Happy Premier League day! It's going to be strange with the World Cup in the middle of the season - The Warm-Up

FRIDAY'S BIG STORIES Get Ready For Something Ad/> It's a bit like being jetlagged, this early start to the season. The Premier League starts tonight, there's no escaping it. So do Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga.

The Championship started last week. It's that time. And yet it's also too damn early, and your equilibrium is all gone, and you don't know how or where or when things should be; except not now, certainly not now.

You look at the calendar and the calendar looks back at you in mutual incomprehension. Transfers'Everything is possible' — Corinthians target unlikely Ronaldo signing6 MINUTES AGO For this, we can of course thank the Qatar World Cup, which seems to be actually happening in defiance of all common sense. This won't be the strangest season in recent memory, but that's only true because of Covid-19, so that's not a huge amount of comfort.

It will certainly be football's strangest self-inflicted season for a generation; in English football, perhaps the oddest since the establishment of the Premier League coincided with the introduction of the backpass rule. And at least that started at a reasonable time of year. For all that men's international football has been eclipsed by the club game, the World Cup remains the focal point of football's generational cycles, a comet that passes through the skies every four years and drags all attention to the skies, then changes everything.

Of all the things that don't really matter, this one still matters the most. And so moving it to the middle of the season alters everything. We've already seen the consequences.