Here are this season’s disgraces, and boy is there a lot of them.
If you’re after something a bit more cheerful, the winners list is also available here.
Manchester UnitedAnd we thought finishing 8th and winning the FA Cup last season was bad. Not sure if you’ve heard but this was their worst season in 50 years.
The most remarkable thing about Manchester United at this point is just what a black hole for talent it is. Players and managers can look very very good when they make the move, only for what was once Theatre of Dreams to become the place where careers go to sleep.
Although there were some question marks, United’s summer recruitment looked good to most of us, yet they have collectively spent the whole season going backwards. The squad is full of players who made bright starts, but then got flattened out to the same level as everyone else.
Remember when Kobbie Mainoo looked amazing? It was only last year. Remember being excited by Rasmus Hojlund and Alejandro Garnacho and Jadon Sancho?
Several players who have also apparently been deemed to be a big part of the problem at Old Trafford have left – whether by their own volition or because they have been exiled – and turned out to still be excellent: Antony, Marcus Rashford and Scott McTominay made our winners list for exactly that reason.
Erik ten Hag still being in charge at the start of the season was also questionable, but he was replaced by one of European football’s hot young things in Ruben Amorim and things got worse, suggesting the Dutchman was not, in fact, the whole problem all along.
United have thus become the kind of club whose precise issues are very difficult to pinpoint from the outside, other than to note there are lots of them.
You could point at Liverpool two years ago and say ‘they need a new midfield’. You can point at Arsenal now and say ‘they need more quality in the final third’. For Tottenham, ‘they need more experience in the side’. For Manchester City, the opposite. Try to point at the issues at Manchester United, and you’ll run out of fingers.
We’ve watched a lot of League One this season, and on more than one occasion have seen sides who just don’t look like they would score if they played until midnight. When that has happened, we find ourselves thinking ‘god, this is like watching Manchester United’ – and we’re genuinely not even trying to amuse ourselves with the comparison.
This year there was no trophy at the end of it to act as any mitigation, and their showing in the Europa League final was pretty representative of how they’ve been. Throwing Harry Maguire up front to look for a goal may have worked in spectacular fashion to get them there in the first place, but it is not a strategy any serious club should be reliant on. But that’s what will happen when you have a side that looks so confused, so lacking in confidence and creativity.
Even for those of us who grew up with the envious antipathy towards United that is afforded to all the best sides, it’s managed to go out the other side of being funny and is now actually quite sad.
United are currently English football’s cautionary tale about how low a club can be brought if their priorities slip away into all the wrong place over time, regardless how big and rich they may be. It says a lot that even now, Amorim’s prospects are being questioned, rather than his head being stuck on a pike.
It’s bad. They’re bad. And it feels like nothing other than a wholesale revolution in the way they do things is going to be enough to get them back on course.
Andre OnanaLong before you found yourself without spare fingers, though, you’d be extending one towards one player. Even within that absolute horror show, the goalkeeper has stood out as a particular liability. As spectacular as he can be at times, he’s just way too error-prone to be regarded as a top goalkeeper.
Unfortunately for United, Altay Bayindir looks to be pretty much exactly the same – which we presume is the only reason Onana has been dropped and then restored and then dropped and then restored. But United can find better, and need to in the summer.
Manchester City and Pep GuardiolaYes, they’re in the losers list despite completing the famously mammoth task of winning the Community Shield. Sorry, Pep.
Has death by rondo had its day? Are we now back in an age of swift, incisive, direct counter-attacking football? It’s too early to write that obituary just yet, especially after City got their act together sufficiently enough to finish third. But this season nonetheless marked the first time that Guardiola’s style has come in for really serious scrutiny beyond the aesthetic.
The issues that contributed to City’s decline in the first two-thirds of the season had not gone unremarked upon beforehand. Erling Haaland looked mortal at times last season, too, while players like Kyle Walker and Kevin de Bruyne were self-evidently past their best.
Still, nobody expected just how bad it was going to get. At one point in November-December, City managed one win and six points from 11 games across the Premier League and Champions League.
For the time being, we’re fairly content to say this could prove to be a difficult and disappointing transitional year for City, and it could have been a lot worse than finishing third despite all those issues.
But even after rallying in January, thanks in part to some big spending in the transfer window, City were hammered by Arsenal and Real Madrid, beaten at home by Liverpool, lost what could have ended up being a crucial six-pointer against Nottingham Forest, dropped points to Manchester United and Southampton, and lost the FA Cup final to Crystal Palace.
That suggests there is still more work to be done to get back to business as normal for a club that has a genuine and well-founded expectation that they’re capable of winning everything in sight.
Phil Foden and, for completely opposite reasons, Jack GrealishWe have sympathy for both. Poor Foden spoke this week about simply being physically and mentally burnt out, to which the only appropriate response is ‘yeah, no s*** Phil, you bloody look it and all’.
Over the past five years, Foden has played 286 competitive games of football for club and country, starting most of them; that’s an average of 57.2 a year, and for a side that has built its success on relentless pressure and intensity.
Genuinely, it’s impressive that it took this long for Foden to have an off season. We say this without any shade intended towards the Chelsea man, but Cole Palmer took less than half as long for it to catch up to him.
It does raise an interesting talking point, and before you write in, we’re not specifically ragging on Guardiola alone here: he’s far, far from the only manager to do this kind of thing.
But while we agree with complaints from the likes of Guardiola about fixture congestion and the demands simply being too much, we can never quite understand why more managers don’t recognise that they have the ability to give their players a month off as and when they need it for their own longer-term good.
All the while, there sits Jack Grealish, desperate to play and supremely talented, but largely left to twiddle his thumbs. You could say that when he’s played he’s not been amazing, but since the turn of the new year he’s had all of 144 Premier League minutes across seven appearances. 90 of them were against Leicester, and he scored in that game.
And yet Guardiola actually wants a smaller squad next season, saying he would quit if he had such a large squad again next season because trying to manage so many players is borderline impossible. Our trophy cabinet is far smaller than Guardiola’s (Cub Scout of the Year 1997/98, you’ll never sing that), but…doesn’t it feel obvious that Foden and Grealish have entirely opposite and complementary problems that can both be solved at once?
Like we say, it’s not just Guardiola by any means – we’re just using this as an example. And yes, FIFA, UEFA and the federations have a responsibility. But surely clubs and managers do too?
Arsenal and Mikel ArtetaThey have to go in losers, we’re afraid, because Arsenal were more or less the default prediction for who was going to win the league this year, and quite justifiably so.
The Gunners had pushed a very very good Manchester City side close over the past two seasons, and had a side that were just coming of age as City’s was beginning to look in need of a refresh. Yet all that optimism turned out to be misplaced.
For our money, Arsenal fell way short of Liverpool this season for two main reasons. In the first half of the season, their lack of discipline was appalling – and by that we don’t mean they had too many bookings and red cards, which was merely a symptom of a wider issue.
What we mean is that they were much too quick to lose their heads, whether that was because of refereeing decisions they didn’t like (regardless how correct they actually may have been) or because of the scoreboard.
To Arteta’s credit, he seemed to manage to sort that out…only to run into problem number two.
We’ve never quite gone all the way along with the ‘they need a striker’ thing, in truth. Arsenal scored 88 and 91 goals respectively in the past two seasons, despite their centre-forward options not being deemed to be up to snuff. Liverpool won the league this season with Diogo Jota, Darwin Nunez, and an out-of-position Luis Diaz as their main striking options. Other players are allowed to score goals as well, lads.
Where Arsenal have suffered is in a lack of depth in the forward line as a whole. That already felt like an issue even before injuries to Bukayo Saka and Kai Havertz exposed it even further. The likes of Leandro Trossard and Gabriel Martinelli are good, but feel more like they should be squad options than starters.
We happily accept that if Mohamed Salah had gone down with a knee injury in October, Liverpool would have suffered in similar fashion – but not quite as badly. Diaz and Cody Gakpo both broke double figures for goals in the league this season; not a single Arsenal player managed it.
Raheem Sterling and, for similar reasons, Jaden SanchoWe are absolutely shocked that Sterling did not turn out to be the solution to that problem for Arsenal. Shocked.
We feel bad for Sterling. As we’ve expressed before, it feels a bit unfair that two different players could each have ten good years in their careers, yet if they have it at the start of their careers they get slated for their decline, whereas if they have them at the end of their careers, they get no stick for having been rubbish before and all the praise for their improvement.
We shouldn’t forget that Sterling was an excellent player for a long time. The problem is that does feel quite firmly past tense now, and he may have to swallow a bit of pride as he weighs up his next move. We doubt another club of Arsenal’s profile will come knocking again this summer.
And while we’re on wingers whose best years look to be behind them…Jadon Sancho was genuinely great for Borussia Dortmund and England a few years ago. Like, he’s not a Francis Jeffers or something, who was just over-hyped out of proportion and was never actually going to get to a top level. He started at a top level.
If he’d been at Chelsea in either of the past two seasons, we could probably write it off as just being another bad career move. But Chelsea have actually been pretty good in spells; Sancho hasn’t. It’s a shame.
Julen Lopetegui and West HamThe Hammers deciding it was time to move on from David Moyes was harsh, but understandable.
While evidently grateful to the Scot for delivering the Conference League trophy and overseeing a considerable improvement on getting drawn into relegation battles, they want to move on to someone with the ability to push them to the next level. Absolutely fine. We get it.
What we don’t get is why they thought Julen Lopetegui would be that man. Does he just interview incredibly well or something? From Spain to Real Madrid to Wolves, we just don’t see what the enduring fascination is with him.
Not that things have really got much better under Graham Potter, mind, that victory away to Arsenal aside. As with Amorim, it’s hard to judge any mid-season managerial appointment – though Moyes and Vitor Pereira did make our winners list – and we’re interested to see what West Ham have for us next season. Our hunch is they will be quite a bit better.
Still, it must be unbelievably frustrating to be a West Ham fan. Never a step forward without a big step back to follow.
Newly-promoted clubs, just in generalThere’s always been a gap between the Premier League and the Championship, but all our number-crunching a few years ago suggested that despite claims to the contrary, that gap had not really grown for about 25 years.
It was there in the numbers. Sides going down to the second tier were no more likely to bounce straight back up than they’d ever been, and sides coming up to the top flight were no more likely to go straight back down than they’d ever been. The complaints about the growing gap in quality was, at that point, the kind of vague ‘sort of feels like it though doesn’t it’ claim that we’re all prone to after a pint.
That’s changed completely since the last massive increase in TV money. The distance between the Premier League and the Championship is an absolute gulf.
It’s not that the second tier has got worse, either. I’ve seen more Championship football over the past 16 years than any other level of football, and can tell you the standard has risen if anything. One colleague told me in a press room this season that he had been watching old mid-table Premier League games from 2005 as research for a piece, and that it looked exactly like the Championship does now.
The standard in the Premier League, as an average across the division, is just now so unbelievably high, because even a pretty mediocre side can go out and outspend all but the biggest behemoths in European football for transfer fees and wages. We got something like confirmation of that in the Europa League: Manchester United and Tottenham both reached the final – and deservedly so – despite being absolute crap in the Premier League, finishing 15th and 17th.
That should be a good thing, but it is desperately hurting the case of any newly-promoted sides, for whom the only reasonable expectation now is that they will go straight back down to the Championship…where the expectation now (admittedly not fulfilled this season, especially not by League One-bound Luton) is that they will go straight back up.
The Premier League has always been depressingly myopic and uncaring about this kind of thing, because they sit separate from the rest of the pyramid and almost exclusively vote in ways that assume that they will be Premier League clubs forever and never ever get relegated.
If that was short-sighted and self-defeating before, it’s now actually becoming the case – and is only likely to get worse. Premier League votes generally only need 16 out of 20 clubs to vote for them. In the current state of affairs, 17 of those clubs actually are more or less entrenched in the top flight unless they right royally screw it up in massive, massive fashion. Good for those clubs. Terrible for everyone else, including the neutral fan.
We need some jeopardy back, and honestly don’t think five up, five down would be a bad idea at this point. It might at the very least get the Premier League clubs thinking about what life is like in the second tier and why narrowing the gap again would be to everybody’s benefit.
Special mention to Southampton for being especially crapDreadful. We’re going to miss saying ‘except against Southampton, which doesn’t count’ every single time we’re talking about another side in a dreadful run of form with one speck of green in it.
Tottenham Hotspur, who are also in the winners listAnd this is why we need that jeopardy back.
There’s an argument that like United, Spurs were so focused on the Europa League towards the end of the season that their league form was basically an inconvenient irrelevance to them. Even if it’s subconscious…who cares if you constantly lose when you already know you can’t get relegated even while finishing with a paltry 38 points?
Well…the fans do, for one, and they were not shy about making their feelings clear.
Tottenham produced lovely stuff at times – for much of the season, Liverpool were the only side to outscore them – but they were callow, callow, callow. Who’d have thought that’s what you’d get from not just centring your recruitment policy around youth, but making it more or less the only criterion?
That excuse only goes so far, though; Chelsea and Brighton both had younger sides on average than Tottenham this season, and they did alright in the end.
While the fans have concentrated their ire mostly on Daniel Levy, the neutral’s glare has generally fallen on Ange Postecoglou and his at times stubborn insistence on ignoring some simple pragmatic steps to improve his side’s form in favour of pursuing a style of play that often feels too risky to be worthwhile.
Chelsea had a similar problem for a while, but as we discussed in the winners, even Enzo Maresca made adaptations to address that, one-nilling their way through the closing stages of the season to secure their Champions League place.
Spurs will be joining them there, of course. The Europa League trophy provided some vindication for Postecoglou, though it was amusing that their 1-0 victory in the final was almost a complete departure from what we had seen from Spurs all season. It was the third time they had won a game 1-0; the others were in their League Cup semi-final first leg against Liverpool, and against Manchester United again in the league.
We will say that despite all that…we still have a soft spot for Postecoglou and for Spurs, if only because it’s hard to dislike an amusingly chippy manager who sticks to his attacking guns so much. They are our early shout for being the most interesting side to watch next season, because it feels like they’re either going to be great or terrible with no in between.
Sean DycheMatt Stead and I had a complete difference of opinion about Dyche’s sacking. I felt it was a risk; yeah, they didn’t score, but wasn’t that because they were a bit crap, and so focusing on defending first and foremost was the only thing likely to keep their heads above water?
No, said Steady. They’re better than Dyche gives them credit for and will do a lot better when they’re given a bit more freedom.
Annoyingly, he was absolutely bang on, of course. By the end of his time at Goodison Park, Dyche was holding Everton back; the results they immediately got after Moyes’ return confirmed as much, as did the genuinely quite impressive attacking form they showed while actually improving their defensive record.
We shouldn’t overlook the enormously difficult situation Dyche inherited, and there’s a case to be made that Everton may not have even been a Premier League club this season without him. But sometimes it’s just time to move on.
Gary O’NeilOn much the same rationale as Dyche, albeit for totally different reasons. The general reporting from those closest to Wolves is that O’Neil, if anything, had too many ideas, and increasingly threw them at his squad as things kept getting worse for them until their brains scrambled.
That is surely only part of it: O’Neil went on record in his final interview as manager to say he had ‘never had such a struggle to help a group cope with real basic stuff’.
It’s less than 18 months ago that O’Neil was being reported as a potential candidate to replace Jurgen Klopp, but after Vitor Pereira went in and turned things around so comprehensively, he has a bit of a job on his hands now to restore his reputation.
Darwin NunezAn £85m squad option for the champions, and not a particularly convincing one at that. He’s got talent, there’s no doubt about that, but Liverpool have spent three years waiting for him to add some consistency as well. It seems unlikely he’ll get a fourth.