We’re going to mostly concentrate on the Premier League, such is our way, but there are a few shouts from outside the English top flight that we think bear a mention as well.
10. Liverpool overtaking Arsenal so convincinglyWe’ll try not to just rake over too much ground that we already covered for Liverpool in the 2024/25 Winners list and for Arsenal in the Losers list.
Suffice it to say that we all thought Arsenal had put themselves in a position where, like Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool before them, they were just waiting for Manchester City to take their eye off the ball enough to sweep in and finally reclaim the title.
City did more than just take their eye off the ball, but Arsenal were nowhere to be found. Instead, Arne Slot’s Liverpool turned out to be far better than we expected and happily filled that void for themselves. It’s not like Liverpool were bad last year by any means…we just didn’t expect them to be so much better than everyone else this season.
9. Tyler DiblingWe’re not yet at the point where we don’t say his name a la Cat from Red Dwarf saying ‘Dwayne Dibley?!’, but we suspect we’ll have to. At risk of this getting bookmarked for someone to poke fun at in five years’ time, we could hearing plenty more about Tyler Dibling over the next few years.
The very concept of a Southampton player being any good at all this season probably qualifies as a surprise in itself, but doubly so with teenager Dibling given he made just a single brief cameo appearance from the bench during the Saints’ promotion-winning campaign last season.
Even in a dismally poor side, Dibling was regularly singled out for praise for his performances cutting in onto his favoured left foot off the right wing, where he routinely left a trail of desperate defenders trailing in his wake. Give him a better team to play in next season please.
8. Aston Villa outlasting Liverpool and Manchester City in the Champions LeagueThe only one of the 20 Premier League sides not to get a mention in the season-end winners and losers piece. We couldn’t really call them winners after they very narrowly missed out on a top five finish after being screwed on the final day, but nor could we really lump them in with the losers after reaching the FA Cup semi-finals and Champions League quarter-finals.
We really shouldn’t be surprised that a Unai Emery team did well in Europe, but after seeing how much Newcastle struggled to compete on multiple fronts in 2023/24, it felt like it would be asking a lot for Villa to excel. In the end there was no shame in the way they went out, mounting a thrilling comeback to go ahead of PSG on the night in the second leg but not quite enough to square things up on aggregate.
Unfortunately, it was Villa’s league form that suffered most from their European excursions. A tired side’s eight Champions League league phase games were followed up with one win, three draws and four defeats in the Premier League. Even just the mildest of improvements in a single one of their games would have given them a chance to try again next season.
7. PSG shaking off the pretenders tagWe’re playing with fire here given the Champions League final is still ahead of us, and an Inter victory would make us look very daft indeed. But if we had to pick the most deserving team to win it this season, we would have to go with PSG.
Paris Saint-Germain have done an awful lot flattering to deceive since their Qatari takeover in 2011. For all the millions they have invested, all the domestic trophies, and despite being home to Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi over the years, they have usually looked far less than the sum of their parts in the Champions League. Not this year.
PSG were slow to warm up to the competition, losing to Arsenal, Atletico and Bayern Munich in the league phase, but rallied in the knockouts. Ligue Un rivals Brest (hehehe ‘Brest’) were hammered 10-0 in the first knockout phase. Liverpool were utterly dominated and had Alisson to thank for taking the game as far as a penalty shootout. Villa fell short despite that second-leg fightback attempt after suffering a mauling in the first leg. Against Arsenal, PSG were less dominant but still looked eminently comfortable.
They’ve got one more game to go to finish the job, but our slightly disdainful attitude towards PSG has been wiped away.
6. Luton Town’s double dropNobody really expected Luton to stay in the Premier League last season, but for things to get this bad…woof.
Luton have become only the fourth side in the Premier League era to do the dreaded double drop all the way into League One, following on from Swindon in 1994 and 1995, Wolves in 2012 and 2013 and Sunderland in 2017 and 2018.
What went wrong, then? Too much to cover comprehensively here, really, but bad recruitment, a lot of the Premier League money going into their new stadium, injuries, the loss of a couple of key players like Ross Barkley, sticking with Rob Edwards well past the point of reasonably expecting a turnaround, and a complete loss of the good vibes that helped them get promoted in the first place were all factors.
5. Thomas Tuchel, England managerAre we used to it now? Probably. But Tuchel’s name seemed a bit fanciful when it first came up in the conversation to replace Gareth Southgate after it became clear Lee Carsley was not the man for the job; the kind of name the bookies throw in just because they’re available and people have heard of him.
But no, there he is, preparing England to go to next year’s World Cup. What a world.
Along with that have come a few other little surprises. Jordan Henderson back in the side, is it? Alright then.
4. Multiple mid-table clubs putting themselves in European contentionNottingham Forest are the big one, obviously, and if they’d seen it through and made it to the Champions League they’d be top of the list by an absolute mile. The Conference League is still excellent going for them.
Even as late as March, though, that race for European places was far from settled. At various points throughout that month, Forest were third and Brighton, Fulham and Bournemouth all went within three points of joining them in the top five.
The natural order of things re-imposed itself in the end, of course, but it was a pleasant surprise for so many Premier League teams to at least look like they had something positive to play for going into the last ten games of the season…especially as the relegation battle and title race were such a letdown.
3. Reigning player of the year Phil Foden disappearing completelyHis 27 goals and 13 assists, and a series of brilliant performance in 53 appearances in all competitions last year, made Foden the clear player of the year for 2023/24.
This season, both his goal and assist tallies fell by more than half: just 10 goals and 6 assists, and most of them came either against weak opposition in the Champions League or in a single purple patch just after the turn of the new year.
By his own admission, it’s been a year to forgot for Foden, who has quite simply played way too much football over the past five years. He’s far from the only City player to have hit a sudden decline – the same also applies to Kevin De Bruyne and Kyle Walker, among others. But his teammates had at least showed signs of it beforehand; Foden’s own decline has been just as deep but more abrupt. He’ll get back on it before too long, we’re sure.
2. Manchester City being so seriously bad for so longGod but they were awful for a while there, weren’t they? We’ve not seen such a pitiful attempt at a title defence since Leicester in 2016/17, and…well, that was Leicester. They were never meant to win that title in the first place.
In a way, it’s kind of reassuring to know that even the biggest and best-prepared clubs can fail to see their own issues coming down the road sometimes. Turns out running a football club is quite hard even if you’re quite good at it? Who knew.
Something more like usual business resumed towards the end of the season, with the notable exception of the FA Cup final, and you’d be daft to predict a repeat performance of that kind of extended awfulness from City again next season…but then, it wouldn’t qualify as surprising if you did.
1. The end of multiple trophy droughtsTottenham won their first major trophy in 17 years. Newcastle won their first major trophy in 70 years (or 56 years, if you want to count the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup). Crystal Palace won their first major trophy in the club’s history.
By definition, that made each of them surprising…and refreshingly so. Shockingly, not everyone is a fan of one of the big clubs with massive, well-dusted trophy cabinets. We all want to feel like our team might actually be able to win something; it’s nice to know the English game has not turned into a complete and total oligarchy just yet.