# Our 2026/27 Premier League Campaign Begins With a Trip to Newcastle United 👊 UP THE REDS! 🔴
There is nothing quite like the days before a new Liverpool season. The kit’s still stiff, the fixture list is still just ink on a page rather than lived memory, and every supporter in the world is allowed to believe, just for a moment, that this is the year everything falls into place. That feeling arrives early for us this time around, because the fixture computer has decided our first competitive test of 2026/27 will come at St James’ Park, on the road, against a Newcastle United side that has spent the last few seasons quietly building itself into one of the most uncomfortable away days in English football. Sunday, August 23, kick-off 4:30pm, live on Sky. Circle it, set the alarm, get the shirt ironed. This is the one.
It is impossible to talk about this opener without talking about everything that surrounds it, because this is not simply another Matchday One. This is the first competitive fixture of the Andoni Iraola era. After parting ways with Arne Slot at the end of last season, the club turned to the Basque coach who spent his time at Bournemouth building a side that pressed like a pack of wolves and refused to sit back against anybody, City and Arsenal included. Now he inherits a dressing room still shaped by the ghosts of the treble-chasing years, a supporter base that has tasted the very peak of the modern game, and a run of fixtures that offers him zero time to ease in gently. St James’ Park under the lights, in front of sixty thousand Geordies who have not forgotten what happened the last time these two clubs shared a pitch, is about as sharp an introduction as English football can offer a new manager. If Iraola wanted a gentle glide into life at Anfield, he is not getting one. He is getting a cauldron.
And it is a cauldron that means something extra this year, because this is also the first Liverpool season in the better part of a decade to begin without Mohamed Salah lining up on the right and without Andy Robertson marauding down the left. Two names that have been stitched into the identity of this club for the better part of a decade, two players who turned Anfield into a place visiting sides dreaded on European nights, both gone from the matchday squad as a new chapter starts. There is a strange, unfamiliar quality to picturing the team sheet without them on it. Football moves quickly, ruthlessly, and it does not wait for sentiment, but there is a version of every supporter reading this who will glance at the XI on Sunday and feel that absence before they feel anything else. That is fine. That is allowed. Grief and excitement can sit in the same chest at the same time, and if anything it makes the new era feel more real, more urgent, more like something worth turning up for.
Because make no mistake, this Newcastle side is not a soft landing for anybody, new manager or not. Eddie Howe has built something durable on Tyneside, a team with genuine steel through the spine, full-backs who bomb forward without leaving gaps, and a front line that can hurt you on the counter as easily as it can grind you down in a low block. St James’ Park with a full house and a 4:30pm kick-off is one of the loudest, most intimidating grounds in the country, the kind of place where the crowd gets inside the referee’s head thirty seconds after kickoff and never lets go. Recent visits there have not been kind to us. There is history at that ground that Liverpool supporters of a certain vintage would rather not relive, results that stung far more than they should have on paper. Whatever the manager, whatever the personnel, going to St James’ Park and coming away with anything is a proper day’s work in this league, and everybody inside the away end knows it before a ball is even kicked.
That is exactly why this fixture matters so much as a marker rather than just three points. A new manager’s first away performance tells you things a pre-season friendly never can, because pre-season is choreography and the Premier League is chaos. We will learn, in real time, whether Iraola’s pressing principles can survive first contact with a crowd baying for blood and a home side that will not be shy about going long and direct when the mood calls for it. We will learn whether the compact, aggressive shape that served him so well at Bournemouth translates onto a squad with far higher individual quality but, potentially, less structural cohesion in week one. We will learn something about the mentality of this dressing room too, about whether the senior professionals who remain, the ones who won titles and lifted trophies under different management, can drag a group through a hostile atmosphere on the very first weekend of the season, before systems and relationships have had the chance to properly bed in.
There is also something quietly poetic about beginning the post-Salah, post-Robbo era against Newcastle specifically. This is a club that spent years scrapping in the wilderness before an ownership change and smart recruitment turned them into genuine top-four regulars, a reminder that identities in football are not fixed, that reinvention is always possible if the work is put in properly. Liverpool are not rebuilding from nothing, not remotely, this remains a squad stacked with quality and ambition, but there is a symbolic weight to kicking off a new chapter against the club that has, in its own way, been writing a new chapter of its own for the past several years. Two clubs mid-transformation, colliding on the opening weekend, both trying to prove something about where they are headed next.
Selection is going to be fascinating in ways it has not been for a few seasons now. Who fills the creative void left behind on the right flank. Who Iraola trusts at left-back to provide the attacking width that Robertson made look effortless for so long. Whether the new manager leans on continuity in central midfield to steady the ship in a hostile away end, or whether he is bold enough from minute one to stamp his own footballing identity onto the side regardless of the occasion. There will be supporters who want to see the kids thrown straight in, and supporters who want proven heads on the pitch for a game like this, and honestly there is no wrong answer, only different bets on how quickly this new project needs to find its feet. What we do know is that whoever wears the shirt on Sunday is not just playing for three points, they are auditioning for a role in a squad that is still being defined in real time. Reputations can be made or complicated in ninety minutes at St James’ Park. That has always been true, and it is especially true now.
There is a version of this preview that spends its word count worrying, dwelling on the difficulty of the fixture, the loss of two icons, the unknown quantity of a brand new head coach walking into one of the most demanding jobs in world football. But that is not really what preseason optimism is for. Every Liverpool supporter alive has learned, across different eras, under different managers, through different styles of football, that this club has an extraordinary capacity to reinvent itself and come out stronger on the other side. We have watched a possession-obsessed European giant become a gegenpressing juggernaut under one manager, then evolve into a more controlled, patient, positionally disciplined outfit under the next, all while collecting trophies along the way. There is no reason the Iraola era cannot be its own distinct, thrilling chapter, built on different principles again, suited to a different pool of players, but carrying the exact same relentless hunger that has defined this club across every version of itself. New eras do not arrive fully formed. They arrive messy, at St James’ Park on a hot August afternoon, in front of a crowd that wants nothing more than to spoil the party, and they get built from there, week by week, performance by performance.
What we can say with total confidence is that the away end will be exactly what it always is. Loud from the first whistle, defiant even when things get uncomfortable, singing songs that have been passed down through generations of supporters who followed this club through relegation battles and title races alike. There is something genuinely special about that continuity, about the fact that whoever is on the pitch, whoever is patrolling the touchline in the technical area, the people in red in that away corner will be exactly as committed as they have always been. Managers change. Iconic players move on to new chapters of their own careers. The identity of the supporters travelling to games like this one does not change even slightly. If anything, difficult, transitional moments like this one are when that identity matters most, when the noise from the stands has to do a bit more of the heavy lifting than usual, when the players on the pitch need to feel, from the very first whistle, that the people who paid good money to travel up to Tyneside on a Sunday afternoon are fully behind them no matter what the scoreline says at half time.
There is also real, practical reason for optimism buried underneath all the sentiment and symbolism. Whatever the club’s business looked like across the summer, whatever names did or did not arrive to freshen up the attacking options, the core of this squad remains one built by winning managers, coached to standards that do not simply evaporate overnight because the name on the training ground whiteboard has changed. Good habits, defensive discipline, the ability to play through pressure rather than panic under it, these things are drilled deep into a group over years, and they do not disappear the moment a new head coach takes his first training session. Iraola inherits players who know, in their bones, what it feels like to win the biggest games in the calendar. That kind of internalised winning mentality is worth an enormous amount on a hostile Sunday afternoon at St James’ Park, arguably more than any tactical printout handed out in the dressing room beforehand.
It would be foolish to promise victory. Football rarely rewards certainty, and away trips to Newcastle under Eddie Howe have punished plenty of far more settled, far more experienced Liverpool sides than the one that will take the pitch this time around. But certainty was never really the point of opening day anyway. The point is showing up. The point is standing shoulder to shoulder in that away end, or gathering around a screen wherever in the world this is being watched, and getting behind a group of players who are, in their own way, just as nervous and just as excited as the rest of us about what this season might bring. The point is watching the very first moments of something new, knowing that in years to come we will look back on this particular Sunday afternoon in August and remember it as the day it all started, for better or worse, for a manager, for a rebuilt attack, for a Liverpool side writing the next chapter of a story that has been going for well over a century.
So here we are. New manager, new era, painfully familiar and painfully difficult opening fixture. Two legends missing from the teamsheet for the first time in years. A ground that has never made life easy for us and shows no sign of starting now. And still, somehow, that same old feeling bubbling up in the chest as kickoff approaches, the one that has nothing to do with logic or form guides or preseason friendlies, the one that simply says, whatever happens, however this campaign unfolds across the next ten months, we will be there for every single minute of it. Sunday, 4:30pm, St James’ Park. Let’s go and get it started the right way.
UP THE REDS. 🔴