The Big Four must be ready to sell their former heroes

After the first round of fixtures, it seems as if the best sides have all taken a step forward. Chelsea seemed less depressed and befuddled than last season. Manchester United seemed much less utterly useless. Liverpool remain ramshackle, but more dangerous on the attack. City have a manager who doesn’t tolerate mediocrity in his squad. However, Arsenal are still as underwhelming as they have been for the last decade, despite the addition of Granit Xhaka. What links all of these sides is the necessity to each excise a longstanding member of the team. How successfully they do it - if they do it at all - could decide which of the traditionally biggest sides have the best chance of claiming the Premier League title.

The obvious bedblocker at Manchester United is Wayne Rooney. Danny Murphy might enjoy a reputation as one of the more erudite and intelligent pundits, but that is simply because the poverty of choice on Match of the Day sets the bar so egregiously low, that he cannot appear anything other than a genius, relatively speaking. However, his description of Rooney as superb, and Jamie Carragher’s pontificating that he could partner Paul Pogba in midfield, doesn’t accurately describe the truth. The truth is that he was once again utterly appalling, save for a neat header presented to him through no impressive contribution of his own. He is slow ahead of his time, obviously, but he is also heavy and has an even heavier touch.

The slowness in his play will matter less if Pogba, Martial and Jesse Lingard all feature alongside him, but it will be highlighted even more if Marcus Rashford replaces him on occasion. The optimistic United fan will hope that, like Marouane Fellaini, Jose Mourinho is giving Rooney a contrasting backdrop. The contrast, of course, is that the background is competent, and Rooney is not. Even the everyman supporter appears to have grasped this. It is crucial that Mourinho somehow negotiates the political and commercial obstacles that keep Rooney at the heart of what could be the best team this year.

A similarly toxic presence, but at Chelsea, is John Terry. It has long been rumoured that he has been unpopular with a succession of managers. Before he himself combusted, it appeared that Mourinho had decided that there was little to be gained from slowly putting Terry out to pasture, and should instead head straight for the glue factory. In the power vacuum that followed Mourinho’s dismissal, Terry, with the qualities we all associate with the man - reasserted himself. Admittedly, his performances improved over the course of the season, but his importance was artificially inflated by the poor performances of Branislav Ivanovic and Gary Cahill, and Kurt Zouma’s serious injury. While he has been a brilliant performer in the past, Antonio Conte should have taken the serious underperformance of last season, plus his current capital as a new manager, to boot him out of the club as soon as possible. Ryan Giggs, after all, wasn’t given the chance to muck about by Mourinho.

At City, the problem is Joe Hart. It is probably worth remarking that of all the supercilious, self-important presences at the club are three England internationals, current or former, who have contributed to a national team that seems utterly unable to form a working, intelligent and sensible team. Hart’s ludicrous carry-on at international tournaments, which can be summed up as him yelling at people randomly, and failing to save the ball, can’t have impressed Pep Guardiola, who saw those actions bookend a couple of years of underwhelming and inconsistent efforts in goal for City. City’s defence is bad enough, but there’s an easier case to be made for jettisoning the injured Vincent Kompany, the woeful Eliaquim Mangala, the ex-Arsenal Gael Clichy and Aleksandr Kolarov. As one of the rare English faces in the City side, Guardiola will have to use his early authority to bin him. Dropping him for the middling Willy Caballero is half the necessary, but finding a willing buyer and getting an adequate replacement, with only a few weeks of the transfer window to go, is essential. The danger is that Hart somehow finds himself back in the first team for a few months, and manages another of his time-limited periods of reliability.

The suspicion is that for all three of these managers, they know there is much work to be done to get the team to the required standard. Jurgen Klopp, too, has been active in the transfer market and while it isn’t clear quite what he can do away from Dortmund, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. And then there is Arsene Wenger.

A man who starts Theo Walcott in attack clearly needs the keys to the office taken away from him, and to be given a gold watch and a golden goodbye. At United, there is Fellaini and Rooney. At Chelsea, there’s Ivanovic and Terry, perhaps Oscar too. At City there is most of the defence and Fernando. All of them need to radically improve or be removed. But at Arsenal, there is not a single member of last season’s squad that has any claim on being indulged any longer. People may now bring up Santi Cazorla as the exception, and say he was impressive last season, but he was not.

As well as Walcott, there’s Olivier Giroud, Per Mertesacker, Kieran Gibbs, Mathieu Debuchy, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Danny Welbeck and many more who need to be shown the door. Most of the squad is simply a terrible parade of Instagram nonsense. The start of the season highlighted that at the top, there are some notable names who need to be disaptched. And for Arsenal, it might not be a player who is the biggest name getting in the way.