Analyze the pre-season friendly matches is exasperating, but right now that’s all we have

Glory for Manchester United, who raised the summer league summer series on Sunday despite the fact that Everton was returned twice to shoot 2-2 in Atlanta. A degree of relief for West Ham, which beat Bournemouth to finish second in the competition despite all the dark forecasts on their upcoming campaign. In Seoul, during this time, there was a very very moment of Tottenham because they followed the joy of the 1-0 victory last week on Arsenal with a 1-1 draw against Newcastle in which James Maddison was stretched with a knee injury described by his manager Thomas Frank as “bad”.

Everything looks real, it seems real and yet everyone knows that it is not real. That even now, in the era of data and meticulous analysis, there is one element of chance, is one of the great joys of football as a sport. But this trend is amplified in pre-season.

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The Premier League has been absent for 10 weeks now. For those who are hung on its soap opera, the wait is intolerable. The club World Cup, the male team of England being terrible in June, as they are so often, the under 21s continuing their unknown excellence, even female euros … There is nothing to offer the same. Obseeing it on transfers is only enough for so long; Finally, it is necessary to see them play.

And so there are pre-season matches, and there is an analysis. The best is skeptical, recognizing the absurdity of making judgments over 45 minutes. The worst is out of breath insistent – by Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha, the two senior players United have managed to sign, appearing together against Everton. What does this mean that Rasmus Højlund was only on the bench? Does this mean that Benjamin Šeško is more likely to sign? The three before, with Mbeumo falling deeply and Cunha and Bruno Fernandes who sometimes exceeded him, seemed commonly. Fernandes and Mbuemo have set up Amad Diallo, overlapping with a rear wing to mark the opener. This is how Ruben Amorim’s 3-4-3 is supposed to work.

In this, at least, there is a feeling of something tangible, a uni which is finally able to execute the plan of attack of their manager. But Ayden Heaven’s own objective was a reminder that United remains as self -destructive. Perhaps more significant was the equalizer conceded after Manuel Ugarte lost possession, the lack of emergency of returning. Did that happen because it was just a friendly and united friend is still far from Peak Fitness? Or because it is a group of players irretrievably without bankrupt?

It’s smoke by a misty day. Will one of them relevant when the season starts for real? United Fans will remember with regret how much they seem to the pre-season under Louis Van Gaal in 2014, only for the season itself to prove to be anticlimatic.

The problem of evaluating the pre-season matches is that the different sides are at different stages of preparation. Some expect to travel the ground from the first week; Others build to peak in March or April, the enlarged differences two weeks before the opening day. Some managers work on specific plans and are less embarrassed by the whole, some simply hope to get semi-competitive minutes in their players’ legs.

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In the past, before the Premier League teams occurred in foreign tours and everyone was desperately walking from a world audience, the pre-season concerned the team link as much as anything else: the team that drinks together wins together, as the adage had. The stories are Legion: Everton Peter Beagrie’s winger leading a motorcycle through a Plateglass window in San Sebastián; The rear lamb and extremely hard of Sunderland, John Kay, terrifying a much larger room that had threatened him by disinstrating the antiseptic cubes of a urinal cubes in Bristol; The French midfielder from Arsenal, Gilles Grimandi, joining five of his English teammates during an evening in Switzerland where the first round included 35 pints of blonde beer and a dry white wine. Many managers, you suspect, would quite appreciate a return at the time, if not alcohol, then at least of the pre-season being a largely private affair rather than a projection of the club in the world.

Very occasionally, something consecutive happens, as Chelsea conceding four in the second half in an experimental Red Bulls from New York led by Jesse Marsch in the summer of 2015, the first sign that something had been wrong for the team of José Mourinho since the victory of the Premier League two months earlier; In five months, Mourinho had been dismissed. (It was also the first appearance in the first team for Bournemouth and the midfielder of the American national team Tyler Adams, then 16 years old).

The pre-season is really the phony war, jockeying, survey. This counts for clubs, but for foreigners, it is essentially like watching an artist mix his paintings. There is anticipation and a vague technical interest, but that does not mean anything as long as it does not start to be applied to the canvas.

It is an extract from football with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look of the Guardian US during the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Do you have a question for Jonathan? Send an email to soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he will respond to the best in a future edition.