scoring City’s goals in those two games.

In this case, City’s iffy form actually did carry over into the season, when every virtually impressive win – 4-0 over Newcastle, 4-1 over Manchester United, putting seven past Norwich – was followed up with a bizarre defeat: 3-2 to Cardiff and Aston Villa, and a 1-0 loss to Sunderland. They found form eventually though, of course, pipping Liverpool to the title after Steven Gerrard’s slip and all that.

Manchester City, 2018/19
A minor miss here, given that City played just three pre-season games in a summer that also featured the World Cup in Russia, all of which were against stern opposition.

Still, it was two defeats and a win for City, and we’ve decided to bung it in here anyway because one of those losses was to Liverpool, who had fallen behind to Leroy Sane’s strike before replying through Mo Salah and Sadio Mane. City also lost 1-0 to Borussia Dortmund, but did come back from two down to beat Bayern Munich 3-2.

Liverpool ended up getting that win where it mattered least of all, of course: City took four points off them in the season that followed, which ultimately proved decisive in a title race with the 97-point Reds. City got 98.

Liverpool, 2019/20
The end of a 30-year wait for the Premier League title came after a summer campaign that had some especially sensitive Liverpool fans worried about whether they had put so much into their failed title challenge and Champions League triumph that they had nothing left to give.

A 6-0 win over Tranmere and a 3-1 win over Bradford City won’t have impressed anyone much, least of all Shania Twain, and Jurgen Klopp’s side followed that up with a three-game US tour that yielded defeats to Borussia Dortmund and Sevilla and a draw against Sporting. Napoli then ran riot in a 3-0 win at Murrayfield, before Liverpool clawed back a final 3-1 win over Lyon in Geneva.

They famously dropped just two points in their first 27 games of the Premier League season, of course, and went on to win the league with 99 points, 18 clear of second-placed City and 33 clear of third-placed United.