The Premier League's latest round of fixtures produced the kind of weekend that resists tidy summary — tension at the summit, anxiety near the foot of the table, and at least one moment sufficiently odd to catch the attention of those who chronicle the game through means other than the conventional match report.
David Squires, the Guardian's long-running football cartoonist, has published a new strip responding to the weekend's events, according to the Guardian. The piece is framed around what the publication describes as an unexpected cameo amid the broader drama of the top flight, though the strip's specific targets are not detailed in the wire.
Squires has spent years treating English football as a rich and largely self-replenishing source of material. His work tends to find the absurdity that exists alongside the genuine stakes — the po-faced press conference, the tactical overreach, the unlikely protagonist — and the Premier League in its closing weeks reliably furnishes all three. A title race still unresolved and a relegation picture that remains open are the conditions in which football produces its most theatrical moments, and in which a cartoonist of his sensibility tends to do some of his better work.
The Guardian notes that the strip is available to purchase, and that a collection of Squires's favourites from 2025 is also accessible on the site. His most recent book, Chaos in the Box, is separately promoted alongside the new piece. None of that is incidental context: Squires operates as something close to a football essayist who draws rather than writes, and his published collections have developed a following among readers who regard his observations as a form of criticism in their own right.
What the weekend's drama consisted of, specifically, the wire does not elaborate — the summary references genuine excitement at both ends of the table without identifying the fixtures or the protagonists. That is, in one sense, appropriate to how Squires tends to work: the cartoon is rarely a match report and more often a commentary on atmosphere, on the culture surrounding events, on the particular flavour of a given moment in the football calendar.
Closing weeks of a Premier League season carry a particular weight. The permutations multiply, managers choose their words with unusual care, and supporters who have spent months in cautious optimism or resigned anxiety suddenly find themselves watching the table with the kind of attention they usually reserve for the matches themselves. Whether the cameo Squires has identified is a managerial figure, a peripheral player thrust into consequence, or something altogether less expected is not clear from the wire. What is clear is that the weekend provided enough material for a cartoonist to work with.
The strip is live on the Guardian's website now.