Not going well for Man City, is it?
Having won four titles in a row, they’ve now gone and lost four Premier League games in a row. Silly of them, and it means they currently sit a jarringly distant fifth in the Premier League table.
Long way to go, of course, but it inevitably sets the mind a-thinking about a) other rubbish Premier League title defences and thus b) whether or not there are enough of them for us to scrape together a vaguely justifiable 10.
Fair warning, the answer to b) is probably ‘No, there is not’. The top half of this list has some undeniable doozies, but we’ve had to be slightly dickish about teams who finished second before we get to that good stuff. Sorry about that. Sure you understand.
10) Arsenal 2004/05
Is it fair to include this purely because they didn’t manage to go unbeaten for a second successive season? Yes, it is.
You can’t go around calling yourselves The Invincibles and then lose five league games the following year, can you? Not really.
All seemed to be going swimmingly enough in the early stages, with Arsenal winning eight of their first nine games to extend that unbeaten run to 49 league games across three seasons, but the defeat when it came threw them all off-kilter.
It was an absurd and controversial defeat, at Old Trafford of all places, and it left a mark. Arsenal won only one of their next five games, and that a 5-4 absurdity in the North London Derby.
They recovered their composure from there on but the aura of invincibility was lost as they trailed in 12 points behind Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea. Looking back now, you can almost see the Premier League’s tectonic plates shifting; Arsenal haven’t won the league since.
9) Manchester City 2019/20
When you have successfully defended the title after every other win, as Pep Guardiola has, it feels kind of unavoidable that the one failure has to make this list. There is obviously an element of being victims of your own success in this, because most teams would bloody love a bad season where they got 81 points.
But context is everything, and City had racked up 100 and 98 in the previous two campaigns, making this an alarming drop in form.
It was an undeniably scruffy league season too from a team that just doesn’t really do that. Sure, they never even lost two Premier League games in a row never mind four, but they did lose nine games altogether, which is loads.
Some silly ones too, with going down home and away to Wolves a highlight as well as managing only a single point in two games against Spurs, in accordance with the prophecy.
The 3-2 defeat at Norwich was perhaps the most memorable slip as Liverpool sauntered off into the distance to leave City as the most isolated team in Premier League history by season’s end, sat almost bang in the middle of the vast 33-point ocean between Liverpool’s champions on 99 points and third-placed Man United on 66.
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8) Manchester United 2001/02
Manchester United’s 2003/04 might have featured an eight-point drop-off but it couldn’t match the sheer shock value of 2001/02 at the time.
United may have only finished three points worse off than their title-winning season in 2000/01, but it dropped them to a previously unthinkable third place. Third! Never before in the Premier League era had United suffered such indignity, and to do it the season after Ferguson had rowed back on his first retirement decision as well.
Not only that, but United managed to make a pig’s ear of everything that season, going potless for the first time in four campaigns. They went out of the League Cup early to Arsenal, didn’t get past the fourth round of the FA Cup and even the saving grace of a run to the Champions League semi-finals ended in the painful ‘what if?’ of away-goals defeat to Bayer Leverkusen.
United’s league season fell apart in an autumn run of five defeats in seven games, three of them in a row against Arsenal, Chelsea and West Ham. They only lost three more games after that, but the damage was done.
One of those three defeats was the crowning turd in the bowl, though, as Arsenal sealed the title with a 1-0 win at Old Trafford.
7) Chelsea 2017/18
Antonio Conte took the Premier League by storm in 2016/17, marching to the title in his maiden season in charge while making a back-three fashionable again. The Blues earned 93 points, seven clear of Tottenham and 15 more than any team that posed a theoretical threat of actually winning the thing.
The novelty of the back-three soon wore off the following season, though, with Chelsea’s opponents having sussed them out, all the while Conte’s players themselves seemed bored by it all as his squad suffered from the desperately short attention span that is customary at Stamford Bridge. Conte spent much of the season in a funk after not getting his way in the transfer market, which is out of character, isn’t it?
At least the FA Cup sprinkled some glitter on a turd of a season, while Chelsea could also console themselves that it was way less bad than their previous title defence. Chelsea’s run of first, tenth, first, fifth between 2014/15 and 2017/18 really should be studied in great detail and punishing length.
6) Blackburn 1995/96
Something astonishingly quaint now about the very idea of a local businessman rocking up with a few million quid and buying the Premier League title.
Kenny Dalglish dragged Rovers over the finish line in 1995, one point ahead of Man Utd, despite losing three of their last five matches. It was a success built by Dalglish, funded by Jack Walker’s millions, with Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton’s goals doing most of the heavy lifting. Rovers led from the front, relinquishing top spot for only a couple of games from the start of November, even if they did their best to hand the title to United during the run-in.
But they could not sustain it. Rovers, reeling from the resignation of Dalglish as manager, finished a distant seventh the following season while winning just one of their Champions League fixtures in a European campaign that is best remembered for David Batty and Graeme Le Saux coming to blows in Moscow. Kicked off the season by losing the Charity Shield to Everton in a game we just had to look up, it having been completely erased from memory, and were also bundled out of the FA Cup in the third round.
So yeah, not great all round, really.
5) Liverpool 2020/21
Jurgen Klopp’s Reds finally ended their 30-year title drought in stunning fashion, overcoming a pandemic and 103-day period between their 29th and 30th matches to gather a club-record 99 points, sealing their 19th championship with seven games to spare – beating the previous best by two matches.
While there are mischief-makers who like to pretend this season comes with an asterisk, we should all really be grateful that the absurd armies of Premier League football fans who see conspiracy and subterfuge everywhere have so little to go at in that interrupted season. Liverpool had it nailed down long before the pandemic shut the country down.
Not the biggest thing about the pandemic, sure, but imagine the nonsense we’d all have had to put up with had it happened during one of the daft title races where Liverpool narrowly missed out to City.
But they couldn’t maintain their stunning form after ending that title drought. The Reds were breaking all the wrong records as the wheels came off their title defence in dramatic fashion, with a 1-0 loss to Fulham being their sixth consecutive home defeat – their worst run ever. But Klopp’s beleaguered side rediscovered some grit, if not necessarily their best form, to win eight of their last 10 matches and sneak a Champions League place while all around them floundered.
Mitigation abounded in the form of injuries to key players and the perhaps inevitable release and relief of finally scratching that 30-year itch. Getting close to that 99-point tally again was always asking a lot, but 70 shouldn’t have been unreasonable.
4) Manchester United 2013/14
United recovered from losing the 2011/12 title race to AGUERRRROOOOO to bounce back and secure their 20th championship in Ferguson’s final season in charge at Old Trafford. The signing of Robin van Persie was the catalyst, with the former Arsenal striker scoring 26 Premier League goals as United eased home by 11 points in a far cry from the final-day goal-difference antics of the previous season.
Then Ferguson left, urging United supporters to ‘back your new manager’. A few months later, a plane was flying over Old Trafford proclaiming ‘Wrong One – Moyes out’. By the time Moyes was finally, inevitably sacked in April, with four games remaining, United were already guaranteed to record their lowest points tally in the Premier League era, with home games a particular problem.
Under Moyes, United were beaten six times at Old Trafford, losing in the FA Cup to Swansea, while Sunderland dumped them out of the League Cup. It led to United missing out on Champions league football for the first time since 1995 as they finished a lowly seventh and 25 points worse off.
The absence of Ferguson/presence of Moyes is quite understandably cited as the main reason, but United absolutely butchered the transfer window as they discovered for the first but not last time that Ferguson really had been making their life unbelievably easy by winning what he did with what he had.
Ed Woodward’s failure to bring the desired and requested Gareth Bale, Toni Kroos and Cesc Fabregas certainly didn’t help matters. Although he did, in his first season in big boy pants, manage to overpay for Marouane Fellaini in the final hours of the summer window. And then Moyes railed against the fixture schedule after the champions were made to play Chelsea, Liverpool and Man City in their first five matches: “I find it hard to believe that’s the way the balls came out of the bag, that’s for sure,” he tinfoiled having apparently confused the fixture computer for the FA Cup third-round draw.
3) Chelsea 2015/16
Jose Mourinho first disproved the theory that you should never go back by winning a third Premier League title in the second season of his second reign at Stamford Bridge. New arrivals Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas immediately flourished, with Eden Hazard providing the inspiration in a 2014/15 season which saw him crowned PFA Player of the Year.
Mourinho then set about reproving the theory by setting the ultimate benchmark for his infamous Third-Season Destroy And Exits. The tone for a pathetic title defence was set on the opening weekend, when Mourinho took aim at Chelsea’s medical staff for doing their jobs. The fall-out hung over Stamford Bridge long after Mourinho was fired in mid-December, at which point the Blues had lost nine of their 16 league matches to leave them languishing a point above the relegation zone.
Guus Hiddink, as he tends to, steadied the ship and a top-half finish following the club’s worst start to a season in 37 years became a creditable achievement for Roman Abramovich’s favourite firefighter. But a 37-point drop-off from one season to the next is really very bad indeed no matter how you slice it.
Obviously, they then won the league the following season because the Premier League was, although we didn’t yet know it, undergoing a few years of utter and glorious weirdness before Pep Guardiola would come along and tame it thoroughly. Until now.
2) Leicester 2016/17
Claudio Ranieri’s Foxes stunned everyone by going from great escapees under Nigel Pearson in 2014/15 to 5000-1 Premier League kings the following year. In the end, it was a procession, with a 10-point margin of victory. The greatest story ever told in English football? Probably.
The Foxes, understandably, suffered quite the hangover from Jamie Vardy’s party and a summer basking in their stunning achievement. N’Golo Kante’s exit hardly helped. They reached the Champions League quarter-finals, but by that time, Ranieri had paid for a miserable title defence with his job. The Italian was axed after just five wins in 25 league games, with his champions one point above the drop zone.
Craig Shakespeare inspired some improvement and Leicester won seven of their last 13 to finish in 12th place.
1) Leeds 1992/93
To our immense relief, this one sneaks in on a bit of a technicality. It might not be a Premier League title defence, but it was a title defence in the Premier League era and we’re loopholing off into the sunset with our fingers in our ears. We can’t hear you.
One of the reasons we want this in is just purely and simply that it means one less Actually Kind Of Okay Defence at the other end of this list. The main one, though, is that it was a real bad defence.
Howard Wilkinson’s Whites, inspired by the February arrival of Eric Cantona, broke Manchester United’s hearts down the final stretch of the last Division One season by unseating the Red Devils, who had led from the front through most of the season. Some Leeds fans will argue that their four-point triumph was a bigger miracle than Leicester’s, with Wilko taking United from 10th in Division Two to English champions within three years.
Leeds’ slide as champions was certainly more dramatic than Leicester’s. During the Premier League’s inaugural season, Wilko’s champs failed to win a game away from Elland Road. They finished 17th in a 22-team division, only two points above relegated Crystal Palace and 31 down on their title-winning effort the year before football was invented. The European Cup offered little respite. They survived the first round after Stuttgart fielded one foreign player too many, only to be beaten home and away by Rangers in the next round.
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