Jose Mourinho, Pep Launch EPL Title Pursuit

Boasting perhaps the most compelling cast of characters in its 24-year history, the Premier League resumes this weekend with the duel between Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho taking centre-stage.

England’s elite have spent big in the hope of usurping champions Leicester City and nowhere will the battle be more intense than between Manchester City manager Guardiola and his Manchester United counterpart Mourinho.

The former El Clasico rivals have each sanctioned outlays of around £150 million on new players, with United notably luring Paul Pogba back to Old Trafford and City capturing John Stones.

City start the campaign as British bookmakers’ favourites, but despite United’s fifth-place finish in May, Mourinho declared on Friday: “We feel that we are candidates to win the title.

“We know that not one or two or three more than that have the same ambitions. We cannot speak differently. We want to fight for the title.

“If at the end of the season we are not champions because someone is better than us then great, that’s football.

“But at Manchester United Football Club, you cannot say differently, we have to fight for the title.”

Mourinho led FA Cup winners United to a 2-1 win over Leicester in last weekend’s Community Shield and will take charge of his first league game at Bournemouth on Sunday.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Eric Bailly and Henrikh Mkhitaryan could get their first tastes of English league football at the Vitality Stadium.

But Pogba, who returned to United from Juventus for a world-record fee of £89 million, must observe a suspension carried over from last season’s Coppa Italia.

Guardiola will begin life in English football with a home game against Sunderland, for whom David Moyes will be starting out in the dug-out after succeeding new England manager Sam Allardyce.

Guardiola has warned that it will take time for City to start playing like his Barcelona and Bayern Munich teams, but he says there will be no excuse for anything less than maximum effort.

“Tomorrow (Saturday), to create something we need time. To create something with ideas to attack, we need time,” he told reporters.

“But to play with soul, with something inside, we don’t need time.”