We might well be about to enter an Era of Arsenal Dominance. What we’re definitely and unmistakably already in is a less catchy Era of Ending Trophy Droughts.
Arsenal’s drought may only have extended to six years before the enormous cathartic release of Tuesday night’s title-winning celebrations, but it was still a very ridiculous amount of time for this particular team to have gone potless. And London Bussing their way into view just 24 hours later came Aston Villa to end a 30-year wait for major honours with a thumpingly impressive win over Freiburg in the Europa League final.
This all comes on the back of last season when Newcastle and Spurs both ended truly and undeniably absurd trophy droughts and Crystal Palace got their hands on a major piece of silverware for the very first time.
And you know how our minds work by now. That means we have literally no choice but to set about ranking the current most conspicuous ongoing trophy droughts among Premier League clubs. And obviously we’re ranking them entirely subjectively by ridiculousness rather than on anything as mundane or useless as ‘time’. You know what we’re like.
Few points of order. For our purposes here, ‘major trophy’ is defined as any of the three main domestic pots and their predecessors, or any of the major European trophies, current or defunct. Your Champions Leagues, your Cup Winners’ Cups, your Europas and UEFA Cups, The Conference Leagues of this world. And the drought length is measured from the first point it could conceivably end for any of these teams – i.e. next year.
A non-exhaustive list of things that don’t count: one-off Community Shield types, any league title below the first tier, play-offs of any kind, the Zenith Data Systems Cup, God rest its soul, and the equally lost and lamented Intertoto Cup. That kind of thing. Okay?
Any team that has won something in the last five years is not considered to currently be experiencing drought conditions. Also, just so we’re not here all day, we’ve only included teams whose drought dates back to actually winning something rather than to the very beginning of their history.
There’s a philosophical element at play here; is it truly a drought if it’s just all you’ve ever known? But mainly we can’t be arsed. With all due respect to Bournemouth, Brighton, Fulham and Brentford, ain’t nobody got time for that.
That leaves the following pot-dodgers.
6) Nottingham Forest – 37 years
The last trophy: 1990 League Cup
And if you want to know just how Olden Times Football 1990 really was, Forest retained the trophy by beating Oldham in the final after knocking out Coventry in the semis.
The near misses:
Forest reached the FA Cup final the following year, and it is still not advised to mention Paul Gascoigne’s name in their fans’ presence, before once again reaching the League Cup final – by now in its much-loved Rumbelows era – in 1992.
Then for a long time, there was very little. Unless you count the Zenith Data Systems glory of that same year, which you definitely shouldn’t and we certainly won’t.
Did reach two quarter-finals in 1996, in the FA Cup and UEFA Cup, but really you have to wait all the way until their 2022 return to the Premier League for any real sniff of a major trophy. They’ve been to the semi-finals of both domestic cups and now the Europa League since their return to the top flight.
Could it end next season?
Forest have about them the distinct whiff of a cup run if they can position themselves suitably in the league not to have to concentrate all efforts on that. Either by chasing the Champions League or fretting about relegation. That second-leg effort in the Europa League against Villa may well prove a source of significant ruing for a significant period of time yet.
5) Wolves – 47 years
The last trophy: 1980 League Cup
Andy Gray scored the only goal as Wolves stunned the reigning – and soon-to-be-two-time – European champions Nottingham Forest at Wembley, with the win allowing Wolves captain Emlyn Hughes to collect one of the few medals missing from his personal collection after all his success with Liverpool in the 1970s.
The near misses:
Reached the 1981 FA Cup semi-final, losing out after a replay against eventual winners Spurs, but Wolves were about to embark on a precipitous tumble through the leagues that would take from the first division to the fourth by 1986.
Not until 2003 would they return to a very different world of top-flight football in England, although they did reach the 1998 FA Cup semi-finals as a second-tier side.
Reached the last four again in 2018/19 in a very successful first season back after another spell outside the top flight that even involved a short stay in League One. A lofty seventh-placed finish in the Premier League got them into the Europa League, where they would reach the quarter-finals.
And there have been further quarter-final appearances more recently in both domestic cups. But nothing you’d call a particularly near miss.
Could it end next season?
Technically yes, realistically no.
4) Sunderland – 54 years
The last trophy: 1973 FA Cup
One of the all-time great FA Cup shocks saw second-division Sunderland pull down the pants of Don Revie’s star-studded Leeds side, Ian Porterfield scoring the only goal of the game 13 minutes before half-time.
Sunderland became the first team from outside the top flight to win the FA Cup since West Brom over 40 years earlier, but kickstarted a brief revival of the concept. Southampton (1976) and West Ham (1980) would repeat the trick within the next seven years, but nobody has managed it since.
The near misses:
A few, to be fair. Lost out to Norwich in the final of the 1985 League Cup, and had a chance at winning another FA Cup as a second-tier side in 1992, reaching the final only to lose 2-0 to Liverpool, and narrowly missed out on another crack at it in 2004 when losing to fellow Division One side Millwall in one semi-final while Manchester United and Arsenal slugged it out in the other.
Closest of all was in 2014, when they lost the League Cup final to Manchester City despite threatening another Leeds-esque shock when leading 1-0 at half-time before going down 3-1.
Could it end next season?
Every chance if they can get themselves into Europe this weekend. Recent history shows that the sheer depth of the Premier League makes English teams very warm favourites in the Thursday night competitions, where no English team will have been eliminated by anyone other than another English team for two full seasons under the new league-and-no-dropouts-from-above format if Crystal Palace win their Conference final next week.
3) Burnley – 67 years
The last trophy: 1960 First Division champions
Emerged top of the pile only on the very final day after a season-long three-way title fight with Wolves and Spurs. Wolves were the defending champions and Spurs would go on to win the Double the following season. None of them has won a league title since, which is fairly nutty.
The near misses:
A 65-year-plus wait for a trophy seemed such an implausible concern for early 60s Burnley that after reaching the semi-finals of the first League Cup in 1961 they didn’t even bother entering it for the next four seasons, and that earns them several points in our very real and very complicated calculations.
The year after Spurs did the Double, Burnley pulled off the Near Miss Double, finishing second to Ipswich in the league and losing to Tottenham in the FA Cup final.
There were two third-place finishes and a League Cup semi-final after they deigned to compete again before the 60s were out, but by the end of the decade their time as a dominant force in English football was over.
There was an FA Cup semi-final in 1974 – and that was in the brief period where a third-place play-off existed for absolutely no good reason at all, which they duly won.
The 1982/83 season was an odd one, featuring an FA Cup quarter-final and League Cup semi-final as well as relegation to the third tier.
The closest they’ve come to anything since was the 2008/09 League Cup, where Burnley fell victim to the tournament’s esoteric away goals rule after a stirring semi-final comeback against Spurs. A 4-1 defeat in the first leg at White Hart Lane appeared to have settled the tie, only for Burnley to roar to a 3-0 ‘win’ after 90 minutes of the second leg at Turf Moor.
Under the normal away goals rule used by literally everyone else at the time, they’d have been through. But in the League Cup away goals only counted after extra-time, by which point Spurs had regained the run of themselves and scored twice to dump Burnley out.
Could it end next season?
We’re going to say no here.
2) Leeds United – 35 years
The last trophy: 1992 First Division champions
As with Burnley, a good effort for anyone’s last trophy to be the actual league title rather than anything inevitably slightly more tinpot. Can’t quite decide whether doing it in the last year before football was invented makes it better or worse. It is undeniably funny that it simply doesn’t count when people talk about how few teams have won the league in relatively recent history.
Have had some good years, some middling years and some truly sh*tbone awful ones in the subsequent 34. But when you consider just how good their very best sides were across that period, it’s a mad old amount of time for such a big club to have won nothing halfway proper.
The near misses:
Even at their pre-crash high point around the millennium Leeds never really sustained a proper season-long challenge for the actual title. Their highest finish over those giddy years was third in 1999/2000, but they were over 20 points behind Man United there.
They also have a curiously wretched record in both domestic cups over our time period. They lost to Villa in the 1996 Coca-Cola Cup final but hadn’t reached the last four of either domestic cup since then until this season, when a side in the middle of a rare old purple patch of form through in a deeply disappointing effort at Wembley.
Did famously get to the last four in Europe two seasons running around their 2000 streets-won’t-forget peak, in the 99/00 UEFA Cup and the following season’s weird two-group-stage Champions League.
Could it end next season?
Absolutely no obvious reason why this team can’t establish itself firmly among the Premier League’s mid-table mass and embark on another meaningful cup run.
1) Everton – 32 years
The last trophy: 1995 FA Cup
Everton’s 1980s glory years were already fading into the background by the time they stunned Manchester United thanks to Paul Rideout’s winning goal at Wembley, but if you’d said to anyone then that this would represent the last silverware the blue half of Liverpool would be celebrating for 30-plus years and counting, that no men’s trophy would ever again be added to the Goodison Park trophy cabinet because if and when it does ever happen again it would be after they’d left and moved to a brand new stadium built over water at the docks, you’d have got some pretty hard stares.
This was still a time when it was only eight years since they’d been league champions, and six years since their last appearance in the FA Cup final. The old pre-Premier League ‘Big Five’ was still fresh in the memory, despite the startling extent to which Everton had missed that particular bus.
The near misses:
Restricted to a few half-decent domestic cup runs. Have certainly never challenged for the league title in the Premier League era, while their occasional forays on the continent have generally been disappointing having never taken them beyond the last 16.
The closest they’ve come is the 2009 FA Cup final, when Louis Saha gave them a 1-0 lead after just 25 seconds only for Chelsea to hit back and win 2-1 thanks to goals from, predictably, Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard.
They reached the semi-finals again three years later, and made the last four of both domestic cups in 2016.
But they’ve gone no further than the quarter-finals in anything since.
Are now famously the only current team in the top four divisions of English football to have spent the entire 21st century with absolutely no tangible moment of success to celebrate. No trophy of any description, no promotion (obviously), no anything. Qualifying for the Champions League that one time and then not even making it to the group stage really is their lot, although they could of course win the coveted ‘We Relegated Tottenham’ trophy this weekend. Not to be sniffed at.
Could it end next season?
There is a convoluted back-door route into Europe available to them this weekend, but it’s vanishingly unlikely. Which is also a fair summation of trophy hopes for a club that has simply forgotten what that looks, sounds or feels like.