The wait is almost over.

One week today the Premier League will return with the two outstanding matches prior to gameweek 30, which will then take place next weekend - more than three months later than initially scheduled.

Aston Villa and Sheffield United have the honour of being the first teams back in action before champions Manchester City - looking to cling on to their crown for as long as possible before being dethroned by Liverpool - host Arsenal later that night.

The clubs and players will all be the same, but it won't exactly be football as we know it.

Here, Sports Mole looks at what we can expect ahead of the long-awaited return of Premier League football.

A DIFFERENT ATMOSPHERE

Anyone who has been watching the Bundesliga since it returned in May will know that the atmosphere is nowhere near the same without fans in the stadium.

Of course, the prospect of playing matches in packed grounds is impossible at the moment and that may be the case until well into 2021 based on some predictions, meaning that we may have to get used to the eerie nature of quiet stadiums.

The echoing yells of players and managers can be clearly heard, a promising attack can pass under the radar through the lack of audible excitement surrounding it and even a goal can be something of an underwhelming incident without the crowd's roar to accompany it.

Premier League clubs are considering ways around it; Sky and BT will have options to include virtual crowd noise while watching games in order to give TV viewers as close to the usual experience as possible, while Brighton & Hove Albion were the first Premier League team to confirm that they will use cardboard cutouts to give the impression that the stadium is full.

English football is famed for its atmosphere, though, and nothing can substitute for the real deal of having fans watching on live so this new normal will take some getting used to.

For years it has almost been a cliche that football would be nothing without the fans - this pandemic has driven that truth home.

TELEVISION FOOTBALL FEAST

Supporters may not be able to watch their favourite teams in person, but there will be a veritable football feast on TV over the coming weeks, with all 92 remaining Premier League matches set to be broadcast.

Sky have the rights to the bulk of them but have also made themselves more accessible by opening some games up to non-satellite customers, including the potentially title-deciding Merseyside derby between Everton and Liverpool on Sunday, June 21.

BT are the next biggest broadcasters of the remaining matches, while Amazon Prime and BBC - the latter of whom have not showed top-flight live English league football since the 1980s - also showcasing games.

Even the Saturday 3pm TV blackout has been put on hold in order to make this possible, with Premier League matches staggered throughout the day and on every day of the week.

While the clubs and players themselves have been central to discussions surrounding Project Restart, the television companies have been as responsible as anyone to get elite football back up and running.

MORE UPSETS

The Premier League season has already been littered with stunning upsets such as Norwich City beating Manchester City and Liverpool losing to Watford.

More could be on their way, though, and bettors in particular could find good value in away teams succeeding more than usual if the Bundesliga example is anything to go by.

Home sides have won just 10 of the 46 Bundesliga matches to take place since the restart, which is just over half of the record lowest for an entire single campaign.

The lack of fans means that home advantage has been lessened somewhat, which may not favour the underdogs so much when they themselves are at home, but could come to their aid when travelling to face teams they are not expected to beat.

Liverpool, for example, boast a 100% record at Anfield this season and it will be fascinating to see whether they can continue that perfection with no fans - they still have home games against Crystal Palace, Aston Villa and Chelsea, all of whom may now fancy their chances a little bit more than they would have otherwise.

One of the great unknowns is also how each team will fare with the unique challenge of having three months off, the majority of which saw them unable to train with their teammates or do any of their usual drills.

Bayern Munich may have picked up exactly where they left off in the Bundesliga, but there is every chance that one of the established big boys could be caught cold upon the restart, whereas teams towards the bottom may hit the ground running.

LOWER INTENSITY

The Premier League is perhaps renowned for its speed of play and intensity more than anything else, but it would only be natural to see that dip in the coming weeks.

Clubs will have all of the stats, numbers and information about players' distance covered, workrate, sprints and just about anything else you can think of, but an unquantifiable metric is how much a baying crowd can lift, or hinder, performance.

It will be the job of the managers and the players themselves to ensure that this is not the case - it is hard to imagine the likes of Jurgen Klopp or Pep Guardiola lowering their demands, for example - and in the majority of games the physical statistics may not be too different to before.

However, it is the moments which the tracking systems cannot account for - digging deeper in the 94th minute as a result of being spurred on by the crowd - which may suffer most.

Add to that an inevitable lack of match practice throughout the entire league and it is unlikely that the Premier League will be able to reach quite the levels of intensity that we are used to for the remainder of this season.

MORE BREAKTHROUGH STARS

One area where managers could come into their own is substitutes - they are now allowed to make five per game rather than the usual three.

This will inevitably mean that some players who were otherwise struggling for game time will now get more, while we are bound to see more youngsters getting a taste of first-team football.

The two additional subs opens up a whole new array of tactical planning for managers, and it may be that some big names are left out of starting lineups in order to be held back as impact subs.

A half-time change, or even a first-half alteration, is now not as big a decision as it was before, with managers having more opportunities to switch from Plan A if it is not working as they would have hoped.

How this rule change is utilised by managers will vary from person to person; the likes of Sean Dyche or Nuno Espirito Santo rarely make many changes to their starting lineup and it may be the case that they do not feel the need to take full advantage of the new complement of options.

By contrast, those with promising young players knocking on the door - suspended somewhere between being not good enough for the first team and too good for the youth team - will see this as a unique opportunity to give the next generation experience they otherwise would not have gained.

There is also the chance that this rule change will benefit those who have players coming back from injury; Harry Kane, Marcus Rashford or Paul Pogba, for example, could be included for 45 minutes of action after a long time out without their half-time withdrawal eating into the manager's other options from the bench.