Football Season Guide

Levante won promotion back to La Liga just one year after their relegation at the end of the 2015/16 season and they did so in style. They left the opposition eating their dust, going top of the second division table in the fourth week of the season and remaining there right to the final day, finishing with 84 points – 14 more than closest challengers Girona. Levante, then, should be the best-prepared of all three of the promoted teams. However, they have lost their top scorer Roger Marti who scored 22 times last season to a serious knee injury which will rule him out of the first half of this campaign. Aiming to overcome that setback, the club brought in Ivi – who scored 14 second division goals for Sevilla's B team last year – and Alex Alegria – who scored three times up front for top-flight Real Betis in 25 games last year. The hope is that they'll take over the goalscoring burden. Whether or not they can lead the line as effectively as Marti remains to be seen so Levante could suffer in the first half of the campaign as they wait for their main man to return. Levante's success was more than just Marti, though. They boasted the second-best defensive record in last season's second division and their starting goalkeeper, Raul Fernandez, and starting back four of Pedro Lopez, Chema, Sergio Postigo and Tono are all still at the club. Levante coach Juan Ramon Lopez Muniz will, therefore, have a solid defensive base to build from and the chemistry they developed over the past year could prove vital for their survival bid. As for how good a coach Levante have, the fact that Lopez Muniz hasn't managed in the top division since he nearly got relegated from La Liga with Malaga in 2010 could be viewed as a negative but there are a lot of inexperienced managers in this year's La Liga so at least he has some knowledge of how top-flight football works in Spain.